Presenters
Director, Harvard University Committee on Human Rights Studies; Lecturer on Law, Lecturer on Social Studies (HLS) Harvard's Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human RightsLaw
Jacqueline Bhabha is Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School, Director of Research at Harvard’s Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, and Adjunct Lecturer on Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. She is also the University Adviser on Human Rights Education to the Provost at Harvard University. She received a first class honors degree and an M.Sc. from Oxford University, and a J.D. from the College of Law in London. She has published extensively on issues of migration, refugee protection, children’s rights and citizenship. She is the editor of Children Without A State (2011) and author of the forthcoming book, Moving Children: Child Migration in the 21st Century (2012). She is the joint author of Seeking Asylum Alone: Unaccompanied and Separated Children and Refugee Protection (2006), Women’s Movement: Women under Immigration, Nationality and Refugee Law (1994) and Worlds Apart: Women (1990). She serves on the board of the Scholars at Risk Network, the World Peace Foundation and the Journal of Refugee Studies. She is also a founder of the Alba Collective, an international women’s NGO currently working with rural women and girls in developing countries to enhance financial security and youth rights.
Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and Professor of African and African American Studies Harvard University
Suzanne Preston Blier (Ph.D. 1981 Columbia, Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University) is an historian of African art and architecture in both the History of Art and Architecture and African and African American Studies Departments. She also is a member of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science Her first book The Anatomy of Architecture: Ontology and Metaphor in Batammaliba Architectural Expression (Cambridge University Press; paperback, Chicago University Press, 1987) won the Arnold Rubin Prize. Her second book, African Vodun: Art, Psychology, and Power (1995) received the Charles Rufus Morey Prize. Other books include: African Royal Art: The Majesty of Form (1998), Butabu: Adobe Architecture in West Africa (2004 NY Times, Holiday Selection), and Art of the Senses: Masterpieces from the William and Bertha Teel Collection (Editor 2004). Two new volumes will be appearing shortly: Art and Risk in Ancient Yoruba: Ife History, Power and Identity c.1300. (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and African’s Worlds: A History (with Joseph C. Miller, Oxford University Press, 2012). From 2005-2008 she was Chair of the Editorial Board of the Art Bulletin; in 2011 two of her articles were selected for the Centennial Anthology of the journal. She is a member of the Collège de France International Scientific and Strategic Committee (COSS) (2011-2013), a member of the College Art Association board, and a past member of the Board of the Society of Architectural Historians. Prior fellowships include: CASVA (Paul Mellon Senior Fellow, the National Gallery of Art), John Simon Guggenheim, the Radcliffe Institute, NEH, the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, Fulbright Senior Research, Social Science Research Council, ACLS, and the Getty Center for the Study of Art. She is Co-Chair of an Electronic Geo-Spatial Database: AfricaMap, and Chair of the Steering Committee of Worldmap. Forthcoming books include: Picasso’s Demoiselles: Pornography, Primitivism, and Darwin; Imaging African Amazons: The Art of Dahomey Women Warriors; and The Image of the Black in African Art (Editor: Harvard University Press).
American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) New Faculty Fellow in the Anthropology Department Harvard University
Kerry Chance is an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) New Faculty Fellow in the Anthropology Department at Harvard University. She joined the Anthropology Department as a College Fellow in 2011 after receiving a Ph.D. in Socio-Cultural Anthropology at the University of Chicago. She is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Living Politics: Practices and Protests of ‘the Poor’ in Democratic South Africa. She has held fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner Gren Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation. Her research interests include: Political Anthropology, African Studies, everyday material life in slums, protest and popular movements, economic liberalization, development, new forms of politics, violence and democratic governance.
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Anthropology University of Chicago
Lauren Coyle is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. She also is currently Dorothy Porter & Charles Harris Wesley Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University and a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency graduate research fellow. She works in legal and political anthropology, historical ethnography, and critical theories of law, sacrifice, and sovereignty in capitalist modernity. She presently is writing a dissertation titled Dual Sovereigns in the Golden Twilight: Law, Land, and Sacrificial Labor in Ghana. This project, based on ongoing historical and ethnographic research, concerns transformations in searing contests over gold mining and the recently revitalized significance of the colonial legacy of dual legal systems – “customary” and state-based – for contemporary nationhood in Ghana. In particular, Coyle analyzes how this legal legacy interacts with “rule of law” governance logics and with various shadow sovereigns to frame signal conflicts over land, labor, gold, the sacred, and “sovereign wealth” in the nation’s neoliberal economy. More broadly, she examines the moral economies of sacrificial mining and environmental politics, as well as the mounting transparency and “upward adjustment” movements in Ghana and across the postcolonial world. Coyle also received a J.D. from Harvard Law School. Her recent work has appeared in Telos, Transition, and Rethinking Marxism.
