Event

8:30 - 8:40 am

Opening Remarks by Co-Host and Director of the Centre for Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania 

Wale Adebanwi

8:40 - 8:50 am

Address by Associate Dean for Social Sciences, University of Pennsylvania 

Emily Hannum

8:50 - 9:00 am

Address by Chair of the Department of Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania 

Tukufu Zuberi

9:00 - 9:05 am

Introduction of Keynote Speaker

Gayatri Sahgal

9:05 – 9:50 am

Keynote Address

Professor AbdouMaliq Simone (University of Sheffield, UK)

10:00 – 11:30 am

Panel 1: Encountering the State and Civil Society: Vulnerability, Crisis, Solidarity, and Alternative Lives

(1.5 Hour Panel)

Chair: Wale Adebanwi (UPenn, USA)

1. Hanna Garth (Princeton University, USA) – ‘Collective Organizing and Vernacular Resilience Among Puerto Rican Fishers’ 
2. Leonardo Torres Llerena (University College London, UK) – ‘Living Through Crisis: Everyday Lives of Instability in Peru and the Global South’ 
3. Anderson Henrique Gonçalves dos Santos (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA) – ‘Afugentar O Desterro: The Plight for Land and Environment in the Quilonbola Council of the Iguape Basin and Valley’
4. Jaira Harrington (University of Illinois Chicago, USA) – ‘Slow Erosion: Afro-Brazilian Trust in an Evolving Democracy.’ (Online)

11:30– 11:45 am

Coffee Break

11:45 – 13:00 pm

Panel 2: Biomedical Perdurance and Alternative Lives

(1 hour 15 min Panel)

Chair: Amiel Bize (Cornell University, USA)

1. Sade K Taiwo (UPenn, USA) – ‘Revitalizing Latin American Social Medicine: Addressing Healthcare Crisis Through COVID-19 Experiences in Rio de Janeiro Favelas’
2. Iyone Agboraw (UPenn, USA) – ‘Opting Out: Nigerian Students’ and Self Destruction as a Mode of Maneuverer’
3. Magdalena Zegarra Chiappori (University of Cambridge, UK): ‘Remaining, Vital Acts, and Possibility: The Exercise of “Sustaining Oneself” in a Residential Care Centre for Older Adults in Lima, Peru’ (Online)

13:00 - 15:00 pm

Lunch

15:00 – 16:30 pm

Panel 3: Precarity, Social Suffering, and Future Making

(1.5 Hour Panel)

Chair: Rogers Orock (Lafayette College, USA)

1. Kevan Harris (UCLA, USA) – ‘The Hidden Injuries of Sanctions: Categorical Erosion and Recognition Ruptures in Contemporary Iran’
2. Franco Barchiesi (Ohio State University, USA) – ‘Bounded Sovereignty: Precarity, Blackness, and the Rhetoric of African Resilience’
3. Mikias Sissay (Temple University, USA) – ‘Conflict-induced Narratives and Its Impact on Everyday Life: A Look into Ethiopia’s 2020-2022 Civil War and Its Effect on Post-Conflict Reconciliation’
4. Caroline Wanjiku Kihato (Oxford University, UK and Woodrow Wilson Center, USA) and Loren B. Landau (Oxford University, UK) – ‘An Atlas of Uncertainty: Spatio-Temporal Journeys into and through African Cityscapes.’ (Online)

16:30 – 16:45 pm

Coffee Break

16:45- 18:00 pm

Panel 4: Climate Adaptation and the Struggle for Sustenance

(1 hour 15 min Panel)

Chair: Lalitha Kamath (TISS, India/CASI, USA)  

1. Tayeba Batool (UPenn, USA) – ‘Examining the Urban “Ecologist” as Political Figure of Climate Change in Pakistan’
2. Briana Hemphill (John Hopkins University, USA) – ‘Land, Food, and Freedom: The Struggle for Food Autonomy in Haiti and Georgia’
3. Jamila Hamidu (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany) – ‘Making sense of climate displacement in West Africa: Communities in search of a promised land.’ (Online)

9:00 – 9:30 am

Opening Remarks by Co-host and Gustave C. Kuemmerle Professor of Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania

