Three ARUA/Mellon funded PhD positions available and effective immediately at the University of Cape Town on the theme “Mobility and Sociality in Africa’s Emerging Urban”

Project Description

The African Research Universities Alliance (ARUA) is seeking post-doctoral fellows to join a five year research programme entitled ‘Mobility and Sociality in Africa’s Emerging Urban.’ This initiative is a scholarly response to unprecedented levels of urbanisation and mobility driven by conflict, ambition, and respatialising economies. It is intended to develop African-based contributions to theories of human mobility and transforming modes of social engagement, authority, representation and expression. This initiative brings together five African Universities dedicated to cultivating a generation of African scholars who can reshape global social theory and scholarly conversations on mobility, cities and social change. It promises to open new scholarly frontiers and enhance the quality of pedagogy and partnerships while positively transforming the continent’s universities. The initiative is dedicated to fostering interdisciplinarity, engagement with the arts, and creative research and outreach methodologies.

PhD proposals are invited for recent social science and humanities MA graduates dedicated to answering one or more of the following questions:

What new forms of moral authority operate in rapidly urbanising contexts? What are the forms of alternative authority that emerge in contexts where the State is largely absent?

How are these changing people’s imagination of traditional hierarchies of age gender and family structure? How are these connected to new notions of morality rooted in age gender and social obligation?

How are changing forms of violence legitimated? What becomes visible as violence and what is eclipsed?

How does widespread translocalism and ongoing mobility reshape urban morphologies and residential patterns; social interactions; subjective understanding of citizenship; representation and civic identity: what is political society in spaces only loosely structured by states and formal markets?

What cultural practices are being reshaped and reconceptualised by mobile urban residents? What are the practical enacted ethics that enable people to make sense of varied diversities and to communicate and exchange across social divisions? How do people make sense of difference without shared histories or the disciplining institutions of common states, religion, or markets?

Interested candidates are should contact:

Professor Francis Nyamnjoh

Francis.nyamnjoh@uct.ac.za

nyamnjoh@gmail.com