Chair-on-Leave of the Committee on African Studies; Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies Harvard UniversityHistory, African and African American Studies
Caroline Elkins is Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Harvard University, and Chair of Harvard’s Committee on African Studies and Committee on Ethnic Studies. She received her A.B., summa cum laude, from Princeton University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. Her first book, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2006. She is a contributor to the New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, and The New Republic. She and her research have been the subjects of a BBC documentary titled “Kenya: White Terror,” which won the International Red Cross Award at the Monte Carlos Film Festival. She has held numerous fellowships and awards including those from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Scholars, Fulbright, the Social Science Research Council, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, the Carr Center for Human Rights, and the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy. Download CV
Chair and Professor Stanford UniversityDepartment of Anthropology
James Ferguson is the Susan S. and William H. Hindle Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, and Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology. His research has focused on southern Africa (especially Lesotho, Zambia, South Africa, and Namibia), and has engaged a broad range of theoretical and ethnographic issues. These include the politics of “development”, rural-urban migration, changing topgraphies of property and wealth, constructions of space and place, urban culture in mining towns, experiences of modernity, the spatialization of states, the place of “Africa” in a real and imagined world, and the theory and politics of ethnography. Running through much of this work is a concern with how discourses organized around concepts such as “development” and “modernity” intersect the lives of ordinary people. Professor Ferguson recently completed a sabbatical year at the Stanford Humanities Center researching emerging trends in social assistance to alleviate poverty in southern Africa. While welfare programs in the West have been pared back in recent years, there has been a surprising expansion of social payments to the poor across much of the developing world. In South Africa, for instance, nearly 30 percent of the population today receives some kind of social grant. Tracing emerging new rationalities of poverty and social assistance, the new research aims to illuminate both the dangers and the possibilities presented by new mechanisms of “social” government and emerging forms of politics focused on the question of distribution. This new research will be published in a forthcoming book, provisionally titled, Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution.
PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology University of Chicago
Mark Geraghty is a Ph.D. candidate from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago and is currently a Resident Fellow at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University. His work focuses on crimes of speech, local genocide courts, violence, identity and nation-building. He has conducted extensive ethnographic research in the African Great Lakes region.
His current research project ethnographically investigates the Rwandan state’s campaign against “genocide ideology” — ideas, revealed through speech, writing and actions, said to foster ethnic hatred, now officially constituted as the root cause of genocide. His research examined the quotidian operations of that campaign — through research in prisons, courts, “re-education” camps, and genocide commemorative events — to assess its differential impact on, implications for, and understandings by, various sections of the Rwandan population.
Anita Hannig is a Florence Levy Kay Fellow in Medical Anthropology at Brandeis University. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago in 2012. Her dissertation is an institutional ethnography of a foreign-run hospital in Ethiopia dedicated to curing women suffering from a childbirth injury called obstetric fistula. In addition to medical anthropology and the anthropology of the body, her scholarly fields of inquiry include ritual and religion, women’s and gender studies, critical development studies, and (post)colonial Africa. Hannig is the recipient of a Century Fellowship for Graduate Study, a Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, and a Mellon Dissertation Fellowship.
Associate Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies The University of Texas at Austin
Neville Hoad is Associate Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality and Globalization (Minnesota 2007) and co-editor (with Karen Martin and Graeme Reid) of Sex & Politics in South Africa: Equality/Gay & Lesbian Movement/the anti-Apartheid Struggle (Double Storey 2005). He is currently working on a book project about the literary and cultural representations of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa.
Emeritus Professor of English at Cornell University and Professor of African and African American Studies and of Comparative Literature at Harvard University.
Biodun Jeyifo is Emeritus Professor of English at Cornell University and Professor of African and African American Studies and of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He was educated at the University of Ibadan (B.A. First Class Honors in English) and New York University (M.A., Ph. D.) He has lectured widely in Africa, Europe, North America and Asia. Professor Jeyifo has published many books, monographs and essays on Anglophone African and Caribbean writings, drama, Marxist and postcolonial literary and cultural studies. His book, Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics, and Postcolonialism (Cambridge University Press, 2004), won one of the American Library Association’s Outstanding Academic Texts (OATS) awards for 2005. The two-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought which Jeyifo co-edited with Abiola Irele was published in 2010.
Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence Harvard Law School
Duncan Kennedy is the Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence at Harvard Law School, where he has taught since 1971. He has taught and written on basic private law subjects, as well as low income housing law, law and development, legal theory, legal history and the globalization of law. He was one of the founding members of the critical legal studies movement.
Associate Professor Rutgers University
Julie Livingston is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. She works at the intersection of history, anthropology, and public health. She is the author of a new book from Duke University Press, Improvising Medicine in an African Oncology Ward, and also of Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana. Her co-edited works include A Death Retold: Jesica Santillan, the Bungled Transplant, and the Paradoxes of Medical Citizenship; Three Shots at Prevention: The HPV Vaccine and the Politics of Medicine’s Simple Solutions; and Interspecies a special issue of the journal Social Text.
Professor Achille Mbembe, born in Cameroon, obtained his Ph.D in History at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1989 and a D.E.A. in Political Science at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques (Paris). He is currently a Visiting Professor of Romance Studies and Franklin Humanities Institute Research Scholar at Duke University. He was Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University, New York, from 1988-1991, a Senior Research Fellow at the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C., from 1991 to 1992, Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania from 1992 to 1996, Executive Director of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (Codesria) in Dakar, Senegal, from 1996 to 2000. Achille was also a visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2001, and a visiting Professor at Yale University in 2003. He has written extensively in African history and politics, including La naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun (Paris, Karthala, 1996). His latest work On the Postcolony was published in Paris in 2000 in French and the English translation has been published by the University of California Press, Berkeley, in 2001.
Associate Professor of Anthropology Brandeis University
Janet McIntosh, Associate Professor of Anthropology, is a cultural anthropologist whose work focuses on linguistic anthropology, psychological anthropology, language ideology, narrative and discourse, personhood, essentialism, religion, ritual, Islam, ethnic identity, colonialism and postcoloniality, and East Africa. After earning a BA at Harvard University (summa cum laude) and a second BA at Oxford University (first class honors), she undertook graduate training at the University of Michigan, earning her Ph.D in 2002 and winning a Distinguished Dissertation Award. Dr. McIntosh has recent articles in such journals as American Ethnologist, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Journal of Pragmatics, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Africa, Journal of Religion in Africa, and Language and Communication. Her book “The Edge of Islam: Power, Personhood, and Ethnoreligious Boundaries on the Kenya Coast” (Duke University Press, 2009), won the 2010 Clifford Geertz Prize in the Anthropology of Religion. Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, she is currently conducting research toward a new project on the narrated dilemmas of former colonial settlers and their descendants in Kenya. She is Deputy Editor of The Journal of Religion in Africa. The courses she teaches at Brandeis include “Language, Ethnicity and Nationalism,” “Linguistic Anthropology,” “Psychological Anthropology,” “Colonialism/Postcoloniality: Encounters and Dilemmas,” “Communication and Media,” “Introduction to the Comparative Study of Human Societies,” and “Language in American Life.” Before coming to Brandeis she taught at University of Michigan, Harvard University, and MIT. She lives in Brookline with her husband Tom and sons Tobias and Theo.
PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology University of Chicago
George Paul Meiu is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago and an Exchange Scholar in the Departments of Anthropology and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. His research, teaching, and publications focus on the intersections of ethnicity and sexuality in the postcolonial world. Within this larger field, his current research explores the social, economic, and political effects of the tourist commodification of ethnic sexuality in Kenya. Entitled Ethno-Erotic Economies: Imagining Samburu Futures in Postcolonial Kenya, Meiu’s dissertation explores how young Samburu men perform traditional ‘warriorhood’ in tourism as a way to initiate relationships with European women, acquire wealth, and build futures. Meiu argues that the cash obtained through such relationships enable people in the Samburu District to regenerate a collective identity, if in new, complicated ways. As this money becomes a source of new inequalities and an object of contestation in ritual and everyday life, it also generates new configurations of gender, generation, and kinship. Meiu offers the analytical frame of “ethno-erotic economies” as a way to map networks of sexual and monetary exchange, which move beyond the tourism industry and which perpetually produce, reproduce, and reconfigure ethnic identity as sexual difference. Preliminary findings of Meiu’s research have been published in Anthropology Today (2008), Canadian Journal of African Studies (2009), as well as in the edited volumes African Sexualities: A Reader (2011) and Great Expectations: Imagination and Anticipation in Tourism (2011).
Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology Columbia University
Hlonipha Mokoena received her Ph.D. from the University of Cape Town in 2005. She is currently an associate professor of Anthropology at Columbia University in the City of New York. Her articles have been published in: Journal of Natal and Zulu History; Journal of Religion in Africa; Journal of Southern African Studies; Scrutiny2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa and Baobab: South African Journal of New Writing. She has contributed opinion pieces and book reviews to: African Studies Review; History & Theory; The Politics of Jacob Zuma, ACAS Bulletin No. 84; the blog “Africa is a Country” and the exhibition “PASS-AGES: References & Footnotes”.
As a teaching professor her main area of interest is South African intellectual history. Her starting point is the fact that one of the defining characteristics of South Africa is that it is a society that ostensibly lacks a collective history or shared philosophical and political traditions. The main objective of her taught courses and seminars is to introduce students to the contested histories of South African political ideas and traditions. Some of the themes and topics examined in the courses include: othering discourses and the emergence of a Cape discourse; slavery, free labour and the history of paternalism; frontier violence and resistance to conquest; and the emergence of African and Afrikaner nationalisms.
Her first book is on Magema M. Fuze, author of the Abantu Abamnyama Lapa Bavela Ngakona (1922) / The Black People and Whence They Came (1979). The book is titled Magema Fuze: The Making of a Kholwa Intellectual. The basic argument she presents in the book is that as an author and an aspirant historian Fuze represents a set of questions about the emergence and arrested development of a black intelligentsia and literati in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century South Africa. His life and writings reveal both his singular attempt to create, under adverse cultural, political and social conditions, a literary career and a body of knowledge while also participating in the constitution of a discourse community or a public sphere of Zulu-speaking intellectuals.
Quincy Jones Professor of African-American Music, supported by the Time Warner Endowment, and Professor of African and African American Studies Harvard University
Ingrid Monson is Quincy Jones Professor of African American music, supported by the Time Warner Endowment, and Interim Dean of Arts and Humanities at Harvard University. She is a former chair of the Music Department, a Guggenheim fellow, and a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow of Harvard University. Monson is the author of Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa (Oxford University Press, 2007), Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), and an edited a volume entitled the African Diaspora: A Musical Perspective (Garland/Routledge 2000). Her article, “Hearing, Seeing, and Perceptual Agency” (Critical Inquiry 2008) explores the implications of work on cognition and perception for poststructural theoretical issues in the humanities. She is currently working on a book about Malian balafonist Neba Solo. Her articles have appeared in Ethnomusicology, Critical Inquiry, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Black Music Research Journal, Women and Music, and several edited volumes. She began her career as a trumpet player and has recently been studying contemporary Senufo balafon.
Professor Monson specializes in jazz, African American music, and music of the African diaspora. She is author of Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (1996) winner of the Sonneck Society’s Irving Lowens award for the best book published on American music in 1996. Her most recent work is on Freedom Sounds: Jazz, Civil Rights, and Africa, 1950-1967, (2005). She is also editor of The African Diaspora: A Musical Perspective (2000). This collection of essays presents musical case studies from various regions of the African diaspora that engage with the broader interdisciplinary discussions about race, gender, politics, nationalism, and music. Contributors include Akin Euba, Veit Erlmann, Eric Charry, Lucy Durán, Jerome Harris, Travis Jackson, Gage Averill, and Julian Gerstin.
Professor Monson earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in Musicology from New York University, her B.M. from New England Conservatory of Music, and her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Economics.
Professor Columbia UniversityAnthropology
Rosalind Morris is a professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. She focuses her fieldwork in two main areas: South Africa and mainland Southeast Asia, especially Thailand. Her earlier scholarship focused on the history of modernity in Southeast Asia and the place of the mass media in its development, particularly in the encounter between old and new forms of mediation. More recently, she has been writing an ethnography of South Africa’s mining communities. Traversing these fields of inquiry, her work addresses questions of the relationships between value and violence; aesethetics and the political; the sexualization of power and desire; and the history of anthropological thought and social theory. In her formally wide-ranging writings on all of these issues, she attends specifically to the problem of language, and the matter of representation.
