This is Volume II of Africaâs Radicalisms and Conservatisms: Pop Culture, Environment, Colonialism and Migration. Like Volume I, the majority of the essays are from the 42nd World Congress of the International Institute of Sociology (IIS) held jointly with the School of Social Sciences, Faculty of Humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, 5â7 September, 2018. Discussions about hosting and organizing the conference at the University of the Witwatersrand began in 2014 between Professor Adam Habib, Vice Chancellor and Principal of the University of the Witwatersrand and Professor Craig Jackson Calhoun, the President of the IIS, and Professor of Social Sciences at Arizona State University, USA. Following the discussions, the School of Social Sciences started putting in place the infrastructure to host the conference in 2018 after Professor Calhoun had secured a grant from Mastercard Foundation to meet the conference costs.
With the assistance of Professor Ruksana Osman, the former Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and now Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic), Professors Muchaparara Musemwa (Head of the School of Social Sciences), Edwin Etieyibo (Head of the Department of Philosophy) and Dr. Obvious Katsaura (Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology) constituted the local organizing committee. The committee formulated a conference call for papers with the theme The Social Sciences, New Conservatisms and New Radicalisms â a theme that we imagined would have an interdisciplinary appeal beyond just Sociology and enable us to have a critical multidisciplinary, and inter-locutional re-thinking of the constitution of life â of emerging political, social, cultural and economic forms â in contexts characterized by what new and rising conservatisms as well as radicalisms.
The conference attracted many young, upcoming and established scholars and academics who presented papers that touched on diverse themes and represented disciplines such as education, sociology, history, anthropology, business, politics, philosophy, media studies, and geography. Most of these conference delegates came from Zimbabwe, Botswana, Nigeria, Ghana, USA, Uganda, Angola and South Africa. A number of the presentations (including some of the keynote addresses) covered topics related to youth identities and politics; youth radicalism; youth struggle narratives; politics and the youth; education and the youth; youth and marginalization; neoliberalism/capitalism and globalization; globalization and inequalities; globalization and poverty; capitalism and inequalities; capitalism and poverty; the politics of poverty; nature of poverty; politics, governance and social justice; poverty and culture; causes of
Over the course of the three-day conference the present editors of this volume decided that it was important to mobilize and capture the diverse range of concrete examples that helped to explicate what are very often highly abstract concepts, namely, radicalisms and conservatisms as the book title reflects. We believe that it was critically important to have a volume that encapsulates and portrays the diversity of multiple meanings and understandings of these concepts from the African stand-point especially as they intersected with ordinary peopleâs resilient lived experiences and how they have grappled with politics, poverty, marginalization and access to education. This explains the origin of both volumes: Africaâs Radicalisms and Conservatisms I: Politics, Poverty, Marginalisation and Education and Africaâs Radicalisms and Conservatisms II: Pop Culture, Environment, Colonialism and Migration.