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: All Global Africa seminar events for this semester will be held in Room 0.16, BG1 Turfdraagsterpad 9, Amsterdam, from 3:00-4:30pm on 12th September 2025 and 21st November 2025. In addition to our seminar sessions for this academic semester, we will also be organizing an in-person skills seminar course on turning a dissertation into a manuscript for publication on 11 September 2025 for all those interested in turning their dissertations into book manuscripts for publications. 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
Thursday 11th September 2025 (0.16 BG1): How to write a Book manuscript
Speaker will be Alf Gunvald Nilsen (University of Pretoria)
Registration: https://uva.fra1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_aWw1HrNSLFZIzZA
Alf Gunvald Nilsen will give a course titled ‘How to Turn Your PhD Dissertation into a Book’. He is the director of the Centre for Asian Studies in Africa at the University of Pretoria, where he also works as a professor in the Department of Sociology. His research focuses on the politics and political economy of democracy and development in the global South, with a particular focus on Asia. He is the author and co-author of multiple books, such as Dispossession and Resistance in India: The River and the Rage (Routledge, 2010), We Make Our Own History: Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism (Pluto Press, 2014), Adivasis and the State: Subalternity and Citizenship in India's Bhil Heartland (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and most recently Southern Interregnum: Remaking Hegemony in Brazil, India, China, and South Africa (Manchester University Press, 2025).
Description of Skills seminar course:
Publishing your first book is a major milestone in an academic career in the humanities. A key starting point for your first book project is your doctoral dissertation. However, the journey from a text written to earn a PhD to a text that is publishable as a book can be a challenging one. In this workshop and mentoring scheme, we will discuss how early career researchers can best navigate this journey, addressing questions such as:
- What are the key differences between a PhD thesis and an academic book, and how do I get from one to the other?
- How do I identify a relevant publishing house for my book project, and how do I establish contact and communicate with editors?
- What are publishers looking for in a book project, and how do I develop a convincing book proposal?
- Once a book contract is in hand, what are the major steps towards the completion of my project?
Friday 12 September 2025 (0.16 BG1): Hegemonic Trajectories in the Global South
Speaker is Alf Gunvald Nilsen (University of Pretoria)
Dr. Alf Gunvald Nilsen will give a talk titled ‘On the Southern Interregnum: Hegemonic Projects in a Turbulent Conjuncture’. The session will be moderated by Dr.Tommy Tse (University of Amsterdam)
How do goverrning elites in the global South attempt to remake hegemony in a conjuncture of durable crisis? This is the question at the core of this talk, which draws on the forthcoming book Southern Interregnum to explore how political and economic elites across emerging powers in the global South work to reconcile accumulation and legitimation at a moment when significant geoeconomic and geopolitical transformations intersect with deepening precarity and widespread popular protest. Grounded in a Gramscian approach, the argument is developed through a comparative conjunctural analysis of recent political trajectories in Brazil, India, China, and South Africa.
Friday 21 November 2025 (0.16 BG1): Histories and Materialities of Second-Hand Clothes
Speakers are Mwangi Mwaura (University of Oxford) and Jiaying Tu (University of Amsterdam). The session will be moderated by Fairuzah Munaaya Atchulo (UvA).
Mwangi Mwaura will give a talk titled ‘Reading/Intuiting Cloth Tags: Second-hand Clothes Materiality, Ecological Harms and Creative Market Survivance in Gikomba Market, Nairobi’.
This presentation will explore the embodied knowledge of traders at Nairobi’s Gikomba market, focusing on how second-hand clothes are sorted and categorised from bales, informing both their market value and whether they are upscaled, downscaled, or discarded. And how the materiality of the clothes —whether they are made of polyester, cotton, linen, etc.— is felt through embodied knowledges and determines the use of the item. In the process, the traders recognise and articulate the ecological harms of various items and decide which one needs to be up-scaled and how. Mwangi Mwaura is a Kenyan Rhodes Scholar currently a DPhil (PhD) student in Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford. Mwangi’s ethnographic research is on second-hand clothes in the UK and Nairobi, Kenya. He has previously and continues to explore and write on other aspects of urbanism, particularly on urban infrastructures, demolitions, and urban habitation in various Nairobi neighbourhoods.
Jiaying Tu will give a talk titled ‘From China to Africa: The Hidden Histories and Global Networks of Second-hand Clothes’. This presentation explores the hidden histories and global networks behind the flow of second-hand clothes from China to African markets. It traces the story from Africa’s colonial/post-colonial clothing trade patterns and market liberalization to China’s transformation from an importer of second-hand clothes to one of the world’s largest apparel producers and exporters - now also of second-hand clothes. Jiaying Tu is currently a PhD student at the Media Studies Department, University of Amsterdam, also affiliated with the China Africa Fashion Power project. Her research studies the cultural economy of second-hand clothing (SHC) consumption in Ghana and how its SHC market is implicated in the global production networks led by China. Specifically, the project seeks to examine how SHC consumption unfold and evolve in the Ghanian context and its respective development intervened by “Made in/(From) China”, initiating discussions on the global circular economies and the sustainable development of Africa's local industries.
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, 14th February 2025, 28th March 2025, 11th April 2025, and 20th June 2025. The event for Friday 14th 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 3rd 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)
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).