Agricultural history has enjoyed a rebirth in recent years, in part because the agricultural enterprise promotes economic and cultural connections in an era that has become ever more globally focused, but also because of agriculture's potential to lead to conflicts over precious resources. History is replete with stories of armies standing or falling as a result of their supply of agriculturally produced commodities. Civilizations have likewise succumbed because of famine or crop-related pestilence, highlighting the critical nature of agriculture to both regional and global society. The importance and fragility of agricultural systems will come into much greater focus because of climate change in the twenty-first century, something farmers the world over have begun to reckon with. As its implications are manifested in droughts and floods that hamper crop production, urban people will become ever more conscious of their own reliance upon agriculture. The contemporary critical evaluation of agriculture reflects a transition from a framework that celebrated the positive aspects of the evolution of agriculture to one that also explores its negative implications, such as the emergence of intensive and extractive agriculture that has worked to the detriment of indigenous peoples and disrupted traditional political economies. The Oxford Handbook of Agricultural History reflects this rebirth and examines the wide-reaching implications of agricultural issues, bringing together the many historiographical traditions within geographic regions across the world that intersect either directly or indirectly in terms of agricultural history. Contributors to this volume include historians from around the world and specialists in European, American, African, Middle East, Russian, and Asian history. Essays touch on the green revolution, the development of the Atlantic slave plantation, the agricultural impact of the American Civil War, the rise of scientific and corporate agriculture, and modern exploitation of agricultural labor. The Oxford Handbook of Agricultural History is an essential volume for those interested in the myriad ways that agricultural systems affect our world.

The comparative analysis of three “contested truths” around COVID-19 in East Africa demonstrates that knowledge is a product of knotted, uneven, and disputed epistemological practices tied to structures of power. Lee, Meek, and Katumusiime examine: (1) the construction of a pan-African skepticism of COVID-19 that drew on anti-imperialist discourses; (2) social media posts through which Tanzanian digital publics critically evaluated steam inhalation as an alternative therapeutic for COVID-19; and (3) the resistance by many Ugandans to complying with public health measures such as lockdowns. “Contested truths” is used as an analytical framework to center the specificity and situatedness of truth-making in East Africa during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study examines recent developments of mobility patterns in West Africa within the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. A broad understanding of mobilities is applied to account for mobilities of people, goods and capital likewise. The aim is to track changes in mobility patterns caused by the pandemic and by institutional responses to the latter. The study may herein serve to encourage more in depth and comprehensive studies of the new (im)mobilities and the regimes that shape them. Embedding the subject of mobility changes into the political-economic framework of the networks of global capitalism and taking a perspective on the formative regimes, we develop first suppositions on how to apply the concept of (im)mobility regimes to assess the newly manifested (im)mobilisations. To shed light on the bigger picture of recent developments in Western Africa, this study tackles a wide range of mobility-related topics. At first, the epidemiological situation as well as the local testing regimes are analysed in order to assess the extent to which the pandemic is scientifically captured in Western Africa in contrast to other regions. By then providing a systematic outline of the lockdown policies of the individual ECOWAS member states, a first approach to the formative regimes can be given. The manifest new (im)mobilities of people are then evaluated with a focus on public transport, migratory movements and public air travel. Thereafter, the (im)mobilities of goods are discussed with a special focus on maritime freight mobilities. Finally, (im)mobilities of capital are dealt with in order to address changes and constants in the context of COVID-19, for example in the realm of remittances. Overall, this provides a first basis for a multi-dimensional understanding of the emerging phenomena in the ECOWAS region.

In this article I aim to contribute to a more multifaceted picture of what decolonising education can mean. I do this in the form of a case study of selected and intertwined Bolivian–German discourses and practices directed at the decolonisation of education in the wide sense of the term. First, I introduce Indigenist and ‘Indianist’ proposals, which are shaped, not least, by Nietzschean ideas. In a second step, I turn to some examples of German ‘Bildungsromane’ that are deeply entangled with Bolivian phenomena. Hence, the first part of the article is about decolonising the formerly colonised via education, whereas the second revolves around decolonising the former colonisers, but without the possibility for or the wish to identify completely clear-cut boundaries. It will thus become clearer how decolonising education can be understood as a relational phenomenon.

