March 28, 2025 | Workshop: Ethnographies of Work in Africa
Venue: 208 Knox Hall (606 West 122nd Street)
Panel 1: Work, Mobility, and New Figures of Power | 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM
This panel explores work, mobility, and shifting power in African labor worlds, highlighting start-up cultures, bureaucratic navigation, coup-making, and ethics in informal transport.
Michaël Bourdon (Sciences Po) "Incarnations of Modernity at Work and New Figures of Success: Professional Ethos and the Re-enchantment of Work within a Togolese Start-up" / Jinny Prais (Columbia University) “Navigating Empire: Bureaucratic Labor, Mobility, and the Work of Aspiration in Colonial Nigeria” / Jesse Weaver Shipley (Dartmouth College) "Coupmaking as a Form of Labor" / Daniel Agbiboa (Harvard University) "Illegal, yet Licit: Popular Transport Work and the Ethics of Illegality in Lagos"
Panel 2: Trust, Morality, and Speculation in African Labor Worlds | 11:15 AM - 1:15 PM
This panel explores how labor intersects with trust, morality, spirituality, and speculation, highlighting inheritance, religious vocation, ecological precarity, and survival strategies in contemporary African contexts.
Rosalind Fredericks (New York University) “Salvaging Salvation: Spiritual Infrastructures of the Waste Commons” / Josiah Taru (Rice University) "Between a Calling and a Job": Pentecostal Clergy Narratives of Their Work / Maxim Bolt (Oxford University) "The Figure of the Fiduciary: The Work of Trust and Responsibility in South African Property Inheritance" / Anna Reumert (The New School for Social Research) "Speculations of Life and Death in Sudan"
Ethnographies of Work in Africa is a Columbia Alliance sponsored initiative uniting scholars from the United States, France, and Africa to explore the evolving nature of work and labor in contemporary Africa. Recognizing work as a foundational theme in African studies, the project seeks to understand emerging forms of work—such as those in cultural industries, digital start-ups, and informal economies—that defy traditional categorizations. It also critically examines precarious labor and its implications for African societies. By bridging historical and contemporary perspectives, the project interrogates long-standing analytical dichotomies, such as wage versus non-wage labor and formal versus informal sectors, while expanding the definition of work to include intellectual, cultural, political, and religious practices. Through ethnographic approaches and thematic workshops, this initiative sheds light on the ecosystems, infrastructures, and social dynamics that sustain diverse work worlds in Africa, aiming to reframe scholarly and policy-oriented conceptions of labor.
Sponsored by the Institute of African Studies, the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life, and the Alliance Program at Columbia University.