Research & Publications

Principal Investigator (PI): SSHRC Partnership Development Grant (PDG).

This is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) funded Partnership which examines Canada/Africa transnational human rights engagements. Specifically, the project examines the nature, attainments, problems, and prospects of Canada/Africa human rights engagements in five African countries (the Congo, Kenya, Nigeria, Cameroon, and South Africa) under four sub-themes: gender/sexuality/women’s rights; investment/human rights; democratization; and economic/social rights in the last three decades. This project builds on foundational work done in a one-year partnership engage grant, known as AHRAP-NET, that I co-led with Prof. Obiora Okafor (PI) and others. CARISSA commenced in late 2020 and data collection (modified to suit the exigencies of COVID-19) is on-going.

Co-Investigator (PI – Prof. Bonny Ibawoh, McMaster University). SSHRC Insight Grant

The Confronting Atrocities Project  examines the role of truth commissions in post-conflict reconstruction and democratic transitions by paying attention to the tensions in their truth seeking and reconciliation mandates in Africa. A particular focus of this project is exploring the tensions that have shaped official truth narratives about past atrocities and considering the role of truth commissions in reinforcing hegemonic collective memories, subverting, or complicating dominant narratives about past atrocities.

This project investigates how new agricultural technologies, including the introduction of genetically modified seeds impact gender equality in four countries (Kenya, Uganda, South Africa and Ghana).

DOI: 10.1080/00083968.2021.1956983

ABSTRACT: Despite the problematique of Global North/South relationships, human rights require transnational collaboration to successfully protect vulnerable people in the world. In particular, human rights engagements between Africa and the West are cemented in legacies of colonialism and mediated by development discourses that portray the continent as a paragon of poverty, corruption and backwardness. Within this context, we explore how an African Union (AU) human rights instrument could impact or transform Africa’s transnational human rights engagements. Specifically, we use Canada–Africa human rights engagements as a starting point and basis for analysing the nature, orientation and impacts of such engagements (especially over three salient issues). Situating Canada as allegorical for the West, our findings show that Canadian human rights actors are critical of colonial legacies, have faith in the AU’s leadership, and see the African Human Rights Action Plan as a potentially transformative instrument in human rights engagements in Africa.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28099-4_41

ABSTRACT: The aim of this chapter is to provoke conversations about rights and culture that enable us to employ an intersectional lens and approach to situating women’s empowerment and rights issues within historical and international political economy concerns. Within a postcolonial African feminist theoretical and methodological framework, the chapter seeks discussions on the following questions: how does reference to culture irredeemably reduce women’s rights issues to a realm of colonial discursive framing that makes it difficult to imagine a transformative approach to women’s issues? How might an indigenous African world-sense (Oyewumi, 1997) enable us grasp the intricacies and dialectics of relational thoughts on women? I propose that it is important to strategically eliminate the tendency to reify culture in discussions of rights since that often forecloses conversations and leads to reductionisms. Subsequently, employing a sociological imagination, the chapter examines how we can engage with the social structures that shape the cultures of societies and through which we can properly engage in a process of mapping embedded, generated, and recurring inequalities and hierarchies. The chapter concludes by suggesting that we need to connect rights issues to political, religious, environmental, global neoliberal, and technological changes, among others.

ABSTRACT: Women’s individual rights claims in many African countries are contentious in large part because they are considered to be a threat to societal and national cultural harmony. This is even more so when women’s sexual rights come into question. Conservative groups argue that these rights claims are Western-oriented and threaten the moral fiber of their societies. To counter these arguments, women’s rights activists not only have to historicize the colonial foundations of women’s oppression but also strategically dialogue between universalist and essentialist cultural norms. This chapter analyzes the contexts, debates, and discourses of women’s rights in African sociopolitical and cultural systems. The chapter emphasizes the need for women’s rights to be situated within global economic inequities in order to highlight intricate interconnections between global neoliberalism and women’s rights at the local levels. The chapter raises an argument that in the changing sociocultural landscape in Africa, African exceptionalism in women’s rights discourses hinders progressive dialogue on women and minority rights. The chapter also discusses intersectionality and generational differences in rights activism.

DOI: 10.1080/14725843.2018.1474340 8740 words. 50% contribution

ABSTRACT: The concrete and abstract geographies of difference on the African continent not only arise from environmental, socio-cultural and religious factors but also from the historical and differential impacts and experiences of colonization and its legacies. In this paper, we use the web series, An African City, as a reference point, to examine the troubling nature of binary depictions of a colonial/traditional Africa and a new/modern/global Africa. Relying on Postcolonial feminist methodologies of critique and deconstruction, we propose that in countering such simplistic narratives, Africa ought to be seen as constructed, abstract, material, plural and confusing in order to account for its complexities. In particular, we focus on the centrality of women to African identity discourses. We argue that while Afropolitan and Africa rising discourses simultaneously challenge and interrupt problematic colonial constructions of Africa as backward and in need of salvation, they also (perhaps more problematically) still re-centre the West as the progenitor of progress, thereby reiterating the colonial tale.

DOI: 10.1080/00083968.2018.1462720

ABSTRACT: Despite the crucial role feminist movements play in securing progressive development policies, legislation and socio-legal protections for women, labeling women’s rights issues as feminist has contradictory, mostly negative, effects on the women’s movement in Africa. This paper discusses research findings that show that older women (activists) are more likely to self-identify as feminists than younger women in Ghana. I argue that, while resistance to feminism may have roots in anti-imperialism, socio-cultural and economic privileges play a crucial role in such resistance at an individual level. Based on findings discussed in the paper I suggest the following. First, the perceived threat of feminism to African socio-cultural norms dialectically enhances opportunities for advancing women’s rights in development planning through a more transformative civil liberties route as opposed to a “special victims’ unit” approach. Second, further empirical research is needed to assess the impact of various intersecting variables (class, age, ethnicity, sexuality, religion and geographical location) on feminist politics in Africa.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19376812.2017.1286245

ABSTRACT: In postcolonial societies, emancipation and empowerment are often dialectically situated within colonial discourses of oppression and disempowerment. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the potential of religious institutions to contribute positively to women’s liberation is highly debatable. In particular, women’s ability to interpret Christian religious doctrine to advance their desire for equal rights depends largely on other leveraging factors such as education and socioeconomic status. This paper discusses field research findings in Ghana that suggest that while Christian religious ideologies reinforce cultural beliefs about women’s subservience, participants in this study find that critical engagements with religious or cultural ideologies can contribute to deconstructing patriarchal interpretations of religious or cultural beliefs that marginalize women. These interpretations of otherwise oppressive provisions in the Bible are found to contribute to women’s activism for gender equality in terms of their conception of what constitutes equality and the divine backing for it.

ABSTRACT: Women’s empowerment discourses in Africa involve contradictory desires from women on one hand and society at large on the other. This article argues that the traditional validation mechanisms for women’s identities are crucial avenues for analysing both the conceptions and experiences of empowerment. Drawing on primary ethnographic data, I analyse paradoxes in women’s empowerment discourses in postcolonial Ghanaian societies, where neoliberal discourses thrive side-by-side with collectivist–socialist cultural ideals. Using an example of social capital, gained largely through mothering, I suggest that, because women’s relationships with capital are structured by local socio-cultural and global economic structures and relations, the theorisation and application of the concept of empowerment need to recognise the complicated relationships (with capital) that women negotiate on a daily basis.