NEH Ajami Collaborative Workshop, July 7-9, 2022
We are pleased to announce a three-day Workshop to celebrate and share experience from our research project ʿAjamī Literature and the Expansion of Literacy and Islam: The Case of West Africa, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The collaborative Workshop aims to reflect on the best practices we developed for the NEH ʿAjamī project, the lessons learned, and the plans at the completion of this three-year initiative. The Workshop will take place on July 7-9, 2022, virtually and at the Boston University African Studies Center. More details can be seen here: NEH Ajami Workshop Program
Lecture at IFAN, Senegal
Prof. Fallou Ngom delivered a virtual lecture on African Ajami on September 13, 2021 at URICA (Unité de Recherche en Ingénierie Culturelle et en Anthropologie) at the IFAN, Institut Fondamental d'Afrique Noire, Cheikh Anta Diop University, Dakar, Senegal.
Towards Comparative Global Humanities
Dr. Daivi Rodima-Taylor presented on African Ajami at the conference Worlds Enough and Time: Towards a Comparative Global Humanities, organized by the MIT School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, November 12-13, 2021. The conference explored novel approaches to an integrative transformation of the Humanities through a radical foregrounding of geographical scope and temporal depth. It aimed to develop new comparative methodologies based on the world’s archives and conceptual vocabularies, to address the social, political, and creative functions of cultural heritage in today’s world and to advocate more effectively for social justice, cultural understanding and reconciliation. Conference presentations and collaborative discussions explored the ways in which forms of knowledge production and humanistic inquiry from other times and places could inspire a productive transformation of today’s humanities, while taking inspiration from the historical experience and textual archive of non-Western and marginalized knowledge cultures and traditions.
Fallou Ngom presenting at ISITA
New Federal Grant Award: Readers in Ajami
The team of Ajami scholars at Boston University, led by Professor Fallou Ngom, has been awarded a three-year grant of $178,900 by the U.S. Department of Education to develop specialized Ajami readers in Hausa, Wolof, and Mandinka (three major African languages with rich written Ajami literatures) with a multimedia companion website. The Readers in Ajami (RIA) project will provide students, language teachers, scholars, and American professionals with the necessary linguistic, cultural and literacy skills to engage Ajami users of West Africa. The resources of the project will cover a range of fields, including business and economy, health and medicine, agriculture and the environment, and human rights, politics and diplomacy. The project will produce a methodology that can be replicated for other world languages with dual literacy systems (Ajami and Latin script orthographies). It will provide an optimal model of how to build and sustain specialized textual and digital educational resources that incorporate local voices and knowledge recorded in multiple African Ajami scripts – something many academics and professionals have overlooked for centuries. The project draws on the expertise at BU and overseas in Ajami, African linguistics, pedagogy, social anthropology, and digital technology. Our team, led by Professor Ngom, includes Dr. Daivi Rodima-Taylor, Dr. Jennifer Yanco, Dr. Mustapha Kurfi, Mr. Ablaye Diakite, Mr. Elhadji Diagne, Dr. Bala Saho, and the Geddes Language Center digital specialists Alison Parker, Shawn Provencal, and Frank Antonelli.
Rodima-Taylor Published Work on Digital Infrastructures
Dr. Daivi Rodima-Taylor, Project Manager of NEH Ajami, published several articles recently focusing on the role of digital technologies in mediating local and global distributions of power. She co-edited a special issue "FinTech in Africa" (with Langley, in Journal of Cultural Economy) and authored an individual article on the fintech political economy of self-help. Her review article “Promise, Ethnography, and the Anthropocene: Investigating the Infrastructural Turn” (in American Anthropologist) examines the role of contemporary infrastructures in in exacerbating the environmental and social challenges of the Anthropocene and explores their potential to distribute material and knowledge resources in novel, sustainable ways. The article “Interrogating Technology-led Experiments in Sustainability Governance” (with Bernards et al., in Global Policy) suggested novel pathways for exploring key ethical, social and political considerations involved in the increasingly technological solutions to global sustainability issues. Another collaborative article, “Global Regulations for a Digital Economy: Between New and Old Challenges” (with Beaumier et al., in Global Policy), examined the unique challenges posed by digital technologies to regulators and policy-makers on local, national and global levels. Daivi's recent co-edited book, Land and the Mortgage: History, Culture, Belonging holds her chapter "Land, Finance, Technology: Perspectives on Mortgage Lending." Her recent work also explores the intersection of the local and global in digital remittance infrastructures, and the legitimacy of digital development in small states. The social study of algorithmic power was highlighted at a co-organized symposium “Law, Ethics, Culture: The Human Face of Artificial Intelligence” at the University of California, Irvine.
