| About
AASP
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The AASP is an organization
made up of the Deans, Directors, Chairpersons, Committee Heads, or individuals
who have the responsibility for organizing or leading the African Studies
program at their college or university. Members range from Directors
of the large Title VI centers to colleagues who keep the flame of African
Studies alive in quite isolated settings. Members may head stand
alone African Studies programs or carry out their Africanist activity within
programs that may include African and African-American Studies, Black Studies,
Multicultural Studies, or Global Studies. AASP’s primary concern
is to reach out and support all Africanists who shoulder campus responsibility
for African-related activities.
The purpose of AASP is to keep all members informed of major national developments that impact African Studies programs. The AASP accomplishes this communication in several ways. For one, a listserv has been developed to facilitate communication to all African Studies programs. Secondly, AASP meets twice a year, once in conjunction with the annual meeting of the African Studies Association, and secondly, each April for a three-day meeting held at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. The annual Washington meeting performs the crucial function of bringing before AASP members a wide range of people whose responsibilities and activities affect African Studies nationally. Thus in any April meeting we will typically hear from those with African responsibilities at the U.S. Department of Education; the Council for International Exchange of Scholars; the Black Caucus; the Senate and/or House Committee on Africa; the Department of State; the National Security Council; the Social Science Research Council; the Ford Foundation and/or other foundations with major African commitments; the Council on Foreign Relations; the Kennedy Center’s African Odyssey Initiative; the National Summit on Africa; and TransAfrica, AfricaNews, the Africa Policy Information Center and other NGOs. The purpose of this concentrated dose of Africana is to keep all programs fully abreast of current national trends in policy formation, funding opportunities, NGO activity, fellowships and scholarships, language training, and other activities that impact AASP member’s ability to deliver training about Africa. African Studies programs from throughout the country can attest to the fact that information garnered (and contacts made) at our annual meetings led directly to their programs being funded from both government and foundation sources. Together with the African Language Teaching Association, AASP shares the task of administering two competitive Department of Education funded Group Project Abroad training programs in African languages. The training programs take place in-country. The Summer 2001 programs took place in Tanzania for Swahili and in South Africa for Zulu; a new funding competition for GPA programs from 2002-2004 is currently underway. Beginning in 2001, the AASP annually gives the Francois Manchuelle Award honoring innovative work in expanding the domain of African Studies at the undergraduate or K-12 levels, or for promoting novel and effective outreach initiatives to American communities with an interest in Africa. AASP activities are supported by extremely modest dues, ranging from $25 to $100 per year, depending upon the size of your program. The main work of the AASP is carried out on a voluntary basis by the Chair and Vice-Chair of the AASP who serve two-year terms. Currently Judith A. Byfield from Dartmouth College is Chair. For further information about AASP activities, please contact Byfield by e-mail: jbyfield@dartmouth.edu. MEMBERSHIP
FORM
This annual award was established by the Association of African Studies Programs of the United States at their annual meeting in Washington DC, April 6-8, 2000. It honors the memory of the late Francois Manchuelle, a distinguished Africanist who lost his life in the TWA 800 air crash off New York in the summer of 1996. Francois dedicated his scholarly life to the teaching and popularizing of African studies at the undergraduate level in four-year colleges and within small communities in the United States – groups normally overlooked by the large, research-oriented universities and foundations. The Francois Manchuelle Award will be awarded for innovative work in expanding the domain of African studies at undergraduate and/or K-12 levels, and for promoting novel and effective outreach initiatives to American communities with an interest in Africa. In more precise terms, the Association of African Studies Programs would like to honor distinguished innovative work in the following areas: --Elementary and high school
instruction on Africa.
