Announcing the Call 2022 Alliance Trilateral Initiatives in Emerging Regions Grantee

Ethnographies of African Work Worlds is a year-long project that brings scholars from the United States, France, and Africa together to examine the changing nature of work and labor in contemporary Africa. Work and labor are not just crucial topics in African studies but are the topics around which African studies has been constructed and organized. Recent years, however, have seen the emergence of a slew of new forms of work – in cultural industries, digital start-ups, privatized transport systems – that are transforming both the nature of work for contemporary Africans and the ways scholars have conceived of and analyzed labor. At the same time, precarious forms of work or what might be designated as not work continue to expand in number. This project seeks to bring scholars together to: A) understand emerging forms of work that do not quite fit into existing conceptual categories and B) re-examine how scholars, intellectuals and policy makers analytically conceive of work and its operations in contemporary Africa.