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Popular Cultural Responses to Kenya’s 2010 Constitution: Machakos Book Workshop

Between 1–4 October, team member Nicklas Hållén visited Machakos University, where he and Dr. Charles Kebaya ran a second of three planned PhD and MA student workshop on popular cultural production in Kenya. The student participants have been working diligently on six different projects which will be collected in a co-authored book that is scheduled to be published in late 2025. Its tentative focus is Popular cultural production and the 2010 Kenyan constitution, and many of the chapters focus on the issue of popular culture in different kinds of social movements and protests.

The workshop was successful and the discussions about the drafts for the different chapters were animated and constructive. Since they will be collected in a co-authored volume, all the attendees are responsible for the quality of all texts. This method of co-authorship brings with it many interesting challenges – chief among which is perhaps the question of how one can reach consensus on the degree to which views can differ within the group without it becoming a problem for the project as a whole.

One topic that came up in many of the discussions is the so called Gen-Z protests and Mama Mboga (market lady) Revolution in Nairobi earlier this year. Other topics that were discussed included rural literary production and sustainability, the futures of literature in Kenya’s minority languages, and how non-political popular music has been re-purposed by Kenyan social movements.

The materials that participants are analysing will all be included in the ALMEDA database.

The next workshop is planned for early 2025 and we look forward to ultimately celebrating the launch of this co-written book in both Kenya and in Sweden!

New postdoc to catalogue Khangas

The Khanga/Kanga/Leso is a traditional cotton cloth with mixed designs, colors and messages worn by women along the coastal regions of Kenya, Tanzania and Zanzibar. The popularization of the Khanga can be traced back to 1887, when the Kaderdina family founded the Hajee Essak Limited company, which pioneered the mass…

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Lecture: Flora Losch on West African audiovisual archives

Join us for the next lecture in the ALMEDA seminar series! Flora Losch (EHESS – Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) will present her research on West African audiovisual archives – past and present. The lecture will be held on Zoom Time and Date: Wednesday 27 November, 13:15-14:45 CEST,…

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Lecture: Afrikaaps and the Literary Archive, Riaan Oppelt

On Tuesday 15 October, our case-study researcher Riaan Oppelt (Stellenbosch University) gave a lecture on his ALMEDA case-study material. You can watch the lecture here:

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Two ALMEDA PhD Courses – Uppsala University

ALMEDA will be offering two project-related PhD courses in 2025. One on the methods of Distant Reading and its implications for African Literature, and the other on Literary Metadata and the Digital Humanities and their importance for the future African literary archive. Please spread the word. These courses are free,…

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