Nominations for this award should be directed to the chair of the Association of African Studies Programs and should be received no later than June 30th of each year. Candidates should submit a three-page double-spaced description of their project, together with any supportive materials. The Association will nominate a panel of three judges at its annual meeting in April. None of the judges will belong to an institution applying for the award. The judges will review the applications and decide on the winner by August 31st of each year. The winners will be announced at the annual meeting of the US African Studies Association in the fall of each year. The first cycle of this award took place in 2001. Applications for the 2003 Award should be submitted to Judith A. Byfield, Dartmouth College, by June 30, 2003. Further information can be received by writing Dr. Byfield at: judith.a.byfield@dartmouth.edu. FRANCOIS MANCHUELLE AWARD RECIPIENTS The AASP is pleased to announce that the first recipient of the Francois Manchuelle Award is Brenda Randolph and the organization African Access. For twelve years African Access has developed solid materials on teaching and learning about Africa and then used innovative technology to bring this information to the K-12 community. African Access has been especially effective in bringing a critical voice to books on Africa marketed for children to an ever widening group of educators. The Award Committee noted that “the African Access target audience of K-12 is a particularly critical community to reach if we Africanists are really going to change how Americans view Africa.” The Award Committee also wished to note and give Honorable Mention to Thomas Hale and a program at Penn State called “New Connections.” In this program interactive video courses on Africa are brought to remote campuses of the Penn State system that otherwise would have no opportunity to study Africa. The Award Committee feels that both of these proposals truly honor Francois Manchuelle’s commitment to bringing down barriers to the study of Africa. The 2002 François Manchuelle Award went to the African Studies Center Outreach Program at Boston University for its impressive outreach to K-12 teachers. The Summer Institutes and lectures provide invaluable opportunities for the K-12 teacher to learn more about African history and societies. The games, curriculum guides and loaning library make available critical materials they can incorporate into their classes. In addition, the Outreach Program must be commended for its web-site which is an invaluable resource for teachers especially those beyond Boston who do not have easy access to the city's resources on Africa. The Outreach Program has regional significance when one considers the paucity of African Studies in the colleges and universities in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. The director of the program,
Barbara Brown, deserves special praise for her hard work and dedication
to the struggle to get Africa included in the K-12 curriculum requirements
in Massachusetts. This is an important victory and it will only deepen
the demand for the important work the Program is conducting.
Motion of the Association
of African Studies Programs
We, the members of the Association of African Studies Programs (AASP) at our 1993 Spring Annual Meeting, unanimously join the African Studies Association, Middle East Studies Assocation, the Latin American Studies Association, the South Asian Council of the SSRC, the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars, the Association of Asian Studies, the Boards of the Social Science Research Council and American Council of Learned Societies, and other scholars in seeking to separate foreign language and area studies in the United States from military, intelligence, and other security agency priorities and programs. We believe that long-term interests of the peoples of the United States are best served by this separation. Specifically, we reaffirm our conviction that scholars and programs conducting research in Africa, teaching about Africa, and conducting exchange programs with Africa should not accept research, fellowship, travel, programmatic, and other funding from military and intelligence agencies or their contractual representatives - for work in the United States or abroad. We are concerned especially about the Department of Defense (DOD) National Security Education Act (NSEA, "the Boren Act") and the new Central Intelligence and National Security Agencies Critical Language Consortium. We call on our colleagues to abstain from these and similar funding initiatives and consortia of security agencies. These military and intelligence programs violate the integrity of the scholarly process and will hinder our relationships with African colleagues and collaborators, embarrass African universities and governments, and, thereby, decrease U.S. access to scholarly information in African studies. We also believe that the broader interests of the people of the United States are served best by Africanist scholarship and programs oriented to goals, issues, and regional foci which are determined openly using academic and broader public priorities, not in secret or for the narrower priorities of military, foreign policy, and intelligence agencies. We are not opposed to U.S. government funding of African studies. Indeed, African studies by far is the poorest of the world area studies and urgently needs an increase of funding for activities in the U.S. and in Africa. Therefore, we urge the U.S. government to increase its funding for African studies and linkages through agencies and institutions outside the security agencies. Enactment: We ask that our AASP Chairperson forward a copy of this resolution to all parties in paragraph one, the Association of American Universities, National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant College, Association of State Colleges and Universities, National Independent College Association, Assn. of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, relevant members of the Administration and Congress, the Chronicle for Higher Education, relevant members of the military, intelligence, and other security agencies, and others he deems relevant. Passed unanimously by all members in attendance, March 31, 1993, Washington, DC [Note: At meetings of the
AASP in most years from 1994-2001, members have been asked if they wanted
to revisit, amend, or reconsider this resolution. The membership
declined to reopen the issue but to allow the 1993 resolution to stand.]
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June 2002