(r)Urban Africa: multidisciplinary approaches to the African city- Ghent University – 2 December 2011
Urban focus
The world is undergoing the largest wave of urban growth in its history. With the half of the world’s population living today in urban centers, urbanization (and rurbanization) has become one of the mayor challenges of this century. The fastest urban growth is taking place in sub-Sahara Africa. It is estimated that between 2005 and 2030, the urban population of sub-Saharan Africa will double. In this context, development programs have increasingly shifted their focus from the rural to the urban setting. For example, where ‘poverty’ has long been perceived as a mainly ‘rural’ phenomenon, development programs today have taken into account the fact that the majority of Africa’s poor people live in cities. Further, also academic research on Africa in general has gained an increasing urban focus, in all kinds of disciplines. The African city has become the scene of extensive anthropological literature, socio-political analyses and economic studies.
This conference takes the African city as its central focus and seeks to approach this African urban context from a wide range of thematic domains: political sciences and anthropology, linguistics and agriculture, history and medicine, etc…
For complete information: http://www.gap.ugent.be/callforpapers5
Paper proposals
Paper proposals (max. 300 words, in English or French) should be submitted before 1 September 2011 to the GAP secretariat (Gap@UGent.be), mentioning “GAPSYM5 – proposal”. By 1 October the scientific committee will notify which papers have been accepted.
Poster presentations
GAPSYM5 offers doctoral students and other researchers the opportunity to present their research projects by means of a poster. Posters do NOT have to refer to the theme of the symposium. Through these poster presentations GAP seeks to give an overview of all current, Africa-related projects and doctoral research at the Ghent University Association. Researchers who would like to submit a poster should also send in an abstract of this poster (before 1 September 2011). The posters (A0 format) should be delivered to the GAP secretariat (Dominique Godfroid, Department of Geography, Krijgslaan 281, S8, Ghent), by Monday, 28 November 2011.
Publication
The 2012 autumn edition of our international and peer-reviewed journal Afrika Focus will largely be devoted to the theme of GAPSYM5. Regular speakers as well as guest speakers are invited to submit their papers for publication in this special issue of Afrika Focus. The deadline for submitting the manuscript is 1 March 2012. If, after peer-review, the paper is accepted, it will be published by December 2012.
Guest institution — Université Cheikh Anta Diop, Dakar
Keynote speakers:
Abdou Salam Fall (Université Cheikh Anta Diop)
Jim Brennan (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Paul Hebinck (Wageningen University)
Scientific Committee — GAPSYM5
Luce Beeckmans, Sofie Boonen, Karen Buscher, Katrien De Graeve, Baz Lecocq, Gillian Mathys,
