Spring 2025

Title: Global Africa (Putting Africa, China and interactions within the ‘multiple South(s)’ into focus)

Organizers:  Fairuzah Atchulo (UvA) and Dr. Johanna von Pezold (UvA)

This reading group is an initiative of the ERC project China Africa Fashion Power (https://www.chinaafricafashionpower.org/)

The Global Africa reading group aims to facilitate critical discussions and dialogues on topics pertaining to ‘Africa’ and the Global South as a whole. In this, it strives to create a scholarly community that encompasses and accommodates the multitude of studies of and from Africa, and an avenue for keeping abreast with the academic developments pertaining to our theorised notion of ‘multiple Souths’. Combining aspects of a reading group and a seminar, Global Africa aspires to bring together esteemed international guest speakers with the China Africa Fashion Power project team, other African studies, humanities, and social sciences scholars based at  Dutch universities, as well as interested PhD and Master students.

About the ERC project China Africa Fashion Power

Fashion is a significant economic force globally and one of the most poignant indicators of cross-cultural exchange. Thus, the China Africa Fashion Power project uses everyday fashion (clothes, textiles, accessories, hair) as the lens to investigate how China’s global power is manifested, negotiated, and resisted in people’s daily life in Africa (Kenya and Mozambique).This will be studied by critically examining Africa-China networks of everyday fashion production, trade, retail and consumption, using a multi-disciplinary, multi-method, multi-sited, and multi-scalar approach. Thereby, the five-year-project aims to  theorise how everyday fashion is created, circulated, valuated, and consumed in and through Global Souths Value Chains connecting Guangdong, Nairobi, and Maputo.

Time schedule: The Global Africa seminar will be held from 3:00-4:30pm on Fridays, 14^th February 2025,  28^th March 2025, 11^th April 2025, and 20^th June 2025. The event for Friday 14^th February 2025 will take place in Room D1. 18A, Oudemanhuispoort 4-6, Amsterdam . All subsequent sessions will be in Room 0.16, BG1 Turfdraagsterpad 9, Amsterdam. All speakers will present in person.

Attendance: Online Attendance via Zoom will be possible for most sessions. Drinks and snacks will be served.

For enquires: f.m.m.atchulo@uva.nl and j.e.vonpezold@uva.nl

1. Friday 14^th February 2025 (D1. 18A OMHP): Building Futures, Shaping Resistance: Nairobi in Focus

Speakers are Dr. Elisa Tamburo and Fairuzah Atchulo. The session will be moderated by Dr. Jupiter Wang (UvA).

Elisa Tamburo will give a talk titled ‘Negotiating the City: Builders, Planners, Dwellers and the Making of Nairobi’. She is a social anthropologist and UKRI-Marie Curie Global Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard and the School of Geography and the Environment at Oxford. Her project ‘Negotiating the City’ focuses on urban planning and dwelling amidst China-built urban infrastructure in Nairobi, Kenya. Her work  has appeared in the JRAI, Focaal, and the Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, and she is currently revising her first book manuscript, Exiled in the City, with Cornell University Press.

Fairuzah Atchulo will give a talk titled ‘From Your Size to My Size: Dressing and Consumer Agency among Kenyan Consumers’. She is a PhD candidate at the Media Studies Department, University of Amsterdam. She is also affiliated with both the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) and the ERC Project China Africa Fashion Power under which she researches on the consumption end of the China-Africa global value chains in Kenya and Mozambique. Her PhD project is focused on standardized size and sizing systems and neo-colonialism in global fashion. It aims to examine the entangled histories of colonialism in global sizing systems, the inherent neo-colonialism still present in global systems and structures, its impact on fashion consumption in the global South, and how within these global structures, agency can be asserted.

1. Friday 28th March 2025 (0.16 BG1): Global Africa/Global China

Speakers are Dr. Miriam Driessen and Dr. Nicholas Loubere. The session will be moderated by Dr. Johanna von Pezold (UvA).

Miriam Driessen will give a talk titled ‘Ethiopian lawyers as brokers of global capital’. She is a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford. Her research explores Chinese-led development in Ethiopia and beyond through the lens of labour, migration, language, and, more recently, law. She is author of Tales of Hope, Tastes of Bitterness: Chinese Road Builders in Ethiopia (2019) and the essay The Restless Earth: Rural China in Transition (2018).

Nicholas Loubere will give a talk titled ‘Unequal Accumulations: Tracing Migration and Resource Flows from the Chinese Gold Rush in Ghana’. He is an Associate Professor at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University. His current research project, entitled ‘After the Gold Rush: Informal Resource Extraction in the Shadows of Global China’ (funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond), examines the movement of Chinese people, capital, and technology as part of extractive resource booms from past to present.

