RSVP on Registration Form to receive the Zoom details.

Email vanessak@uj.ac.za if you encounter problems.

What happens when the struggles for human dignity, liberation and freedom from the imperial-colonialism is thought in term of African political thought and not reduced to and explained away as ‘African violent resistance’? This Actuvirtual Symposium engages with Stephen Chan’s book, African Political Thought: An Intellectual History of the Quest for Freedom (Hurst 2021).

Chair

Fazil Moradi, JIAS, LOST,Sci-Tech Asia

Reginald M. J. Oduor, Senior Lecturer, University of Nairobi

Shobana Shankar, Associate Professor, Stony Brook University

Stephen Chan, Professor, SOAS, University of London

Anthony Bogues, Professor, Brown University

Anthony Bogues is Asa Messer Professor of Humanities and Critical Theory and Africana Studies, and Director of Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice at Brown University. Professor Bogues is also a Visiting Professor & Curator at University of Johannesburg and Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. He is the author / editor of 8 books.

 Stephen Chan OBE is Professor of World Politics at SOAS University of London. He has advised governments, opposition leaders and liberation movements in many parts of Africa, and negotiated on the African side of delegations to Beijing. His 36 books include Spear to the West, published by Hurst – as was African Political Thought.

 Reginald M.J. Oduor is currently Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Nairobi, and the first person with total visual disability to be appointed to a substantive teaching position in a public university in Kenya. Over the past thirty-one years, he has lectured philosophy in five universities (two full-time, three part-time). He has special interests in African philosophy, political philosophy, ethics, the rights of persons with disabilities, and philosophy of religion. He has published a number of journal articles and book reviews. He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the New Series of Thought and Practice: A Journal of the Philosophical Association of Kenya from 2009 to 2015. Together with Drs. Oriare Nyarwath and Francis Owakah, he has edited the volume, Odera Oruka in the Twenty-First Century (RVP 2018).

Shobana Shankar is Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook University. She is the author of Who Shall Enter Paradise? Christian Origins in Muslim Northern Nigeria, c. 1890–1975; and co-editor of Religions on the Move! and Transforming Africa’s Religious Landscapes: The Sudan Interior Mission (SIM), Past and Present.

Artwell Nhemachena is a Research Fellow at the University of South Africa, a visiting Associate Professor at Kobe University and he is a lecturer at the University of Namibia. He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cape Town. He has published over 18 books and over 80 book chapters and journal articles in the areas of security, environment, development, sociology and social anthropology of science and technology studies, relational ontologies and decoloniality.

 Fazil Moradi is a Research Fellow at Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study – University of Johannesburg, where he is also the organizer of the Actuvirtual Symposium, a Research Associate at the Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences, an Affiliate Scholar at the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, Graduate Studies, Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, Graduate Center – CUNY, New York, and a fellow LOST; Sci-Tech Asia Research Network; and Refugee Outreach & Research Network. Dr Moradi has been a researcher at Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, and works together with medical scientists on the long-term impacts of chemical warfare agents at Sahlgrenska Academy – University of Gothenburg in Sweden. Some of his publications appear in: British Medical Journal, Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies, Critical Studies, PLOS ONE, Genocide Studies International,

CODESRIA, Routledge, Rutgers University Press, and Praesens Verlag.