Entre as décadas de 1960 e 1970, na esteira das lutas anti-coloniais em África, vê-se surgir através do cinema a possibilidade de construção de uma identidade africana e uma autonomia cultural e política do continente. A linguagem cinematográfica configurou-se, naquele momento, numa ferramenta de discurso diante da dificuldade de escrita da História. A câmara, assim, tornou-se uma arma para a denúncia da impotência da classe política africana e, além disso, um meio para a reivindicação de uma imagem descolonizada do continente. Neste artigo, problematizo os conceitos de identidade, tradição e modernidade no contexto pós-independência africana, conforme a representação do filme Xala (1975) do cineasta-escritor senegalês Ousmane Sembène. Além disso, discuto os aspectos que possibilitaram a construção de um imaginário de superação da colonização e a articulação discursiva dessa tendência cinematográfica em torno da desejada revolução social em África.

Since July 2019, the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth has been funding a project dedicated to the creation of an Islamic Cultural Archive (ICA), a database designed for collaborative research in English, French and Arabic connecting researchers based in Germany and four African countries. The ICA project pursues individual but interconnected studies revolving around Islamic learning in Africa. Supported by IT specialists, we develop a digital platform that meets the related requirements. The ICA seeks to develop new approaches to the handling of data through establishing an ontology-based digital research environment building on WissKI, a set of modules that extends the content management system Drupal with semantic web technology. The chapter sheds light on the technical implications of our endeavor to connect diverse alphabets and data from various digital and digitized media. The research team members connect their diverse data sets to create synergies between various research foci and interests, ranging from the nexus of Islamic knowledge production, dissemination, and acquisition to the socio-religious, political-economic, and cultural dimensions of Islamic learning. The chapter shows how our system allows us to collect and archive different types of data, generate metadata through an ontology, and connect data beyond language barriers. Most notably, our data description method links the data through multilayered and multilingual tags, as well as through comprehensive cross-references, thus constituting an innovative way of data handling that can benefit researchers in Islamic Studies as well as cultural and literary studies more broadly.

This dissertation contributes to the understanding of three pertinent developmental challenges in sub-Saharan Africa, namely education, geography, and trade. More specifically, it presents three independent and self-contained chapters which analyze these factors from a micro-level perspective, in turn. After a brief introduction in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 re-visits the role of physical geography in economic development. In particular, it employs a large-scale geo-referenced household-level survey covering 28 sub-Saharan African countries over 20 years to analyze the previously established link between coastal access and individual living standards. Analyzing individual-level data allows to expand on the insights from cross-country and cross-regional contexts and also facilitates the analysis of potential channels. The results show that individuals living further away from the coast are significantly poorer, as measured along a breadth of welfare indicators, such as basic consumption (water, food, medical care), possession of various consumer durables, or having paid employment. The chapter highlights the role of human capital, urbanization as well as infrastructural endowments in explaining the identified within-country differences in individual economic welfare. Chapter 3 investigates the effect of education on women's fertility and contributes to a growing literature which analyzes this nexus via quasi-experimental methods. Specifically, it leverages Burundi's Free Primary Education Policy of 2005 to identify exogenous variation in schooling via a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) and analyzes the outcomes affected by schooling through an instrumental variable (IV) approach. The results confirm the negative relationship between schooling and fertility observed in other developing settings. However, contrary to extant studies, the chapter provides novel evidence on a differential treatment effect of education. While poor women profit from policy-induced education in terms of increases in literacy, remunerated employment opportunities as well as a reduction in teenage births, none of these effects of additional education are observed for women from the wealthier households of our sample. The evidence of such a marked heterogeneity helps to evaluate under which conditions the literature’s previous findings may generalize. Chapter 4 evaluates the distributional effects of trade liberalization in Africa by combining the spatial considerations of regional market integration with a household-level analysis. The chapter thereby treats the re-establishment of the East African Community (EAC) in 2001 as a regional policy intervention having differential effects on individual households governed by their geo-spatial location within the countries. This prediction is derived from an extension to a canonical New Economic Geography (NEG) developed in the chapter. Contrary to the model’s prediction, the empirical results drawn from a difference-in-differences (DiD) approach do not reveal relative welfare increases in regions closer to internal EAC borders. Rather, the results provide evidence of strengthened agglomeration tendencies in the pre-existing economic hubs of Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and Kampala, as measured by an increase in consumption and population density.

Wie selbstverständlich es in Deutschland geworden ist, dass alle Kinder eine Schule besuchen, zeigen die Schul- und Kitaschließungen während der Corona-Pandemie. Dass Kinder den ganzen Tag zu Hause sind, ist eine ungewohnte Situation für viele Haushalte und beeinträchtigt den Arbeitsalltag ihrer Eltern. Im Gegensatz dazu ist es in anderen gesellschaftlichen Kontexten selbstverständlich, dass Kinder die Arbeit ihrer Eltern begleiten und selbst mitarbeiten. Die Durchsetzung einer allgemeinen Schulpflicht und ein Verbot von Kinderarbeit stellt diese Haushalte vor Herausforderungen.

