On 2 May 2022, the Collaborative Research Centre TRR 228 Future Rural Africa officially launched its second funding phase. After a successful first funding phase from 2018 to 2022, the research consortium received funding for an additional four years by the German Research Foundation (DFG). While the thematic outlook in the first phase was centered around the concepts of intensification and conservation in the context of rural Africa, this focus is widened in the second phase to include infrastructuring as a third essential process. Infrastructuring should be understood as the establishment of large-scale infrastructure, which we consider an additional driver of land-use change and social-ecological transformation. All three processes – intensification, conservation, and infrastructuring – contribute, in often overlapping dynamics, to large-scale transformations in our research areas with multiple micro-scalar repercussions.
The official launch of the second funding phase took place at Universitätsclub Bonn. The event featured welcoming addresses by Prof. Dr. Britta Klagge and Prof. Dr. Michael Bollig, spokespersons of the project. Their contributions were followed by a keynote address by Helmut Bley, emeritus professor of the Department of History of the Leibniz University Hannover.
Finally, the launch featured a boat trip along the river Rhine from Bonn to Cologne, symbolizing the move of the project administration from the University of Bonn, where it had resided in the first phase, to the University of Cologne, from where it will take place in the second phase.