Rosalind Morris has served as a Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, an Associate Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, and is the former co-editor of CONNECT: art, politics, theory, culture. She is also the founding editor of ‘The Africa List,’ for Seagull Books. Download CV
Professor of the Practice of African Languages and Cultures Harvard UniversityAfrican and African American Studies
John M. Mugane is the Director of the African Language program in the Department of African and African American Studies. He is a linguist specializing in African languages and is the Professor of the Practice of African Languages and Cultures at Harvard University. Mugane has been the Director of the language program since 2003 developing the teaching of African languages and cultures. Mugane is the author of Linguistic Description: Typology and Representation of African Languages in Trends in African Linguistics (Vol. 5, Africa World Press, 2003), Tujifunze Kiswahili Let’s Learn Swahili (Aramati Digital Publications, 1999), and A Paradigmatic Grammar of Gikuyu Stanford Monographs on African Languages (Will Leben (ed.), CSLI Publications, Stanford Univ., 1997). Among his published works are papers on Bantu languages, linguistics, and instructional technology.Mugane’s research interests include Bantu linguistics, African languages, computer mediated language instruction, grammar documentation, and pedagogy. Mugane received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Arizona, Tucson (1997) and his M.A. in Linguistics from Ohio University (1991). A graduate of Kenyatta University in Kenya, B.Ed. in Languages, Literature, and Linguistics (1987), he also earned an M.A. in International Affairs, African Studies (1991) at Ohio University. Mugane’s current projects include the Africa’s Sources of Knowledge Digital Library (ASK-DL) and the Enhanced Language Instruction for African Studies (ELIAS). Download CV
Professor of African Religious Traditions Harvard Divinity SchoolAfrican and African American Studies
Jacob K. Olupona is Professor of African Religious Traditions, Harvard Divinity School and Professor of African and African American Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He studied at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka and Boston University where he received his Ph.D in Comparative Religion in 1983. He is currently working on a path-breaking study of the religious practices of the estimated one million Africans who have emigrated to the United States over the last 40 years, examining in particular several populations that remain relatively invisible in the American religious landscape: “reverse missionaries” who have come to the U.S. to establish churches, African Pentecostals in American congregations, American branches of independent African churches, and indigenous African religious communities in the U.S. Olupona has authored or edited seven books, including Kingship, Religion and Rituals in a Nigerian Community: A Phenomenological Study of Ondo Yoruba Festivals. In his forthcoming book Ile-Ife: The City of 201 Gods, he examines the modern urban mixing of ritual, royalty, gender, class, and power, and how the structure, content, and meaning of religious beliefs and practices permeate daily life. Olupona has received prestigious grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the Ford Foundation, the Davis Humanities Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Getty Foundation. He has served on the editorial boards of three influential journals and was the president of the African Association for the Study of Religion. In 2000, Olupona received an honorary doctorate in divinity from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Download CV
Professor Duke UniversityCultural Anthropology, African & African American Studies, and Women's Studies
Professor Charles Piot focuses his research on contemporary culture and politics, as well as on histories of slavery and colonialism, in francophone West Africa. His first book, Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa (1999) attempted to retheorize a classic out-of-the-way place as within the modern and the global. His new book, Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa After the Cold War (2010), explores the way in which human rights discourse, democratization, NGOs, and charismatic Christianity are remaking sovereignty, the biopolitical, and political culture in West Africa. An in-progress book on Togolese applying for, and attempting to game, the US Diversity (green card) lottery also explores the experiences of West African expatriates in the US and Europe. He is also co-editor of the journal Cultural Anthropology through 2015.
Associate Professor in the Anthropology Department and in the Graduate Program for International Affairs The New SchoolAnthropology
Janet Roitman holds a joint position as an Associate Professor in the Anthropology Department and in the Graduate Program for International Affairs. Roitman has conducted extensive research in Central Africa, focusing specifically on the borders of Cameroon, Nigeria, the Central African Republic and Chad. She has recently published an analysis of the unregulated commerce that transpires on those borders, which inquires into emergent forms of economic regulation in the region of the Chad Basin and considers consequential transformations in the nature of citizenship. Her topical interests are in political economy, the anthropology of economics, the constitution of contemporary economic subjectivities, the anthropology of reason, and the sociology of critique.
PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago and an Exchange Scholar in the Departments of African and African American Studies and Anthropology at Harvard University
Joshua Walker is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago and an Exchange Scholar in the Departments of African and African American Studies and Anthropology at Harvard University. His research focuses broadly on the social and cultural effects of extractive industries in Central Africa. His dissertation project examines the colonial and postcolonial history of diamond mining in the Kasai region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). By exploring how rapidly shifting kinds of extractive labor reshape the ways in which people produce lives, the dissertation seeks to elucidate new ways of conceptualizing value, temporality, and domestic reproduction. In addition to having conducted 19 months of fieldwork in the DRC, Walker has also worked for intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations dealing with issues of peace, disarmament, and democracy in the DRC, Sierra Leone, Togo, and Zambia.