Digitizing Past and Present: Our Geddes Digital Humanities Team
By Mark Lewis and Daivi Rodima-Taylor
The Geddes Language Center of Boston University is one of the integral partners of our NEH-funded Research Project on Ajami Literature and the Expansion of Literacy and Islam: The Case of West Africa. The Geddes Language Center is a full-service language learning facility dedicated to providing an extensive humanities resource for the College of Arts and Sciences and the Boston University community. Founded in 1960, the mission of the Geddes Language Center is to support the teaching and learning of languages, literatures, cultures, and film as faculty introduce new learning modalities and resources, both in the classroom and online.
The collaboration with the Geddes Digital Humanities Team under the leadership of Mark Lewis provides a unique multi-media component to our archival and research project. Geddes web designer Alison Parker and director of programming Shawn Provencal provide the website design and coding elements to accommodate the digital repository and display of Ajami manuscripts, their transcriptions and French and English translations, in four West African languages – Wolof, Mandinka, Hausa and Fula. Video resources specialist Frank Antonelli processes and edits video and audio files that form an important part of the NEH Ajami project, and advises project scholars on the use of multi-media equipment.
Geddes has a long-standing collaboration with the BU African Studies Center. This includes the African Language Materials Archive (ALMA) that is a multi-partner project focusing on the promotion and documentation of literature and literacy in the languages of Africa. This archive holds a collection of cassette recordings from the 1980s, made during field research in a number of different Sahelian and desert countries. Many of the transcriptions accompanying these recordings were translated into Western languages, mostly French or English. This collection, known as At the Desert’s Edge, involved hundreds of interviews of every-day people in traditional societies. Researchers engaged them in discussions of the ecological conditions of their existence and the state of the environment in their countries.
The countries that are part of the ALMA project are Burkina Faso, Chad, Ethiopia, Mali, Niger, Senegal, and the Sudan. The project represents one of the largest digitization initiatives the Geddes Language Center has undertaken in more than a decade, and will likely continue for the foreseeable future. All coordination and technical work is done by Frank Antonelli, Video Resources Specialist. The primary material of this collection was digitized during the years of 2016-2019.
Fallou Ngom’s African Studies Review Distinguished Lecture
NEH Ajami project director Fallou Ngom’s African Studies Review Distinguished Lecture “Beyond Orality: Non-Europhone Sources and African Studies in the 21st Century” can now be viewed here.
Our Scholars at the African Studies Association Annual Meeting
The African Studies Association 62nd Annual Meeting, “Being, Belonging and Becoming in Africa,” took place in Boston, MA, from November 21-23, 2019, in Boston Marriott Copley Place. The Annual Meeting featured presentations and contributions by several of our NEH Ajami Research Project scholars.
NEH Ajami project director Fallou Ngom was chosen to present this year’s African Studies Review Distinguished Lecture. The lecture series was established in 2011 featuring state of the art research in African Studies. Prof. Ngom’s lecture was titled “Beyond Orality: Non-Europhone Sources and African Studies in the 21st Century.” Dr. Ngom’s other engagements at the Annual Meeting included panels Between the Lines: African Languages in Ajami Manuscripts and Quranic Education, and Roundtable: Islamic Manuscripts, Muslim Intellectuals, and European Colonialisms in West Africa.
David Robinson was engaged in Roundtable: Joseph C. Miller Dialogues Part I: The Communal Ethos: Methods and Mentorship in African History, and served as discussant in panel Two Books on West African Islam - The Walking Qur’an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa.
David Glovsky presented in panel The Importance of a Regional Approach: The Case of Senegambian History, and chaired and presented in Roundtable: Frontiers in Digital History in Africa: Trends, Opportunities, and Futures.
Daivi Rodima-Taylor served in the ASA Annual Meeting Local Arrangements Committee, and chaired and presented in the ASA Local Arrangements Committee Panel Building Bridges through Migration: First Generation African Immigrants. She also co-chaired and presented in panel Crypto-politics: Digital Media, Sociality, and Power.
Former ASA Board member, Jennifer Yanco, has been active in organizing local field tours and other ASA Local Arrangements Committee activities.
David Robinson on Ethnohistorical Fieldwork in West Africa
Our project member Dr. David Robinson describes his experience preparing and carrying out interviews in Senegal and Mali in the linked article “Interviewing, Intermediaries and Documents: Senegal and Mali,” published in Mande Studies (vol. 20, 2018). He emphasizes the importance of his assistants or intermediaries for the choice of informants and the conduct of the interviews, as well as the quality of translation of the sessions. In his fieldwork, he combined the interview material with documents, especially an Arabic ethnohistory written by Cheikh Moussa Kamara in the 1920s, to produce his publications on Futa Toro and al-hajj Umar. He also reflects on the transformation, i.e. Africanization, of the History Department at the University of Dakar. READ MORE HERE