TAFACAC15U CANCELLED - Thematic course: Citizenship and Change in Africa

Volume 2019/2020
Education

MA programme in African Studies

Content

Citizenship as a concept is understood in a number of different ways, depending on the intellectual/ disciplinary tradition within which such understandings have emerged and been applied. For example, it is conceptualised in legal/statutory terms, or as a form of political recognition or as an expression of certain kinds of rights or claims, or as an assertion of socio-cultural belonging, and so on. In this course, students will be introduced to an interdisciplinary and critical approach to the multiple conditions, meanings and manifestations of citizenship, with a specific empirical, historical and relational focus on a range of African contexts. This will include attention to both the formal, institutional dimensions of citizenship in given settings, and the diversity of ‘ordinary’ experiences of lived, active or ‘insurgent’ citizenship, as much as the interactions between these different domains. The course will equip students to engage empirically and analytically with questions related, for example, to nationality and belonging, to displacement and statelessness, to urban property and rights to the city, to rural resource struggles, to specific social movements around selected positionalities such as class, race, gender, sexuality and so on. It will also place some emphasis on understanding processes of citizen certification and its material forms, in terms of various identity documents.  Overall the course will, simultaneously, train students to understand the ways in which different concepts and discourses of citizenship shape the conditions and experiences of citizenship in practice, and in turn, to appreciate how the varied dimensions of both formal/legal and lived/practised citizenship contribute to theorising the meaning of citizenship.

Learning Outcome

LEARNING OUTCOME

  • Knowledge of key critical approaches to development planning and policy processes and their implications (especially in relation to Africa)
  • Knowledge of tools for undertaking critical project planning and policy analysis
  • Skills in undertaking and reflecting on a country-relevant development project planning exercise 
  • Skills in identifying and developing a key theme relevant to the course themes
  • Competence to conduct independent, interdisciplinary and critical analysis of development planning and policy processes, based on relevant theoretical approaches and empirical material

    Students will obtain knowledge, skills and competence as follows:

  • Knowledge about key theories, concepts and discourses related to both legal/formal and substantive/informal versions of citizenship, and their real-life implications
  • Knowledge about different forms and practices of citizenship in Africa as manifested and experienced empirically in key social, political, economic, cultural and personal domains
  • Skills to engage with complex theoretical and empirical material related to multiple citizenships
  • Skills in identifying a relevant theme and framing an independent research question related to a key dimension of citizenship in Africa
  • Competence to undertake independent, critical, interdisciplinary analysis of a selected topic, drawing on relevant sources
    Knowledge of key critical approaches to development planning and policy processes and their implications (especially in relation to Africa)
  • Knowledge of tools for undertaking critical project planning and policy analysis
  • Skills in undertaking and reflecting on a country-relevant development project planning exercise 
  • Skills in identifying and developing a key theme relevant to the course themes
  • Competence to conduct independent, interdisciplinary and critical analysis of development planning and policy processes, based on relevant theoretical approaches and empirical material
  • Knowledge of key critical approaches to development planning and policy processes and their implications (especially in relation to Africa)
  • Knowledge of tools for undertaking critical project planning and policy analysis
  • Skills in undertaking and reflecting on a country-relevant development project planning exercise 
  • Skills in identifying and developing a key theme relevant to the course themes
  • Competence to conduct independent, interdisciplinary and critical analysis of development planning and policy processes, based on relevant theoretical approaches and empirical material
  • Knowledge of key critical approaches to development planning and policy processes and their implications (especially in relation to Africa)
  • Knowledge of tools for undertaking critical project planning and policy analysis
  • Skills in undertaking and reflecting on a country-relevant development project planning exercise 
  • Skills in identifying and developing a key theme relevant to the course themes
  • Competence to conduct independent, interdisciplinary and critical analysis of development planning and policy processes, based on relevant theoretical approaches and empirical material
Literature

Bezabeh, Samson A., 2011. ‘Citizenship and the Logic of Sovereignty in Djibouti’, African Affairs Vol. 101, No. 441, pp. 587–606
 

Breckenridge, Keith, and Simon Szreter (eds), 2012, Registration and Recognition. Documenting the Person in World History, Oxford: Oxford University Press


Clarke, John, Kathleen Coll, Evelina Dagnino and Catherine Neveu, 2014. Disputing Citizenship, Bristol and Chicago: Polity Press


Cornwall, Andrea, Steven Robins and Bettina von Lieres, 2011. States of Citizenship: Contexts and Cultures of Public Engagement and Citizen Action, IDS Working Paper 363, Sussex: Institute of Development Studies


Dorman, Sarah, Daniel Hammett and Paul Nugent (eds), 2007. Making Nations, Creating Strangers. States and Citizenship in Africa, Leiden and Boston: Brill
 

Gouws, Amanda, 2017 (2005). (Un)thinking Citizenship: Feminist Debates in Contemporary South Africa, London: Routledge
 

Hammar, Amanda, 2018.  ‘Certifications of Citizenship: Reflections through an African Lens’, Contemporary South Asia, Vol. 26, No. 2, pp. 238-246

 

Holston, James. 2009. ‘Insurgent Citizenship in an Era of Global Urban Peripheries’, City & Society Vol. 21, No. 2, pp. 245–267

 

Lochery, Emma. 2012. ‘Rendering Difference Visible: The Kenyan State and its Somali Citizens’,  African Affairs, Vol. 11, No. 445, pp. 615-639

 

Lyon, David, 2009. Identifying Citizens. ID Cards as Surveillance, Cambridge and Malden MA: Polity Press

 

Manby, Bronwen, 2018. Citizenship in Africa. The Law of Belonging, Oxford: Hart

 

Manby, Bronwen, 2009. Struggles for Citizenship in Africa, London and New York: Zed Books

 

Nyamnjoh, Francis B., 2006. Insiders and Outsiders. Citizenship and Xenophobia in Contemporary Southern Africa, Dakar: Codesria Books, London and New York: Zed Books
 

Stokke, Kristian, 2017. ‘Politics of citizenship: Towards an analytical framework’, Norsk Geografisk Tidsskrift–Norwegian Journal of Geography, Vol. 71, No. 4, pp. 193–207

The course, based on intensive, guided reading, will be taught in the second half of the Autumn semester, on the basis of 2-hour sessions twice a week for seven weeks (28 hours). The teaching methods will combine lectures (including guest lectures), classroom discussions requiring active participation, and the possible use of film and fictional sources. Students will select a topic of their own to write about for the exam, and receive some limited supervision in this regard.
  • Category
  • Hours
  • Class Instruction
  • 28
  • Course Preparation
  • 122
  • Exam
  • 120
  • Exam Preparation
  • 150
  • Total
  • 420
Credit
15 ECTS
Type of assessment
Written examination
A written paper on a topic of the student’s own choosing comprising 36,000-43,200 characters.
Marking scale
7-point grading scale
Censorship form
External censorship
Exam period

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