Scenes of South Africa's Fight for Freedom and
Democracy 1994 ... as seen through the eyes of the
renowned photojournalist — Leonard Freed

About the Talk:

Modern African food markets are in transition, and MSU researchers, are working with their collaborators to understand the changes, the effects those changes have on the economy, and on diets of urban and rural populations. Demographic changes underpin many of the changes, with migration and urban population growth as well as rising incomes.  Even in rural areas, Africans are buying and eating more processed foods. How can markets transition to continue to meet the demands with local and regional production, marketing and processing?

On the consumption side, shifts in demand may be contributing to increasing threats to health from malnutrition, with nutrient deficiencies, over nutrition, and lack of dietary diversity. Legumes provides one example where reversing the negative consumption trends are tied to a series of investments from breeding to storage to processing, to marketing, and finally to home preparation and consumption. Shifts in the legume food systems demonstrate how transitions in food systems can provide a positive shift to healthy food choices, in urban and rural areas. 

About the Speakers:

Since 1981, Cynthia Donovan has been involved with agricultural research, training and outreach in developing countries. She is currently Deputy Director of the Feed the Future Legume Systems Research Innovation Lab, as well as an Associate Professor in International Development in the Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics (AFRE) and a member of the Core Faculty of the African Studies Center at Michigan State University. She is a long term member of the Food Security Group in AFRE. She has previously worked with the FAO, IFPRI, and West African Rice Development Association (now Africa Rice).  With the Innovation Lab Director, she currently manages a $13.6 million program to fund multidisciplinary competitive grants in Central America and West Africa.  She focuses on key issues in development including production economics and technology adoption, market development for smallholder participation (especially legume market development), market information systems, and impact assessment of policies and shocks on rural households. She has lived in Senegal and Mozambique, with substantial research in Rwanda, Zambia, and other sub-Saharan African countries. She was a Peace Corps volunteer in Paraguay and has professional competency in Portuguese, French and Spanish languages.  

David Tschirley is Professor, International Development in the Department of Food, Agricultural, and Resource Economics at Michigan State University, and Co-Director of the department's Food Security Group. He has over 20 years of experience in applied food security research, mentoring of developing country researchers, and active policy outreach.  His work emphasizes three main areas: 1) agrifood system transformation in Africa focusing on diet change and its implications over a range of policy and programmatic issues, including employment, midstream and upstream change, and nutrition; 2) the intersection of food aid, staple food markets, and emergency response, including extensive work on monetization, local and regional food aid procurement, and the role of food trade and government policy in emergency response, and 3) institutional approaches to linking smallholder farmers to cash crop markets such as cotton and fresh produce.  He is the author of over 20 journal articles, several book chapters, one edited book volume, and dozens of working papers and policy briefs.  Dr.  Tschirley has consulted for and otherwise served the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N., InterAmerican Development Bank, International Fund for Agricultural Development, The MasterCard Foundation, USAID, World Bank, and World Food Program.  Fluent in Spanish and Portuguese, Dr. Tschirley has had long-term assignments in Ecuador (1987-1990) and Mozambique (1995-98) and works most actively now in East and Southern Africa.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Msia Kibona Clark is an Associate Professor in the Department of African Studies at Howard University. Her work has focused on popular culture, migration, and gender studies in Africa. Dr. Clark has written numerous scholarly publications on hip hop culture's intersections with social change, gender, and politics in Africa. She has published several scholarly books, articles and book chapters on hip hop in Africa. Her published books include Hip Hop and Social Change in Africa: Ni Wakati (2014) and Hip-Hop in Africa: Prophets of the City & Dustyfoot Philosophers (2018), the first solo-authored book to address hip hop culture across Africa. She also teaches the Hip Hop & Social Change in Africa course at Howard University, and produces the Hip Hop African blog and monthly podcast hosted at hiphopafrican.com.

About the Talk:

This talk is based on my recently published book, Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World. Drawing on long term ethnography with demographic survey research projects in rural Malawi, the book tells the life story of quantitative health data, tracking and analyzing their transformation from pencil marks recorded on a survey page into statistics consumed by policy makers, researchers and the public. In this talk, I trace how demographers' scientific investments in pure, clean data—symbolically represented in surveys that act as a recipe for data collection—are made and unmade by Malawian fieldworkers' practices and processes on the ground. First, through close analysis of everyday data collection practices, I illustrate how frictions between epistemological metrics for data and the particularities of everyday fieldwork produce—and come to validate—the numerical evidence we use to understand the AIDS epidemic in Malawi. I focus, in particular, on the cultural translation of survey concepts such as probability, the techniques used by fieldworkers to uncover the truth of rural Malawian social realities, and researchers' efforts to harmonize encounters between fieldworkers and research participants. Standards of data collection, I show, make stability and fixity in numerical representation possible, not despite but because of, their customization by fieldworkers in the field (here, I counter racialized suspicions that fieldworkers are liabilities and center their indispensability to making good numbers). I conclude by gesturing toward connections between my past and present research and reflecting on what anthropology might contribute to critical data studies in the age of Big (and small) Data.

About the Speaker:

Cal Biruk is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Oberlin College. Cal is the author of Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World (Duke U Press, 2018) and numerous articles in venues such as Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Journal of Modern African Studies, Critical Public Health and Critical African Studies. Her research and teaching interests are at the intersection of medical anthropology, critical data studies and queer studies. Her second book project, Fake Gays: Metrics, Ethics and Authenticity in African Aid Economies, draws on long term ethnographic work with an LGBT-rights NGO in Malawi to capture the relations and transactions that constitute diverse political, identity, and economic projects that play out within aid geographies in the global South. Fake Gays melds insights from queer theory and critical data studies to show how numbers and quantification become unlikely resources in queer projects on the ground.

Global Health Alliances Across Nations, Agencies (NIH/NSF/NASA), and Institutions To Build Capacity in Africa

Desire Tshala-Katumbay, MD, MPH PhD
Professor of Neurology
University of Kinshasa and the Oregon Health and Sciences University
E-mail: tshalad(at)ohsu.edu

Michael J. Boivin, PhD, MPH
Professor of Psychiatry and of Neurology & Ophthalmology
Michigan State University College of Osteopathic Medicine
E-mail: boivin(at)msu.edu 

Esperance Kashala-Abotnes, MD, PhD
Lecturer and Postdoctoral Research Fellow
University of Kinshasa and University of Bergen
E-mail: Esperance.Abotnes(at)uib.no

ABSTRACT
Our Michigan State University Alliance for African Partnership (AAP) project builds upon an existing global health alliance of US, EU, Australia, and African institutions; alliance of which the focus evolved around the issues of climate variations, food and water insecurities, and impact on child development. This partnership is embedded within a NIH-sponsored research program for scaling up a community-based intervention to prevent konzo, a neurological disease affecting impoverished women and children, and caused by cyanide toxicity from poorly processed cassava.  Our leadership team will share various challenges faced and lessons learned over the years as they pertain to the three pillars of the AAP program namely transforming lives, transforming institutions, and building bridges. The present partnership brought opportunities for team leaders to deepen and expand on collaboration for high-impact intervention research in the DRC, where only few American and European universities have sustained partnerships. Speakers will share challenges faced and lessons learned as she has facilitated resource sharing and capacity building between early childhood caregiver training research used pertaining to neurodevelopmental needs in children from konzo-stricken areas. Although highly beneficial, a number of language, cultural, and logistical barriers make such global collaborative partnerships challenging and difficult.

Details Forthcoming

Details forthcoming

Details forthcoming

Details Forthcoming.