1. Friday 11th April 2025 (0.16 BG1): Afro-Sino Tech Futures

Speakers are Dr. Seyram Avle and Dr. Wei Wang. The session will be moderated by Dr. Tommy Tse (UvA).

Seyram Avle will give a talk titled ‘Other Futures? Afro-Sino Entanglements in the Digital Age’. She is an associate professor of Communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She researches on digital technology cultures and innovation across parts of Africa, China, and the United States. Her work primarily takes a critical approach towards understanding how digital technologies are made and used, as well as their implications for issues of labour, identity, and futures.

Wei Wang will give a talk titled ‘Predict the unpredictable? The futile data colonialism and techno-developmentalism in China’s industrial innovation’. He is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the China Africa Fashion Power project at the University of Amsterdam. His research explores China’s multi-dimensional global influences on Africa through ethnographic fieldwork. He currently focuses on how everyday fashion products are designed and produced in China and eventually reach African markets.

1. Friday 20th June 2025 (0.16 BG1): Book Salon

Speakers are Dr. Andrea Pollio and Dr. Maria Repnikova. The session will be moderated by Dr. Carwyn Morris (Leiden).

Andrea Pollio will give  a talk on his book Nairobi, techno-capital: Global China and the Silicon Savannah. He is assistant professor of Economic and Political Geography at the Polytechnic of Turin, Italy, and a research associate of the African Centre for Cities at University of Cape Town, South Africa. He is a former Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellow at both institutions. He is one of the founding editors of Platforms & Society, and a co-curator of UTA-Do - Urban Theory Workshop-Africa.

Maria Repnikova will give a talk on her book China’s Image-Making in Africa: Competing for Soft Power in the Shadows of the West. She is an expert on China, an Associate Professor in Global Communication, and the inaugural William C. Pate Chair in Strategic Communication at Georgia State University. She is the author of the award-winning book, Media Politics in China: Improvising Power Under Authoritarianism (Cambridge 2017), as well as the recent, Chinese Soft Power (Cambridge Global China Element Series). Other than working on China, Maria Repnikova does comparative work on information politics in China and Russia.

Fall 2024

Title: Global Africa (Putting into focus: Africa, China and interactions within the multiple “South(s”))

Organizers: Atchulo Fairuzah, Tommy Tse.

This reading group is an initiative of The ERC Project China Africa Fashion Power (https://www.chinaafricafashionpower.org/)

Aiming to facilitate critical discussions and dialogues on topics pertaining to “Africa”, and the global South as a whole. In this the Global Africa reading group strives to create a scholarly community that encompasses and accommodates the multitude of studies of and from Africa, and an avenue to keeping abreast with the terrains of discussions pertaining to our theorized notion of “multiple Souths”. This reading group thus combines aspects of a reading group and seminars, and aspires to bring together guest speakers with academic, artistic and/or professional contributions to and affiliations with the China Africa Fashion Power project and Africa, humanities and social sciences faculty members from different universities, Postdoctoral and PhD researchers as well as Master students.

About The ERC Project China Africa Fashion Power:        

Fashion is a recognised significant economic force globally and one of the most poignant indicators of cross-cultural exchange. Thus, the China Africa Fashion Power Project uses everyday fashion (clothes, textiles, hair, cosmetics) as the lens to investigate how China’s global power is manifested, negotiated, and resisted in people’s daily life in Africa (Kenya and Mozambique), the encompassing South-South interactions it creates and thrives upon, and the complex dynamics and expressions of power it exudes. This will be studied by critically examining Africa-China networks of everyday fashion production, trade, marketplace and consumption using a multi-disciplinary, multi-method, multi-sited, and multi-scalar approach, and will theorise how everyday fashion is created, circulated, valuated, and consumed in and through Global Souths Value Chains of Guangdong, Nairobi, and Maputo.

Time schedule: The team will be away conducting fieldwork in Africa (Kenya and Mozambique) and in China. For this reason, we will be hosting just one huge international event for the next semester. We will resume our usual schedule next year.  

1. Fashion, Beauty & Creativity Unbound: China, Africa and the Multiple South: (26 September 2024). This is the first international workshop organised by the China Africa Fashion Power  in collaboration with the Global Africa Research Group. This international workshop will be organised in Kenya, and brings together academics, fashion designers, industry practitioners and artists to give their talks on: De-centring creativity; Global Africa as method; Brands, labels, and authenticity; African creative industries; Web3; Fashion supply chains; Creative resilience; Fast fashion; and AI and creative labour.