During the armed struggle, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) supported women's liberation and appointed women to several political, logistical, and military positions. Meanwhile, in colonial society, changes in economic activities, access to formal education, and urban sociability resulted in a more significant female presence in public spaces. After independence, women's liberation rose to prominence in a context of internal conflict and economic disruption. The new government promoted the “New Man” and a host of associated social personae, all of which were defined by a set of moral qualities individuals were expected to comply with if they wanted to qualify as legitimate actors in the making of independent Angola. Women ought to engage in “National Reconstruction” by joining the Organization of Angolan Women (OMA), which focused on literacy and hygienist campaigns aimed at fighting “obscurantism”. However, many urban women had their own agendas, which called for changes in gender roles in both public and domestic realms. This paper seeks to highlight the shifting gender patterns in Luanda and rural guerrilla zones during the late colonial period, and then analyze how, after independence, different groups of women conceived their place in the building of the new nation, and how the State tried to “domesticate” the possibilities of women's activism as such, in symbolic as well as practical ways.

Founded five years ago, DjumbaiALA is a network committed to enhancing intercultural conversations and a non-hierarchical co-production of knowledge in the Global South. Diverse researchers, artists and activists from Latin America, Africa and Europe are contributing to this cause.

Eine funktionierende Wissenschaftskommunikation außerhalb des akademischen Feldes stellt gerade bei Kooperationen mit benachteiligten Bevölkerungsgruppen im Globalen Süden eine herausfordernde Notwendigkeit dar. Dahingehend bedarf es nicht nur ausreichender Open-Access-Zugangsmöglichkeiten, sondern ebenso sach- und zielgruppengerechter Übersetzungen, welche sowohl sprachliche, als auch soziokulturelle und wissensbasierte Deutungsbarrieren überwinden. Das Projekt "DjumbaiALA: Dialoge afrikanischer und afro-diasporischer Wissensformen im multimedialen Zeitalter" ermöglicht die Durchführung eines Workshops in Salvador da Bahia (Brasilien), der Nachwuchswissenschaftler*innen und Expert*innen aus den Bereichen digitales Design, Performance und Afrikastudien vereint. Als deutsch-brasilianisches Kooperationsprojekt zielt das Vorhaben darauf ab, das erste multimediale E-Book des transdisziplinären Netzwerks DjumbaiALA zu produzieren, um innovative Wege in der digitalen Wissenschaftskommunikation einzuschlagen. Durch die kollaborative Erschaffung dieses Prototyps werden institutionelle Partnerschaften gefestigt, auf deren Grundlage künftig weitere multimediale E-Books erstellt werden sollen. Indem Textelemente auf kreative Weise mit audiovisuellen Inhalten verknüpft und in unterschiedlichen Sprachen bereitgestellt werden, erhöht sich die Sichtbarkeit und Reichweite von sozial- und geisteswissenschaftlichen Forschungsergebnissen. Die Originalität des Projektes besteht insbesondere darin, dass mittels der multimedialen DjumbaiALA Books ein Wissensaustausch auf Augenhöhe zwischen dem Globalen Norden und Süden angestrebt wird. So können nachhaltige Lösungen für globale Herausforderungen erarbeitet werden.

Situated at the crossroads of pragmatics and interactional linguistics, the aim of the present working paper is to sketch a theoretical framework that is able to capture the linguistic and communicative facets of everyday moralities. Based on a phenomenological, constructivist and dynamic understanding which is informed by recent sociological and anthropological research, the case is made that moralities are best conceptualized as an interactional achievement, in other words, as ‘doing ethics’. Moreover, it is argued that communication plays a major role in doing ethics. Hence, moralities are explored in relation with language. The focus is on everyday moral communication and, in particular, on the verbal means and communicative practices conventionally used to signal moral meanings. The main purpose is to flesh out a conceptualization of doing ethics which opens up this domain for pragmatic and interactional approaches. Thus, theoretical considerations are prevalent in the working paper.

