SPP 1448:  Adaptation and Creativity in Africa - Technologies and Significations in the Production of Order and Disorder

• Subject Area: Humanities ; Construction Engineering and Architecture ; Geosciences ; Social and Behavioural Sciences
• Term: from 2011 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 128797734

The African continent and its role in the world are changing again. Political and economic liberalisation, changing state-society relations, new local and translocal dynamics as well as accelerated processes of globalisation are posing wide-ranging challenges. Africa is witnessing one of the most precarious periods in its post-colonial time: new distributions of sovereignty and forms of ordering are negotiated at various levels. The capacities of African societies to navigate these changes are crucial, yet the determinants of these capacities are heavily under-researched.
The Priority Programme addresses the key question of how actors in post-colonial Africa deal with the multiple challenges they are facing by mobilising and transforming their institutional capacities of adaptation and creativity. Particular attention is being paid to the role of technologies and systems of signification in the production of order and disorder. The main goal of the research programme is an empirically informed theoretical discussion and clarification of the relation between adaptation and creativity. The Priority Programme has four structural aims: (1) to contribute to the understanding of what determines the capacity for adaptation and creativity in Africa in view of fundamental new challenges in various arenas; (2) to promote cooperation between academics from different disciplines in African studies in Germany and across different institutions of teaching and/or research in the humanities and social sciences; (3) based on the common research agenda and the networking of academics, to create an enabling framework for the development of a common vocabulary among representatives of different disciplines in African studies in Germany; (4) to increase the visibility of Germany-based African studies throughout Africa and in countries with an established tradition of African studies (such as France, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, the United States and Portugal), but also in those countries, which play an increasing role in Africa (such as Brazil, China, India and Russia).
It does so by facilitating innovative, interdisciplinary research and by promoting research approaches, which are promising to take African agency serious.

• DFG Programme: Priority Programmes
• International Connection: Chad, Netherlands, Niger, Switzerland

Projects

• African Political Cultures: A Comparative Study in Guinea-Bissau, Libya, South Africa, and Zambia (Applicants Klute, Georg ;  Macamo, Elisio Salvado )
• Changing stateness in Africa: Ghana, Ethiopia and Mozambique compared (Applicants Engel, Ulf ;  Macamo, Elisio Salvado ;  Middell, Matthias )
• Coordination Funds (Applicants Engel, Ulf ;  Rottenburg, Richard )
• Creativity and Constraint on African State Boundaries (Applicant Dobler, Gregor )
• "Festivalisation" of Urban Governance: The Production of Socio-Spatial Control in the Context of the FIFA World Cup 2010 in South Africa (Applicant Haferburg, Christoph )
• Global Micro in the Making: The Marketization of Weather Index Insurance for Agriculture in Africa (Applicant Boeckler, Marc )
• Oil and Social Change in Niger and Chad: An Anthropological Cooperative Research Project on Technologies, Signification and Processes of Creative Adaption in Relation to African Oil Production (Applicant Schareika, Nikolaus )
• Refugee Camp. History of a Humanitarian Technology (Applicant Glasman, Joël )
• Refugee Repatriation and Local Politics in Angola: Conflict and Creativity Following the Return of Chiefs and Party Functionaries (Applicant Inhetveen, Katharina )
• Roadside and Travel Communities. Towards an Understanding of the African Long-Distance Road (Applicant Beck, Kurt )
• The Anthropology of Transnational Crime Control: The War against Drugs, Combating Human Trafficking, and the Fight against Counterfeit Medications (Applicant Kirsch, Thomas G. )
• The Life of Files Extended and Overlapping Logics (Applicant Schlichte, Klaus )
• The Local Arena of Power Sharing. Patterns of Adaptation or Continued Disorder (Applicant Mehler, Andreas )
• Translating Global Health Technologies. Accounting and Testing in health care provision in Uganda and Rwanda (Applicants Beisel, Ulrike ;  Rottenburg, Richard )
• Translating the networked city: adaptation and creativity in urban infrastructures in Africa (Applicants Baumgart, Sabine ;  Monstadt, Jochen )
• Translations of the 'adaptation to climate change' paradigm in Eastern Africa (Applicants Bollig, Michael ;  Doevenspeck, Martin ;  Müller-Mahn, Detlef )
• West African Traders as Translators Between Chinese and African Urban Modernities (Applicants Giese, Karsten ;  Marfaing, Laurence )

• Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Richard Rottenburg
• Deputy: Professor Dr. Ulf Engel