The CIHA Blog is very pleased to let you know that we are holding an exciting conference at the University of California, Irvine this Thursday and Friday, December 6 and 7, 2012 on “UCI and Africa: Expanding Engagements, Ongoing Dialogues.” Panels include one that takes up our Luce-funded initiative on religious conceptions of charity that features participants from South Africa, Senegal, the University of Rochester, UCI and the Episcopal Church. Others honor the work of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, spotlight social activism on the continent in the wake of the Arab Spring, feature artistic exchanges between UCI and the University of Ghana, and describe initiatives in mobile money, health, and the virtual exchange of knowledge. Watch for information on Twitter and Facebook during the conference. The entire conference will also be filmed, and the charity panel will form the basis of several future blog entries. We look forward to your comments during and after the conference.
The multi-discliplinary approach to the charity/aid debate drawn on during the conference facilitated critical engagements that made me conceptualize the extent to which aid/charity may not only be well intended but could also be a tool of power and control. Envisioning aid/charity within the critical scholarship of surveillance studies, it emerged that aid/charity could be systematically aggregating the beneficiaries and hence aligning them to a vulnerability that reinforces them to the demands of the donor. Therefore, speaking within the ideals of independence and self-actualisation, it suffices that these could end up being overwhelmingly compromized at both individual and state levels.