ATLAS Conference Program
Thank you for joining us for the 1st Annual UMD ATLAS Conference! The Africa Through Language and Area Studies (ATLAS) Initiative is made possible through University of Maryland’s Grand Challenges Grants. This team grant is led by Miranda Abadir, senior faculty specialist at the National Foreign Language Center (ARHU), and Matthew Thomann, assistant professor of anthropology (BSOS), with support from many collaborators from across campus. From its inception, ATLAS was envisioned as a way to highlight and bring together Africa-related research, scholarship, courses and events happening across University of Maryland’s campus, including African American and African diaspora studies. The initiative received tremendous support from faculty and departments spanning the UMD campus community, and in March 2023, the University of Maryland awarded ATLAS a three-year Grand Challenges Team Project Grant.
ATLAS serves as a nexus for the study of African languages, history, contemporary issues, and research at the University of Maryland with the goal of increasing the understanding of the African continent and its growing global influence. One of the cornerstones of ATLAS is an annual conference to bring together the UMD community and celebrate the diverse contributions
Arrival – 10:00 am-10:25 am
Welcome and opening remarks with Dean Stephanie Shonekan – 10:30 am-10:55
- Session 1: Media, Literature, and Other Expressive Cultures – 11:00
Moderated by Matthew Thomann
Eva Hageman “shiplap”
Where is race in lifestyle reality television? Lifestyle TV imagines a post-racial world where the economic playing field has been leveled through privately funded transformations. shiplap uses a term and material made popular by HGTV’s show Fixer Upper to speculate about the hidden racial narratives of house flipping and the everyday.
Briana Barner “Black Podcasts as Transformative Media”
Black podcasts use the platform to build Black audiences and communities and to espouse various perspectives and worldviews steeped in Blackness. Marginality, bell hooks writes, is “...a site that one clings to even because it nourishes one’s capacity to resist” (hooks 1989: 20). This paper explores how Black podcasts use language, audience and community to embrace making media at the margins as a form of resistance and a celebration of joy.
Cécile Accilien “To Stay or to Leave? The Complexity of Home in the film Freda by Gessica Généus”
This presentation argues that Haitian popular cinema is working through an aesthetic of bay lodyans, which in Haitian Kreyòl means to tell stories to an audience, and more generally, to entertain. It specifically considers bay lodyans as a Haitian epistemology that responds to the needs and desires of Haitian audiences in and beyond Haiti. Through a brief analysis of the film Freda by Gessica Généus it analyzes the complexities of home while reflecting on the sociopolitical and cultural issues related to family, gender, sexuality, and economic hardship.
Valerie Orlando “African Authors Writing in/for La Littérature-Monde: A Literary World of Exchange”
This presentation considers contemporary works by African authors of French-expression who are contributing to “La littérature-monde” (French World literature). They not only write about their home spaces but also engage with those of others as they travel throughout the world. Their narratives are transnational, transcontinental, and multivocal, tackling the challenges faced by those who are exiled, often living in the margins of France, the U.S., Canada and elsewhere. Novels in French such as F. Diome’s Le ventre de l’Atlantique (2003), A. Waberi’s La divine chanson (2015), and A. Mohamed Sarr’s La plus secrète mémoire des hommes (2021), exemplify a new “worldly” (mondiale) generation of African authors who write for our common humanity as they traverse multiple viewpoints, traveling “lines of flight” to explore what postcolonial theorist Achille Mbembe notes is an “Afropolitanism” that characterizes contemporary, transnational African identity.
Lunch – 12:15 pm-12:55 pm
- Session 2: Health, Vulnerability, and Care – 1:00
Moderated by Nikita Viswasam
Kenneth Leonard “Improving health outcomes by choosing better doctors: Evidence of social learning about doctor quality from rural Tanzania”Households in Africa and indeed almost everywhere, face a choice of health care providers with only limited information about the relative quality of these providers. Unlike households in developed counties, however, rural African households make choices among providers of highly variable quality for illnesses that are frequently severe, and they must do so without access to formal sources of information or any insurance against the consequences of bad outcomes. In spite of---or because of---these difficulties, households in rural Tanzania do learn about and react to the quality of health care providers. In this paper, I examine a two-year panel of health seeking behavior for over 500 households in rural Northern Tanzania where households face choices between forty modern health care providers. This paper shows (1) that households change the way they visit new providers as they learn about quality, visiting better providers for marginally more severe illnesses and (2) households improve their outcomes as they learn about quality by choosing the appropriate doctors when they are sick.
Shanéa Thomas “Mother, as a Gender: Life and Research at the Intersection of Blackness and Queerness”
Motherhood is often deemed solely through the ownership of womanhood. However, Mothering, particularly in Blackness, has been and is a needed practice of community, joy, care, and survival amongst queer folks since the beginning of time. This presentation opens up to the personal journey of Mothering outside of the binary and how visibility, or lack thereof, also intersects with the experiences seen in research and mental health care. This talk will allow the audience to gain an understanding of the importance of Black queer visibility and how queerness should be the standard, and not the exception, in research, especially within the medical and community supportive systems.
