Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) 2018 Graduate Students’ Conference

Theme: Beyond Binaries and Analogy

The logic of binary opposites and analogical deduction has defined the study of Africa for long. Modernity is pitted against tradition, capital against pre-capital, state against society, perpetrator against victim, and so on. It is within such opposites that the realities of Africa are often explained. The assumption is that the continent must follow the historical experience of Europe from which explanations for conditions in Africa are deduced. The annual MISR Graduate Students’ Conference seeks to foster scholarship that moves away from such reductionism in order to study Africa without isolating it from the world and without overlooking its historical specificity. The 2018 Conference will take place at Makerere Institute of Social Research (Makerere University) in Kampala, Uganda, on 20—21 July 2018.

The conference will aim to contextualize the diverse realities of Africa—from political violence to gender issues, from economic affairs to governance, from higher education to arts and culture—without being trapped in the predicament of binaries and the inertia of analogy.