Public Lecture: What does “sustainable governance” mean? Situating the debate in an “ecologies of knowledge” framework; Speaker: Susann Baller

Abstract:

The lecture reflects about MIASA’s main topic of “sustainable governance” by taking a non-normative approach, unwrapping the concept from different disciplinary perspectives. The lecture explores the semantic fields of “sustainable” and “governance” as well as the combination of both, and it asks how the use and non-use of “sustainable governance” as a concept is shaped and informed by different ways of how global knowledge production works. Before this background, the lecture shows how MIASA has contributed to a more nuanced understanding of the thematic field by taking the pluriversality of knowledge into account. For this purpose, the lecture brings the “sustainable governance” debate into conversation with a recent concept from art practice, the “mangrography”, a way of seeing the world from the mangroves, understood as a poetic and political metaphor.

Susann Baller is historian and researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch Berlin. From 2021 to 2023, she was Director of the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA), and from 2017-2020 she directed the Transnational Research Group “The Bureaucratisation of African Societies” in Dakar, sponsored by the Max Weber Foundation. Based in Accra and Dakar throughout this period, she was employed as a researcher by the German Historical Institute Paris. Prior to this, Susann Baller was a researcher and lecturer at the Humboldt University in Berlin and at the University of Basel as well as a fellow of the Swiss National Science Foundation at the Institut des mondes africaines (IMAF) in Paris and at the University of Michigan as well as a fellow at the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies. Specialised in African history, she completed her dissertation at the Humboldt University in Berlin (published under the title “Spielfelder der Stadt: Fußball und Jugendpolitik seit 1950” [Playing Fields of the City: Football and Youth Politics in Senegal since 1950], 2010). Her habilitation project deals with the topic of “Travelling Politicians: Power and its Representation in West Africa during Decolonisation, 1945-62”. In addition to the fields of urban, sports and youth history and decolonisation in West Africa, she has also worked on the topics of bureaucratisation, knowledge production and scientific cooperation.

This lecture is open to the public.

For virtual participation via Zoom, please use the following link:

https://uni-freiburg.zoom-x.de/j/61442824562?pwd=05OHw0WGNMabuO09ZtjoHtUbXVXjX4.1

Meeting-ID: 614 4282 4562
Code: chji2rfs6