Important Dates

Abstract

Learning is inevitable a relational process, therefore learning events are multiple and diverse. In our panel we want to highlight and analyse such multiple and relational processes of learning in Africa as well as their global connectedness. It contributes to an understanding of the many roles that learning plays in the making of subjectivities, life-stages and gendered bodies, and the ways that these are framed through the unequal distribution of educational opportunities. We invite papers from different disciplines that seek to analyse how learning itself is relationally constituted by — and at least partly co-constitutes — institutions, worldviews, communications, infrastructures, and transnational and transcontinental connections. Our understanding of learning goes beyond research approaches that limit their focus to formal educational settings such as schools or universities. Rather, we will address learning in a wider sense, encompassing all of the ways and processes in which knowledge and skills are transmitted, acquired and (re-)produced, regardless of institutional borders. An understanding of learning in Africa and elsewhere as a relational process will allow us to highlight aspects of multiplicity and diversity within learning events. Further, analysis of entanglements, mutual coexistence, conditions of emergence, and the multiple ways in which learning processes combine in peoples’ lives, will enable us to get a sense of the manifold interrelations within the highly heterogeneous African educational landscape. In particular, we want to stress the need for studying learners as embedded in their specific environments, who in the same time are as well producers of these environments through their networks of relations.

[initiated by the learning section of the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence: reconfiguring African Studies, University of Bayreuth, with African partners i.e. Moi University Kenya]

Convenors

• Marieke van Winden (conference organiser) (African Studies Centre Leiden)
• Hassan Ndzovu (Moi University)
• Britta Frede (Universität Bayreuth)

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