【2018/3/5】6th Colloquium of Natural History of Landscape Formation

更新日:2018/03/07

6th Colloquium of Natural History of Landscape Formation

5th March 2018 (Monday) 15:00-17:00
(Reception will open on 14:30)

Middle conference room, Inamori Memorial Foundation Building (third floor), Kyoto University
https://www.asafas.kyoto-u.ac.jp/about/access

15:00-15:10 Introduction
Akira Takada (Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies
(ASAFAS), Kyoto University)

15:10-16:30
Framing Future Africa: A report on new collaborative research in the programme “Future rural Africa: future-making and social-ecological transformation”
Thomas Widlok(University of Cologne)

Abstract:

This presentation provides a short summary of a new collaborative research center (CRC) that has recently been launched at the University of Cologne (https://www.crc228.de/) and it reports some preliminary findings on the role of framing the future in processes of current land conversions.

The starting point for the new CRC is the observation of large-scale land conversions in Africa. In some areas large tracks of land are set aside for conservation (for instance the KAZA Transborder Park) while at the same time there are plans for large-scale intensification of land use for agriculture or other forms of resource extraction. In some places both processes take place side-by-side, an example is the KAZA Park that is cut-across by a major highway and development corridor. The new CRC tries to understand these processes in terms of the ways in which ideas about the future make these developments possible and more generally how futures are made for rural Africa. We follow A. Appadurai in distinguishing futures of possibilities from futures of probabilities and we seek to understand these transformations as being both social and ecological, linked across local, national, regional and global scales. In this presentation I shall provide some examples on how the anthropology of time is relevant for the larger research programme as defined by the new collaborative research center.

16:30-17:00 General discussion

* The talk is given in English, and no translation will be provided.
* No reservation is required for participating in the Seminar.
* Admission-free.