International Workshop details:

Date: Thursday 26 September, 2024

Time: 9:30-17:30 (East African Time EAT)

8:30-16:30 (Central European Summer Time CEST)

Venue: Nairobi Garage Spring Valley, 3^rd Floor, The Promenade, Nairobi Kenya and on Zoom

Registration for both in-person and online attendance (See QR code below).  

20+ academic researchers and creative industry practitioners will join the event, including:

David Avido (Kenyan fashion designer)

Prof. Yiu-Fai Chow (Hong Kong Baptist University)

Dr. Erica de Greef (African Fashion Research Institute)

Sunny Dolat (The Nest Collective)

Prof. Anthony Fung (Chinese University of Hong Kong)

Prof. Jeroen de Kloet (University of Amsterdam)

Siviwe James (South African fashion practitioner)

Dr. Tom McDonald (University of Hong Kong)

Prof. Patricia Pisters (University of Amsterdam)

Prof. Bin Shen (Donghua University) 

Dr. Nina Sylvanus (Northeastern University)

Dr. Tommy Tse (University of Amsterdam)

Fall 2023

Please contact Ms Fairuzah Atchulo (f.m.m.atchulo@uva.nl) if you would like to discuss your paper or with any contributions you may have.

Time schedule: The launch session will take place on Thursday 21 September 2023 from 2:00 – 4:30pm in Room D3.06, Buishuis-Oost-Inddisch Huis. Subsequent sessions will be organized on Friday (3:00-4:30pm) at BG1 Room 0.15, Turfdraagsterpad 9, 1012XT, Amsterdam (the ones organized by partner universities will be confirmed later).

1. The Fold: Fashioning K(New) Narrative Seminar (21 September 2023), keynote speakers are Dr. Erica de Greef and Mr. Lesiba Mabitsela; founders of the Africa Fashion Research Institute based in Cape Town (South Africa). Together, they will present their talk on The Fold, a decolonising project that brings the performative act of folding that which is folded away, into focus. This interest in African sartorial practices that involves folds and folding is shaped by an urgent inquiry to remember, rethink and rewrite African fashion histories, and a critical effort to shift perceptions of knowledge-makers and knowledge-making in fashion to the continent. The Fold encompasses three projects that explore notions of afro-sustainability as cultural resilience; folded fashions as archives of indigenous knowledge; and fold-words as languages of remembering, holding, hiding, encompassing, and expressing ideas and identities. Join us for an introduction to enfolded afrocentric research.
2. 17 November 2023. Reading session, work-in-progress sharing, led by Ms Fairuzah Atchulo (ERC PhD Researcher, UvA Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis), and Mr. Qidi Feng (ERC PhD Researcher, UvA Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis). Mr. Qidi and Ms Fairuzah are both researchers of the ERC China Africa Fashion Power Project. Ms Fairuzah is currently researching on the exclusion of African bodies in the sizing of Chinese and African online shopping platforms. Mr Qidi is currently researching on the exhibitions of Asian human hair in African malls, and on African bodies through the China-Kenyan hair trade, and the changes in definition of authenticity and cultural representation during this trade.
3. 2 February 2024. Brotherly Strangers: Kenya’s & Zambia’s Relations with China 1949-2019 Seminar, keynote speaker Dr. Jodie Sun.  Dr. Jodie Sun is a Senior Lecturer at Fudan University, and a Research Fellow at the University of the Free State, South Africa. She will present a talk based on her recent book Kenya's and Zambia's Relations with China 1949-2019.  Her talk will be on analysing and understanding China’s growing influence in the global South via Africa, and the impact of this historical relationship. Through the triangulation of the global Cold War, African history, and Chinese history, this study provides a detailed analysis of China-Africa relations in the second half of the 20th century. Examining the encounters, conflicts, and dynamics of China-Kenya/Zambia relations from the 1950s until the present, as well as the basis on which historical narratives have been constructed, the book presents two contrasting state perspectives underlining the concept of 'African agency'. 
4. 22 March 2024. Africa in Fashion Seminar, keynote speaker Mr. Ken Kweku Nimo.  Ken Kweku Nimo is a Ghanaian researcher and author who explores themes in African fashion, culture and textile heritage. His book Africa in Fashion: Luxury, Craft and Textile Heritage examines the evolution of fashion in Africa and the contemporary fashion design industry on the cusp of global relevance. He is currently a PhD researcher at the Africa Leadership Centre, King’s College London, where he researches African fashion under Leadership Studies on Security and Development. Ken’s talk will chart his research and publishing journey and examine his conceptualizations of fashion and Africa. He will also explore identity and meaning making through fashion, and fashion as visual language in mediation, contention and congruity between cultures in the Global South.
5. 17 May 2024. Seminar, keynote speaker still pending. To be organised by Leiden University
6. 21 June 2024. Seminar, keynote speaker still pending. To be organised by Leiden University