Mon | April 7th, 2025 | 16:00 – 17:30 (CEST)
Between the City and the Countryside: Centering Accumulation in African Studies
Prof. Dr. Stefan Ouma (University of Bayreuth)
Thinking beyond clear-cut rural-urban divides, this presentation is a call for centring accumulation in the study of African Cities, and developing respective theoretical concepts. “Accumulation” is much more than “growth” or “development”, which cloud the processes through which value is created and/or distributed and how they interact with power relations. “Accumulation” helps us center political economy questions: who owns what, who does what and why, who gets what (broadly defined as “surplus”, but including returns that might not be generated from productive labour in a narrow sense) and what do they do with it – in and beyond Africa. It allows us grounding these questions in larger relations and social structures that often transcend the domain of the locale, often amounting to global entanglements (global commodity chains; global investment chains; other social networks, algorithmic infrastructures etc.). Debates on accumulation in Africa also offer the opportunity to link with global debates on increasing wealth divides (“asset-based inequality”), and the rise of the rentier economy.
Professor Stefan Ouma is Chair of Economic Geography at the Department of Geography at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, where he also is the co-director of the Institute of African Studies and a PI in the Cluster of Excellence “Africa Multiple”. His scholarship has focussed on the political economy and ecology of global agri-food commodity chains, and the financialization of land and agriculture. More recently, he has delved into research on intersectional inequalities and associated ideologies, particularly how these transpire in the world of the tech-economy. He is currently a co-speaker in the BMBF-funded Racism Research Network (WinRa) and is a former member of the editorial collective of Antipode.
Venue:
Geozentrum, Ü8
University of Bonn,
Meckenheimer-Allee 176,
53115 Bonn
