CAS MA Graduates successfully competing for PhD positions in highly respected European universities
The Centre of African Studies is delighted that in the coming autumn (2018), three of our excellent former MA students will each be starting an Africa-related PhD in highly respected European universities, having been selected for these positions within in an extremely competitive academic environment. Read the reflections on their time at CAS, and the exciting PhD research plans, respectively of Joanna Woods (graduated 2013), Amanda Rasmussen (graduated 2015), and Rune Larsen (graduated 2017).
JOANNA WOODS
I completed my MA in African Studies at CAS in 2013, with a thesis entitled Negotiating the Idea of Home in Malawian Poetry. Since then I have gone on to explore the literary space in Malawi and Africa more broadly. Transitioning from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, where I completed my BA in African Studies, it was at CAS that I developed significant interdisciplinary interest within the study of Africa. My analytical and writing skills developed greatly while attending CAS, and the professional and personal networks built are as strong today as they were in 2013. Thanks to such networks, and the supervision I received at CAS, my thesis was published as a book by African publishers, Langaa RCPIG. I see it that CAS acted as one of the first fundamental stepping stones into my academic career.
Over the past year, I have been a Lecturer in the Department of English at Chancellor College, University of Malawi, while maintaining voluntary positions as Communications Editor for Africa in Words (AiW) – the online African Literature blog - and copyeditor for the publishing group Langaa RPCIG. Last month I was accepted as a PhD student in the English Department at Stockholm University, where I will be supervised by Professor Stefan Helgesson.
My doctoral research looks to investigate alternative worlds in speculative short stories from Nigeria, Uganda and Malawi written in English and published since 2010. Emerging out of my position at the University of Malawi, building on conversations with local writers and more recent engagement with African speculative fiction, I will be exploring mimetic reality within speculative short stories by Nnedi Okorafor and Eugene Odogwu (Nigeria), Dilman Dila and Acan Innocent Immaculate (Uganda), and Andrew Dakalira and Muthi Nhlema (Malawi). I argue that mimeticism manifests itself within the speculative text in Africa through a series of anxieties. Such a study is important for both the literary discipline and for understanding social imagination in the respective nation-states in Africa in the 21st Century.
AMANDA RASMUSSEN
I started my MA in African Studies at CAS in 2013. I remember being quite nervous, coming from a different discipline of religious studies and for the fact that I had not yet even been to Africa. However, CAS proved itself to be the platform from where a young and nervous MA student could be academically and personally challenged into becoming a curious and critical young researcher. Only by attending an academic milieu of fierce experts and curious students that engaged with and challenged ideas about the Africa continent and its position in our globalised world, was I capable of developing the strong passion, critical reasoning, and methodological skill-set needed to become a rigorous and hardworking – soon to be – PhD student.
With a thesis that explored the effects of a Danish NGO’s fishery development project in Somaliland, I finished my MA in African Studies in 2015. After graduating, I went to SOAS and undertook an MA in Social Anthropology and expanded further on my research about the fishery sector in Somaliland, while keeping in touch with my academic network at CAS. Afterwards, I returned to CAS to commence a research internship that helped me develop the necessary confidence, academic network, and knowledge of academic writing that assisted me in my efforts towards applying for a PhD. Further, together with Stig Jensen at CAS, functioning as an academic mentor, I cooperated on various academic ideas, including publishing a chapter on the development-security nexus in Somaliland. Once again, CAS proved itself to be a platform from where critical academic reasoning and fierce scholars where paired with an open-minded and supporting milieu towards young researchers like myself. Such support has been instrumental in me finding my right PhD fellowship.
In September 2018, I begin my PhD at Aarhus University in the School of Culture and Society – which by a fun coincidence is also abbreviated to ‘CAS’. My supervisor will be Associae Professor Michael Eilenberg. Under the current title Give an NGO a fisher, and you finance it for a day. Give an NGO a global fear of piracy, and you finance it for a lifetime?, my project sets out to investigate the local and global implications of the current trends of linking development, market, and security interests through fishery development projects and security interventions in the Somali waters.
RUNE LARSEN
I completed my MA at CAS in August 2017, with my Master’s thesis entitled Being a comrade: social positioning in the struggle for multi-party democracy in Swaziland (Supervisor: Associate Professor Amanda Hammar). During the MA program in African Studies at UCPH I developed both significant analytical skills within an interdisciplinary environment, and a deep contextual understanding of the African continent and Africanist scholarship. After my graduation I undertook a brief research internship at CAS which assisted me greatly in developing a strong network of academic and personal relations who all supported and assisted me in my efforts towards finding the right PhD fellowship. In general I consider CAS to have acted as an imperative factor in my path towards furthering my academic career.
Recently I have been accepted as an ESR PhD fellow at KU Leuven’s Institute for Anthropological Research in Africa, under the ANTHUSIA project, in joint collaboration with Aarhus University’s Department of Anthropology. My supervisors for this project will be professors Steven Van Wolputte (KU Leuven) and Morten Nielsen (Aarhus University).
The PhD project seeks to explore how unemployed and politically engaged educated youths in their everyday lives navigate socially within the urban spaces of Windhoek, Namibia. The project will analyze how this affects the way social solidarity is transformed and negotiated through different everyday practices of urban politics. It will also be investigated how unemployed youth politically engage with the remaining Namibian society, and how they position themselves in relation to the Namibian state - through open political engagements, as well as more subtle “everyday forms of resistance” as conceptualized by scholars such as Scott (1985) and Abu-Lughod (1990).
