16thgeneralassembly.codesria.org16th CODESRIA General Assembly

16th GA Programme About Speakers Contact Us Check your abstract status English Submit your Full Paper Submit 4 to 8 December 2023 The Social Sciences and ‘Pandemics’ in Africa Date From 4 to 8 December 2023 Speakers Will be available later Remaining Submissions Location Dakar, Senegal The 16th General Assembly will be started in 0 0 Days 0 0 Hours 0 0 Minutes 0 0 Seconds Plenary Session 11: Nurturing the Next Generation Plenary Session 10: Implementing a Pan-African Scientific Agenda Plenary Session 9: Governing the Council: Reflections by Former Presidents of CODESRIA Plenary Session 8 : CODESRIA: Origin and Agenda - Solidarity Speech from H. Thoko Didiza Plenary Session 7: Militarisms in Contemporary Africa Plenary Session 6: Panel - Gender and Pandemic Experiences Plenary Session 5: Panel - Social Policy Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic: Lessons from Africa Planery Session 4: Panel - Higher Education, Agency and Inequalities: Perspectives on Pandemics Planery Session 3: Panel - Legacies of the Other ‘Pandemics’: A Case for Reparations Plenary Session 2 - The Social Sciences and Humanities in Times of Disruption: Grounding the Debate Plenary Session 1 - Claude Ake Presidential Lecture Opening Ceremony: Welcoming Speeches & Solidarity Messages Book Exhibition Programme Self-sponsored participants : Executive Secretary Declaration With less than a month to go until the 16th General Assembly, tune in as CODESRIA’s Executive Secretary, Dr Godwin Murunga, shares an update on the planning and provides a broad overview of the programme for the #CODESRIA2023GA Call for Abstracts and Papers ... The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) will hold its 16 th General Assembly in Dakar, Senegal from 4 to 8 December 2023 . The Council has selected the theme ‘ The Social Sciences and Pandemics” in Africa ’ for this edition of its triennial General Assembly . The Assembly combines an academic conference with a business meeting where CODESRIA members discuss, among other things, the work of the Council and those in good standing” elect a new Executive Committee. This edition of the Assembly will also coincide with the 50 th anniversary of the founding of the Council. This Assembly comes, too, at a time defined, at a global level, by the COVID-19 pandemic. Beyond the biomedical significance of COVID-19, the pandemic represents an epistemic moment, one with major implications for knowledge production globally, and specifically for Africa. It is a moment pregnant with possibilities for making sense of scholarship and how its course has been fundamentally shaped and reshaped by intellectual labour. It is a moment when scholarship in the social sciences and humanities is grappling with significant changes in society at the sociopolitical and economic levels. Not only are major global powers experiencing serious economic challenges, but there is a reckoning taking place in the political realm. The democratic experiment has been weakened by an aggressive, conservative and nativistic backlash in the heartland of liberal democracies. The social realities and consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic and the fiscal demands it has imposed on economies now manifest in a global economic downturn and a political retaliation against democracy in some parts of the world that all raise important questions for the social sciences and humanities. This disruption invites a rethinking of methodologies of comprehending the rapid changes in society and whether these shifts herald any major transitions or transformation in society. At the heart of the myth of origin of the pandemic are two versions: that the virus emerged as an unintended consequence of a research process gone wrong or that it was deliberately fabricated by scientists. Of course, there is the additional version that it was a species transfer from a wild animal to humans. Whichever way one looks at it, the intense focus on the origin of the virus (that is, the ‘moment of original sin’), important as it may be, offers little space for exploring the more fundamental challenges that the virus unleashed. It occludes a more critical focus on the global spread in general and, most importantly for us, the impact on Africa. Worse, the spread of the virus has occasionally been held hostage by another ‘pandemic’: the unending contestation for the ‘truth of the matter’, which is mired in a deluge of unverified suppositions and speculations. These have significantly influenced the subsequent narrative of the pandemic, demarcated its contours and impeded progress in its control and prevention. Even in the proliferation of the ‘pandemic’ of ‘fake news’, some significant, even uncomfortable, questions have been raised about histories of unethical scientific research, the implications of scientific inquiry in mass atrocities, and the exploitation and abuse of certain populations around the world in the name of science. There is also the issue of the role of Big Pharma, which eventually connects to the drive for superprofits from the prevailing health and medical challenges. Knowledge production grounded in the race to invent cures and vaccines and to understand societal responses to the outbreak has spearheaded the quest for a ‘return to normal’. All these dynamics have played out against the background of intense debates over the authority of science and the legitimacy of the knowledge producer. While for some the knowledge producers carry hope in a time of boundless despair, for others they are a siren luring the world down a dystopian path. This pandemic has thus been marked by tantalising prospects for the reordering of knowledge production. Quandaries, including pandemic denialism, have compelled an acknowledgement of the role that the social sciences and humanities can play in making sense of the dynamics of the pandemic, including dealing with disease outbreaks and shedding light on the multifaceted nature of its spread, mutation and effects. However, the social sciences and humanities are still often perceived as subsidiaries to STEM – areas of study worth invoking only when the natural and biological sciences arrive at a dead end. The need to fundamentally understand the pandemic as a sociopolitical reality instead of a biomedical one persists. This calls for a fundamental rethinking of the enduring problematic compartmentalisation of fields of knowledge, and to breach disciplinary boundaries through interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary frameworks. The evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic in Africa, with lower-than-expected case and fatality numbers, puzzled the world. The Economist , for example, expressing doubt over the death toll reported by African countries, went into modelling mode and reached the conclusion that the estimated number of global deaths was at least 2.1 to 3.8 times more than official figures. Not only are we terribly unsure of the numbers of fatalities that have resulted from COVID-19 globally, the multiplicity of hypotheses proposed to make sense of this situation deserve exploration. Still, we know enough to argue that those widespread expectations that the pandemic would evolve in Africa in ways very different from the path it took urge a rededication to the task of interrogating the persistent scholarly and public sphere representation of the continent as a place of lack, disaster, incompetence and helplessness. The actual outcome forces a rethinking of the tendency to view the pandemic primarily through the lens of biomedicine to thinking about it using the metaphor of disruption. This in turn has ushered in a new way of looking at the future: rather than a ‘return to normal’ there is now increased emphasis on moving into ‘a new normal’. This is an acknowledgement that, underneath the disruption and discontinuity that has characterised the pandemic in deeply intimate spheres as well as those that are very public, the old ingenuity and adaptive mechanisms with which...