Kirsten Stoebenau “Why should we care about marriage in urban Africa?”
Anthropologists have argued that across contexts in Africa, especially, ‘marriage is a process, not a discrete event.’ However, large-scale studies in the region have continued to measure marriage as a static event. By reviewing social change and emerging social stratification in marriage systems, we highlight the ongoing need for culturally salient measures of marriage. We then describe the development of a novel measure of marriage and how it can be used to improve our understanding of the links between kinship support, marriage, and mother's and children’s health outcomes in low-income Nairobi, Kenya.
Sangeetha Madhavan “Because marriage matters for mothers' mental health”
It has long been known that marital relationships and social support are key correlates of the mental health of mothers. However, it has only been in the past 5 years that researchers have paid attention to the social determinants of mental health in the African context. In this analysis, we draw on three waves of data from an ongoing longitudinal study in two low income communities in Nairobi, Kenya to examine the extent to which marriage is protective of maternal mental health.
- Session 3: Feminisms, Genders, and Sexualities – 2:00
Moderated by Devon Betts
Will Mosley “Looking for Tenderness in All the Wrong Places”Tenderness in African American culture describes how Black hearts, hands, and hair might be pulled, touched, and handled in an ideal situation. At times a feeling to be felt, a temperament to be witnessed, or a mode of relation, tenderness can be, at best, offered and accessed to someone in need of some softness. At worst, it can be denied through a matrix of domination Black folk, especially Black girls and women, know all too well. This paper takes seriously the various ways Black people do tenderness, revealing an epistemic tension at the root of this feeling. Black feminist theories of tenderness highlight some of the anti-Black foreclosures of tenderness and critique modes of intra-racial relation that perpetuate the superwoman ideal on Black girls and women. Thinking with Jasmine Johnson, Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, and Meg Scales, I ask, How have Black feminist contended with the multiple holds of hegemonic tenderness, the foundation of which is the rendering of Blackness as ontologically incapable of tender feeling, practice, or subjectivity? Using Black LGBTQ art, this paper also suggests hegemonic forms of tenderness, similar to that of Black feminists, are countered in distinct and critical ways. This paper argues that Black LGBTQ practices and demands for softness reveal a critical disruption of the binaries that prevent their particular intersection of identities from access to dominant modes of softness, a practice I call radical tenderness.
Zenzele Isoke “Yabo! Loving Blackness as Emancipatory Pedagogy”
The black feminist classroom has become a significant site of emancipatory knowledge-making and pedagogy for both graduate and undergraduates across the liberal arts. For many, it is a rare opportunity for full immersion into the ideas of black female scholars, poets, philosophers, community organizers, and intellectuals. This paper reflects on the use of tactile assignments including “creative word journals” and “zine biomythographies” to work through the theories of coloniality, enfleshment, and black feminist poetics and activist praxes. Reflecting on fifteen years of instruction, this paper brings together the theories of black love offered by Alexis de Veaux, Audre Lorde, and June Jordan to discuss how tactile poetics can invigorate classroom spaces by igniting friendships and encouraging risk-taking and creativity while deepening critical reflection of the ideas of black feminist icons in the academy and beyond.
Matthew Thomann “Flesh in the Excess: HPV, Anal Warts, and the Queer Potentiality of Ad-Hoc Care in Kenya”
While the global health community has rushed to normalize the science of human papillomavirus (HPV) prevention for adolescent girls and young women in the name of cervical cancer prevention, the HPV-related prevention and treatment needs of sexual and gender minorities are largely ignored in global public health policy and programs. In Kenya, HPV often manifests among this population as severely advanced anal warts. Presenting with such a condition at a public facility would effectively “out” the patient in a country where homosexuality remains criminalized and clinical homophobia has been well documented. Instead, men regularly progress to extremely late stages of anal disease, when bowel functioning has become obstructed before accessing improvisational services set up by a community-based clinic in Nairobi. In this paper, I present ethnographic findings from my ongoing research with patients receiving these ad-hoc forms of care to illustrate how they come to embody the overlapping layers of neglect, body in the form of excess flesh. I draw attention here to the forms of relationality, humanity, and healing it produces between patients, caregivers, and the anthropologist. In doing so, I aim to reorient thinking around the bare life of the abject, fleshy queer body to instead illustrate how emergent forms of care disrupt dominant ways of governing health and healing.
