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JHEA, Volume 18, n° 1, 2020 - Full Issue

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Special Issue on The Politics of Knowledge Production in Africa (With selected papers from the 15th CODESRIA General Assembly) Contents Academic (Im)mobility: Ecology of Ethnographic Research and Knowledge Production on Africans in China Kudus Oluwatoyin Adebayo..........................................................................1 What Should Globalization Mean for African Humanities and Why? Lawrence Ogbo Ugwuanyi..........................................................................23 Sociology of Knowledge in the Era of Academic Dependency in Africa: Issues and Prospects Oludele Albert Ajani..................................................................................39 Situating African Indigenous Ideas within Conventional Learning as an Impetus for Knowledge Construction in Africa Babatunde Joshua Omotosho.................................................................53 Skills or Credentials? Comparing the Perspectives of Degree- and Non-degree-holding Ghanaian Graduates on the Value of Higher Education Nana Akua Anyidoho............................................................................67 Globalisation, Decoloniality and the Question of Knowledge Production in Africa: A Critical Discourse Olugbemiga Samuel Afolabi..............................................................93 Propos sur un Bandoeng épistémique: l’Afrique, le Sud Global et la production du savoir à l’ère de la mondialisation Germain Ngoie Tshibambe................................................................111

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Chapter
The academic productivity of universities depends on academic staff as well as on management structures at these institutions that are able and qualified to provide conditions for productive work, reasonable decision-making, and proper career incentives. However, academic norms should not be underestimated. In a university, as a professional organization, there are both administrative and academic control systems, and the latter is based on academic norms. One of the most important norms is concerned with talent recruitment and its priorities, policies, and practices. A university’s decision to hire or not to hire their own graduates is one of the key decisions: it defines the characteristics and quality of people recruited, as well as how the management of academic teams is structured. For Russian universities, a rather high level of hiring from within (inbreeding) is traditional, and the reasons for it are cultural, infrastructural, and financial. In this chapter, we examine the causes of inbreeding and its consequences in the context of productivity, social norms, and emerging organizational structures. We use data from a set of detailed interviews with top management (vice-rectors and deans) of regional Russian universities collected in 2012. Interviews were focused on employment policies and the causes and consequences of inbreeding.
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Jean and John Comaroff enthusiastically claim that Africa constitutes a rich site ‘of new knowledges and ways of knowing-and-being … that have the capacity to inform and transform theory in the north, to subvert its universalisms in order to rewrite them in a different, less provincial register’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2011). What role, then, can the African university – which, as described by Jeremiah Arowosegbe, is in a lamentable state – play in creating and generalizing these ‘new knowledges’?
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Chapter
Modern African literature was produced in the crucible of colonialism. What this means, among other things, is that the men and women who founded the tradition of what we now call modern African writing, both in European and indigenous languages, were, without exception, products of the institutions that colonialism had introduced and developed in the continent, especially in the period beginning with the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 and decolonization in the late 1950s and early 1960s. African literature had, of course, been produced outside the institutions of colonialism: the existence of oral literature in all African languages and precolonial writing in Arabic, Amharic, Swahili, and other African languages is ample evidence of a thriving literary tradition in precolonial Africa. But what is now considered to be the heart of literary scholarship on the continent could not have acquired its current identity or function if the traumatic encounter between Africa and Europe had not taken place. Not only were the founders of modern African literature colonial subjects, but colonialism was also to be the most important and enduring theme in their works. From the eighteenth century onwards, the colonial situation shaped what it meant to be an African writer, shaped the language of African writing, and overdetermined the culture of letters in Africa. © Cambridge University Press 2004 and Cambridge University Press, 2008.
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