The generation of translocal and transnational spaces through women groups,
activists, development workers and academics has been going on in various
fields, and the panel seeks to draw attention and analyse the cohesive and
reshaping power which is often overseen by development policies and research.
The panel will draw on empirical studies to analyse interfaces between these
partly overlapping and sometimes fragmented translocal spheres of activism
public arenas that contribute importantly to the emergence of new transnational
pubic arena in and beyond Africa.
Contributions to the panel will discuss social organizational structures such as
self-help initiatives aiming at the protection of natural resources; local
grassroots organizations revising conventional developmentalist agendas;
regional networking initiatives drawing on the Beijing platform; and
transnational forms of religious revival and mobilization and diversity of
feminisms.
Theoretical debate will focus on questions of recent reconfigurations of the
public sphere in Africa, and how the changing interconnections between “state”
and “society” as well as of social cohesion allow actors and organizations to
negotiate new visions of political community and the common good; what new
structures of sociality, activism, and knowledge production emerge; and in what
ways these new spaces for action and room for manoeuvre call into question
conventional categories of social and political analysis, such as the concept of
civil society.
