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Citizenship and Ethnic Relations: Social, Cultural and Historical Perspectives

REMESO

Citizenship, between state and culture

The stream is organized around two critical terms - citizenship and ethnic relations - which resonate into two major areas of research; one dealing with politics and policy, and how the relation between individual and state is transformed through the institution of citizenship; the other one dealing with ethnicity, culture, and politics of belonging, and how the relation between individual and social community is transformed through the ways in which the individual is addressed as embodying a specific ethnic, national, racial, sexual or gendered identity. Citizenship and ethnic relations are seen as instances of social formation and collective identification and hence as parts of the most enduring fabrics of human history.

Prefixed Africanity

Perceptions of (National) Belonging and Landscape among Whites in Southern Africa 1947-1966

This project by PhD candidate Julia Willén examines the position of the white subject in Africa. The study is focused on the narratives of belonging among white Africans during the post WWII period in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia, or today's Zimbabwe. The hypothesis is that a new subject position emerged as a result of political and social constraints: descendants of white settlers (often women) found themselves being in-between an old, given colonial order, and the decolonial processes of the antiracist, anti-imperial and anticolonial struggles in Southern Africa and Europe.

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Moving Bodies

Omalayitsha, Transnational Practices, and the Embodying of Movement between South Western Zimbabwe and South Africa.

Xolani Tshabalala, PhD-candiditate, examines circular movement in Southern Africa in the context of entrepreneurship, multiple logics of legitimacy, and everyday interaction between travelers and state functionaries. The project builds on the ideas of the human economy and embodiment as a way to investigate how movement can be understood by those that are involved in its everyday practice. The projects specifically focuses on the practice of private transporting of goods, people and ideas between South-Western Zimbabwe and South Africa.

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Building Eurafrica

Reviving Colonialism through European Integration, 1920-2007

This project, led by Professor Stefan Jonsson and Professor Peo Hansen, investigates the relation of European integration to colonialism through a once influential notion: Eurafrica. With sources mainly from EU's historical archives, it shows that the incorporation into the EEC of the member states' colonial possessions was critical for the agreement on the Rome Treaty in 1957 and for the founding of EU. From the 1920s until the late 1950s, practically all working towards European integration placed Africa's geopolitical and economic incorporation into the European enterprise as a key objective.

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