Situated at the crossroads of pragmatics and interactional linguistics, the aim of the present working paper is to sketch a theoretical framework that is able to capture the linguistic and communicative facets of everyday moralities. Based on a phenomenological, constructivist and dynamic understanding which is informed by recent sociological and anthropological research, the case is made that moralities are best conceptualized as an interactional achievement, in other words, as ‘doing ethics’. Moreover, it is argued that communication plays a major role in doing ethics. Hence, moralities are explored in relation with language. The focus is on everyday moral communication and, in particular, on the verbal means and communicative practices conventionally used to signal moral meanings. The main purpose is to flesh out a conceptualization of doing ethics which opens up this domain for pragmatic and interactional approaches. Thus, theoretical considerations are prevalent in the working paper.

Este escrito narra el sentido que denota el sistema simbólico de la población negra del Chocó (Colombia) conectado con el territorio biogeográfico. A través de una exploración etnográfica, se muestra cómo la espiritualidad teje las prácticas ancestrales (religiosas, ecoculturales, de funebria y de ritmos musicales) con las identidades de los chocoanos, visibilizadas en su muntu, es decir, en su fuerza vital para revitalizar y recrear el mundo-vida en su territorio.

From early 1944 until 1946, more than 25,000 refugees from Yugoslavia, mostly from the Dalmatian coast and islands, stayed in refugee camps in Egypt at El Shatt. Located on the shores of the Suez Canal, this complex of tented camps on desert sands was jointly run by the British military, Yugoslav Partisans and international humanitarian organizations. After the war, most of the refugees returned to their homes and only a five-pointed star-shaped cemetery overlooked by the statue of a grieving Mother remained on the spot. This article shows that unlike most refugee camps, El Shatt was not forgotten after its closure, but instead memorialized from the very beginning. Based on extensive research in United Nations, British and Croatian archives, we ask how the camps in El Shatt were memorialized in changing circumstances from their closure to today. How was their memory integrated into dominant historical narratives and practices, and what roles did local, intimate individual and family experiences and practices play in this? Reasons for not forgetting El Shatt start with the extraordinary documentation of these camps because they stood at the beginning of the UN-centred international humanitarian regime and the founding of Socialist Yugoslavia. For the continuous memorialization, however, it was important that the refugees returned as a large group to Dalmatia, the same region where they had come from. The local communities of memories provided the foundation for the abundant movement and communication of memories of El Shatt across different registers, spaces, genres, times and media.

Indigenous communities such as the Misak people in Colombia continue to struggle against the consequences of colonization and violence, but at the same time, they propose emancipatory methodologies of knowledge production. These practices towards epistemic justice are crucial to assure the (re)existence of indigenous peoples and their wisdom in Abya Yala. In this vein, our article sheds light on research methodologies rooted in Misak cosmogonies and processes to validate ancestral knowledge production. Through ethnographic and participatory action research in the indigenous reserve of Shura Manéla in the Colombian Cauca Department, we got insight into the spiral of persistent existence (espiral de pervivencia) and the law of origin of the Misak people. On this basis, we describe the Latá-Latá methodology reinvented by the community to recover their ancestral knowledge, and the Pachakiwa social cartography applied to depict their territorial relations. Moreover, we explain how collective validation processes work in practice. This serves to open up a transdisciplinary discussion on the potentials and the limitations of such vernacular research methodologies. We observe that healing from the trauma of colonization and inferiorization is a key driver of indigenous research processes. Therefore, developing further emancipatory methodologies based on equal subject-subject relations is an urgent task in the field of decoloniality. Learning from communities like the Misak is an invitation to become aware of the pluriversal complexity, listen to silenced sagacity, and find methods to pursue epistemic equality.

Documents on the social media platform Twitter are formulated in short and simple style, instead of being written extensively and elaborately. Further, the core message of a post is often encoded into characteristic phrases called hashtags. These hashtags illustrate the semantics of a post or tie it to a specific topic. In this paper, we propose multiple approaches of using hashtags and their surrounding texts to improve topic modeling of short texts. We use transfer learning by applying a pre-trained word embedding of hashtags to derive preliminary topics. These function as supervising information, or seed topics and are passed to Archetypal LDA (A-LDA), a recent variant of Latent Dirichlet Allocation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach using a large corpus of posts exemplarily on Twitter. Our approaches improve the topic model's qualities in terms of various quantitative metrics. Moreover, the presented algorithms used to extract seed topics can be utilized as form of lightweight topic model by themselves. Hence, our approaches create additional analytical opportunities and can help to gain a more detailed understanding of what people are talking about on social media. By using big data in terms of millions of tweets for preprocessing and fine-tuning, we enable the classification algorithm to produce topics that are very coherent to the reader.