Michael Hanchard 

Title: Interrogating Precarity in the Current Moment

9:30 – 11:30 am

Panel 5: Idioms and Practices of Resilience, Subversion, and Agency

(2 Hour Panel)

Chair: Wale Adebanwi (UPenn, USA)

1. Juan Suarez Ontaneda (Bryn Mawr College, USA) – ‘Afro-Pacific Teratology: La tunda and the Idiom, for Violence in the Ecuador-Colombia Border’
2. Amiel Bize (Cornell University, USA) – ‘Finders Keepers: Ku-okota and the Right to Salvage’
3. Chwienui Helen Ghogomu Gayelle (University of New Mexico, USA) – ‘The Invention of the “Motoman”: How the Profession Displays a Prosaic Figure of Vernacular Resilience in Cameroon’
4. Nicki Kindersley (Cardiff University, UK) with Mawal Marko Gatkuoth, Manal Adbulaziz Mudis, and others – ‘Where will those with no buttocks go to? Popular analysis of exploitative life on the South Sudan–Sudan borderlands.’ (Online)
5. Brian Klein (University of Michigan, USA) – ‘Against Extractivism: Moral Economies of Everyday Extraction in the Mines of Madagascar.’ (Online)

11:30 – 11:45 am

Coffee Break 

11:45 – 13:00 pm

Panel 6: Informal Taxation and Everyday Fiscal Lives

(1 hour 15 min Panel)

Chair: Julia Elyachar, (Princeton University, USA)

1. Vanessa van den Boogaard (University of Toronto, Canada) – ‘Informal Contributions and Crisis Responses: Evidence from Rwanda and Sierra Leone’ 
2. Yannick Lokaya Bokasola (International Centre for Tax and Development (ICTD, UK)) and Caleb Jérémie Dohou (ICTD, UK) – ‘Beyond the State, but Supporting It? Informal Tax Institutions and State Legitimacy in the DRC’
3. Miranda Shield Johansson (University College, London, UK) – ‘Fiscal Impositions and Creative Survival: Money Management Amongst Low Earners in Peri-urban Bolivia’ (Online)

13:00 – 15:00 pm

Lunch 

15:00 – 16:15 pm

Panel 7: Gender, Resilience, and Reflections

(1 hour 15 min Panel)

Chair: Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet (UPenn, USA)

1. Camille C. Carr (UPenn, USA) – ‘The Politics of Viche: Black Women’s Place-Making and Political Legibility in the Colombian Pacific’
2. Helen Bezuneh (UPenn, USA) – ‘“Let Ethiopia March Ahead with Her beauties”: The Making of a Modern Nation at the 1968 Miss Addis Ababa Beauty Contest’ 
3. Rayi Kena Ferraz da Cunha de Souza Teixeira (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) – ‘The “Dirty Mark” of Experience: Heloisa Teixeira’s Critical Response to Cultural Instability in “Impressões de viagem” (1980)’ (Online) 

16:15 – 16:30 pm

Coffee Break 

16:30 - 18:00 pm

Panel 8: Art and the Aesthetics of Resilience, Struggle, and Survival

(1.5 Hours)

Chair: Carol Ann Muller (UPenn, USA)

1. Rogers Orock (Lafayette College, USA) – “Who Sing’s the Crisis State? Elite Misrule and the Music Of Disaffection in Cameroon”
2. Barbara Alves Matias (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) – ‘Frictions Between Art, Ethics, and Politics: Mujeres Creando and Gender as a Methodological Lens in the Production of Other Worlds’
3. Juliana de Assis Beraldo (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) – ‘“I Make Money with Bananas”: The Uses of Babanas in Paulo Nazarath’s Works’
4. Clarke Dickens and Teia Hudson (UPenn, USA) – ‘A Changing Landscape: How Urbaside Has Redefined Life Within Salvador, Bahia, Brazil’
5. Echezonachukwu Nduka (UPenn, USA) – “Musicking through the Timeline: Songs as Resistance and Survival in Postcolonial Nigeria, 1970-2025”

18:00 – 18:30

Closing Discussions by Co-Host and Director of the Centre for Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania 

Wale Adebanwi