SPP 1448: Adaptation and Creativity in Africa - Technologies and Significations in the Production of Order and Disorder

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The African continent and its role in the world are changing again. Political and economic liberalisation, changing state-society relations, new local and translocal dynamics as well as accelerated processes of globalisation are posing wide-ranging challenges. Africa is witnessing one of the most precarious periods in its post-colonial time: new distributions of sovereignty and forms of ordering are negotiated at various levels. The capacities of African societies to navigate these changes are crucial, yet the determinants of these capacities are heavily under-researched. The Priority Programme addresses the key question of how actors in post-colonial Africa deal with the multiple challenges they are facing by mobilising and transforming their institutional capacities of adaptation and creativity. Particular attention is being paid to the role of technologies and systems of signification in the production of order and disorder. The main goal of the research programme is an empirically informed theoretical discussion and clarification of the relation between adaptation and creativity. The Priority Programme has four structural aims: (1) to contribute to the understanding of what determines the capacity for adaptation and creativity in Africa in view of fundamental new challenges in various arenas; (2) to promote cooperation between academics from different disciplines in African studies in Germany and across different institutions of teaching and/or research in the humanities and social sciences; (3) based on the common research agenda and the networking of academics, to create an enabling framework for the development of a common vocabulary among representatives of different disciplines in African studies in Germany; (4) to increase the visibility of Germany-based African studies throughout Africa and in countries with an established tradition of African studies (such as France, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, the United States and Portugal), but also in those countries, which play an increasing role in Africa (such as Brazil, China, India and Russia). It does so by facilitating innovative, interdisciplinary research and by promoting research approaches, which are promising to take African agency serious.