#  Dr. Amanda Haarman 

Visiting Scholar 2026/27

 

 

 



   ![A professional headshot of Amanda](/sites/g/files/omnuum9081/files/styles/hwp_4_5__320x400/public/2026-09/Headshot%20Amanda%20Haarman.jpg?itok=OiCNuwgp) 

 



 





 

Amanda Haarman is a Visiting Fellow at the Harvard University Center for African Studies for the 2026–2027 academic year. Her research focuses on entrepreneurship and cultural and creative industries, with a particular focus on Ghana. Across her work, she examines questions of agency and possibility: how entrepreneurial and creative practices expand what can be imagined, valued, and brought into being, and how these processes unfold within wider relations of power. She obtained her Ph.D. from Copenhagen Business School in Denmark in 2025. Her doctoral research followed returnee entrepreneurs working across Accra’s creative industries, including fashion, film, visual arts, and graphic design. She examined how entrepreneurs sought to challenge dominant representations of Africa, revalue creativity, and reclaim cultural agency while navigating colonial legacies and global capitalist structures. This research informs her broader interest in entrepreneurial worldmaking and the role of entrepreneurship in giving aesthetic, material, and spatial form to alternative possibilities. She is currently extending this research to technological change, examining how generative AI is being taken up in creative work in Ghana and how competing visions of technological futures are negotiated and pursued. Her research has been published in *Global Networks*, *The European Journal of Development Research*, and *Population, Space and Place*.

**Research at Harvard**

During the fellowship, Amanda will work primarily on her book project, *Entangled Ambitions: Entrepreneurial Worldmaking and African Futures*. Building on her doctoral research in Ghana’s creative industries, the book examines the possibilities and limits of entrepreneurship as a means of pursuing alternative futures under postcolonial conditions. It further develops entrepreneurial worldmaking to understand how efforts to create change take form while remaining entangled with the historical structures and relations of power they seek to transform. Alongside the book, she will continue developing an emerging line of research on generative AI and creative work in Ghana, focusing on questions of authorship, agency, and technological sovereignty.



 

 

 





 

 

- ## People
    
     [Visiting Fellow](/people/visiting-scholar)