NAB XVIII 2019

Current Affairs
of Islamic culture that revolve around
religious learning in the widest sense.
For the purpose of this project, learning
will be perceived as processes where
teachings and practices pertaining to Islam
are conveyed: these may be found
in formal education, but extend to many
other settings and contexts. In addition,
given the interconnectedness of learning
networks, data on religious affiliations
and networks will be included, thus creating
synergies with the research section
“Affiliations”. If successful, a long-term
perspective for the project beyond the
first funding period, including other
realms of Islamic culture in Africa is
possible.
Learning beyond the Classroom:
Coping with Illiteracy in Urban
Literate Environments in Bolivia
and Benin
Research Team: Erdmute Alber,
Carlos Kölbl
Few ideas have travelled around the globe
as successfully as the notion that literacy is
a basic need, right, and standard throughout
the world. Today, people everywhere
move through lifeworlds heavily shaped
by written signs, even as new illiteracies
constantly emerge, seemingly failing to
achieve “development through education”.
Master narratives of illiteracy situate it as
“historical” or “traditional”, something
that will become obsolete. In contrast, the
project assumes that not having learnt to
read and write at school can no longer be
seen as “old” or “other”. Instead, we see
“new” illiteracies as being related to and
constantly produced by ongoing global
processes that mainstream western-oriented
literacy through schooling. The project
aims to test this assumption by studying
processes for coping with illiteracy in
urban lifeworlds in two countries, Benin
and Bolivia. The project identifies similarities
and differences in its case studies,
while acknowledging that both countries
are influenced by the same global processes
of mainstreaming literacy.
Research Section:
Mobilities
Planned Obsolescence, Circular
Economies and Ecologies of
Electronic Devices in Transdisciplinary
Perspective
Research Team: Uli Beisel, Ruth
Freitag, Erdmute Alber, Christina Roth,
John Kuumuori Ganle, Grace Akese
Planned obsolescence denotes design
practices that are assumed to build an
artificially limited life span into a technical
device. This discourse links electronic
waste to the logics of capitalism and renders
the design of devices into a process
imbued with politics. It also transforms
the electronic product into waste, or rather,
into a material object that has outlived
its intended usage patterns. However, the
fact that an electronic device has reached
its intentioned shelf life does not mean its
life is over. On the contrary, this is a moment
where the device enters into different
processes of transfer and transformation.
Using mobile phones and fridges as
examples, and examining their mobility
between Germany and Ghana, this project
scrutinises the intentioned and improvised
registers of the mobility of electronic
devices – their physical circulations,
their composition through design, repair,
and maintenance, as well as the attendant
material-semiotic transformations of the
devices themselves.
Oil Movements: the Production and
Government of Petro-(im)mobilities
in East Africa
Research Team: Martin Doevenspeck,
Paddy Kinyera, Goretti Nabanoga,
Fredrick Okaka
The discoveries of commercially viable hydrocarbons
in East Africa, for which the
development of strategic infrastructures in
Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania are underway,
squarely puts the region within the
frames of transboundary petro-politics.
East Africa’s oil industry not only promises
substantial economic development
and energy security within the region, but
also significant profits for the oil multinationals
involved. The region is a striking
example of how (im)mobilities framed
around substances such as oil are integral
to socio-political and socio-economic issues.
This projects studies the dynamics
of oil movements in order to understand
how inter-state power relations are integral
to the (im)mobility of people, ideas, practices,
and things. Additionally, the inquiry
into East African ‘oil-mobilities’ promises
to generate new empirical and theoretical
insights that could help explain how
strategic natural resources influence the
production and government of patterns of
(im)mobilities.
Africa in the Global History of Refugee
Camps (1940s to 1950s)
Research Team: Joël Glasman,
Jochen Lingelbach
Despite well-established criticism of refugee
camps from both scholars and humanitarian
practitioners, camps are still key
instruments in the management of refugee
(im)mobility in Africa. The common
narrative of refugee camp history portrays
them as a device that emerged in the 1940s
in Europe and was transferred to Africa
in the 1960s. However, the research team
argues that there is a longer and more entangled
history of encampment in Africa.
This project will look into the global history
of this seemingly ahistorical and technical
humanitarian device. Focusing on the
“emergency phase” the project asks why
and how refugee camps emerge and what
knowledge, personnel, and things must be
mobilised in order to “make” a camp.
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Photo: Martin Doevenspeck
Uhamaji wa Wanyerwanda: Migration
and Conflict in Ituri, Democratic Republic
of Congo
Research Team: Martin Doevenspeck,
Nene Morisho, Aloys Tegera