- Session 4: Food, Environments, and Agricultural Politics – 2:30
Moderated by Amber Ketchum
Jen Shaffer “Network Complexity in Conservation Management of the Maasai Mara-Serengeti”The complex nature of community needs, biodiversity conservation, and competing economic goals between different agricultural systems, ecotourism, governments, and resource use are in conflict in the Maasai Mara-Serengeti, a cross-border protected region of Tanzania and Kenya. Changes in traditional uses of land, human attitudes toward wildlife, and changing governmental regulations of land intersect and are in conflict. This paper explores how the investigation of the network of community, government, and NGO organizations operating in the Maasai Mara-Serengeti could offer insights into resolution of these differences. Such work is essential to establishing a foundation for a sustainable, just, and resilient savanna social-ecological system that supports human and non-human residents alike.
Psyche Williams-Forson “Black women and the hypocrisies of food conversations in the Anthropocene”
This paper considers how food policies from history to the present directly and indirectly have had an effect on Black lives. From the unnamed African huckster and trader to John Boyd, Jr and countless other Black farmers, racist policies in America have had a damaging effect on Black American lives from the psychic to the economic. Though deleterious, resilience is nonetheless a mainstay of Black survival and existence and this is evidence in the ways in which we negotiate day to day food systems.
Catherine Nakalembe “Interplay of Agriculture, Land Use, Climate Change, and Food Security in Africa”
Food security in sub-Saharan Africa is a critical issue with approximately 140 million people facing acute food insecurity, according to the 2022 Global Report on Food Crises. To address this challenge effectively, understanding the dynamics of land use, climate change impacts on agricultural productivity, and factors influencing food access and resource distribution is crucial. This talk delves into the complex interplay between agriculture, food security, land use, and climate change in sub-Saharan Africa, exploring sustainable pathways and the role of remote sensing and machine learning technologies in enhancing decision-making. By utilizing data-driven approaches, we can identify opportunities for more sustainable and equitable solutions, especially concerning food security in the region. The talk emphasizes the potential for these technologies to drive positive change on a large scale.
Paul Turner “Fungal contaminants in sub-Saharan dietary staples - a potential third arm in the nexus of limited improvements in infant growth”
Poor infant growth is common in many low- and middle-income regions of the world, though it is notable that in Sub-Saharan Africa improvements have remained stalled compared to other world regions. The epidemiology clear indicates that poor nutrition and limited hygiene are key players. However, mitigation approaches that focus on improving diet and/or reducing gastrointestinal infection have been limited and suggest much of the growth faltering is not explained by these measures. Enteric intestinal enteropathy is a common hallmark of infants struggling to grow; and transition to complementary foods and gastrointestinal infection are strongly implicated to impact growth. In regions where stunting is endemic and where diets are typically monotonous, infants are additionally exposed to the highly toxic fungal metabolite, aflatoxin. Aflatoxin is a frequent contaminant of maize and groundnuts in subsistence and small-hold farming settings in tropical world regions, with an estimated 500 million people chronically exposed. Aflatoxin is a major contaminant of complementary foods. Here data will be presented (a) looking at associations between aflatoxin exposure and poor growth in (b); pilot data indicating poor nutrition of infants and aflatoxin goes hand-in-hand c) introduce ongoing efforts to understand the combined risks, d) suggest more collaborative approaches to mitigate risks, with a focus on Global FEWture Alliance activities recently initiated in Tanzania.
Keynote Address: Dr. Orisanmi Burton, “Methods of Carceral War” – 4:00 pm-5:15 pm
Reception – 5:20 pm-6:00
We hope you enjoyed today’s program! Our ATLAS Monthly Speaker series will resume in March 2024. Please look out for more information. We look forward to seeing you at the next UMD ATLAS Conference in February 2025! If you would like to contribute or have ideas for the Speaker Series of Annual Conference, please reach out: atlas-center@umd.edu
Acknowledgements
The ATLAS team would like to thank the many people who made this conference possible and those who contributed to the success of the first year of the ATLAS Initiative. .
We would like to begin by thanking Deans Stephanie Shonekan and Susan Rivera and their colleagues in the ARHU and BSOS Deans’ office for their early and continuous support. We would like to extend a special word of thanks to ARHU for their generous financial support.
We would also like to thank Gregory Ball, the VPR’s office, and the Grand Challenges team for their leadership and funding.
The ATLAS programming would not be possible without the support from the Language Science Center. We want to thank Colin Phillips for his early support and Caitlin Eaves and Shevaun Lewis for their generosity with their time and expertise.
We would also like to thank Joseph Scholten in the Office of International Education for his dedication to ATLAS and for his constant support.
We would like to extend our thanks to the entire ATLAS team and various faculty and staff from the National Foreign Language Center who have contributed their time and talents behind the scenes to make this conference possible.
We would like to thank today’s panelists and moderators. They are the true reason why ATLAS exists at UMD.
Finally, there are dozens of other individuals who have contributed to the ATLAS initiative throughout its inaugural year. We want to thank you for your efforts. Your work brought people from across campus together to collaborate and learn from each other.
With much appreciation,
Miranda Abadir and Matthew Thomann
ATLAS Co-PIs