Return envelopes and a ballot for the election have been mailed to all eligible members. Only current (2002) members of the Association may vote. According to ASA bylaws, each ballot must be mailed and placed in an unmarked sealed envelope by the member, and the unmarked sealed envelope must then be placed in another envelope bearing the name and address of the member. Ballots must be mailed to the ASA Executive Office in the accompanying envelopes and received by September 30, 2002.
 

I wish to express my greatest appreciation for the honor of being nominated to run as a candidate for the ASA's 2002 position of Vice-President. I was born and raised in Mozambique and came to the United States as a political refugee in 1965. Since 1986, I have been Frank Porter Graham Professor and Chair of the African-American and African Studies Department at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNCC). I have a B.A. degree in History from Catholic University, an M.A. in History from American University, a Ph.D. in African History from Duke University, and a Master's Degree in Epidemiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before assuming the chairmanship of the African-American and African Studies Department at UNC Charlotte, I taught at two predominantly black institutions, namely, St. Augustine's College (1971-1975) and Jackson State University (1975-1986). My main academic concentrations in graduate school were former French Equatorial Africa, with Chad as the major focus, and Lusophone Africa, Mozambique being a natural point of interest for me. Over the years, I have taught such courses as West Africa, East Africa, Southern Africa, Pre-Colonial and Colonial Africa, Modern Africa, Introduction to African Civilizations, World History, Pan-Africanism, History of Military Regimes in Africa, Introduction to African-American and African Studies, African-American History, the History of Economic Development in Africa. I have attended certificate classes at The University of Michigan (Public Health), Howard University (African Studies), Southern Connecticut College (African Studies Institute), UNCC (Epidemiology), the University of Yaounde (Cameroon Studies), and the University of Nairobi (Kenyan Studies).

I served as a member of the ASA Board in 1986-1989 and as a Co-Coordinator of the South-Eastern Seminar in African Studies (SERSAS) in 1986-1989. Currently, I am also the Executive Director of Educators United for Global Awareness (EUGA). My major publications include books, articles, reviews in journals, and essays in reference works. Books include: Africa and its People (1982), African Profiles (1975); The Returning Hunter (1978); Cameroon and Its National Character (ed.) (1981); Cameroon and Chad in Comparative Perspectives (1989); Kenya: The Land, the People, and the Nation (ed.) (1990); Chad: A Nation in Search of Itself (co-author) (1998); Roots of Violence: A History of War in Chad (1998); Africana Studies: A Survey of Africa and the African Diaspora (ed.) (1993); Tragedy and Triumph: Mozambican Refugees in Southern Africa (Praeger-Greenwood, contracted and forthcoming July 2002). My book articles have been featured in Disease in African History (Hartwig and Patterson, eds.) (1978); Independence Without Freedom (Mugomba, ed.) (1980); Religion, State and Society in Contemporary Africa (Ahanatu, ed.) (1992); Ethnic Conflict and Democratization in Africa (Glickman, ed.) (1995); State Building and Democratization in Africa (Mengisteab, ed.) (1999); and African Economic Development (Nnadozie, ed.) (2000). My articles have appeared in African Studies Review, Journal of African Studies, Journal of Negro History, African Affairs, Journal of Southern African Affairs, InternationalReview of African Studies (a Lusophone journal), Social Science and Medicine, Current History, Africa Today, Africa in the World, Western Journal of Black Studies, ConflictQuarterly, Journal of Islamic Minorities, The Researcher, Sunbelt, and A Current Bibliography on African Affairs. My essays have been featured in such references as Encyclopedia of Africa South of the Sahara, Encyclopedia of the Islamic World, McGill'sMilitary History of Africa, Masterplots, Great Lives of the 20th Century, and Oxford World Political History. Notwithstanding my schedule as a department Chair, I have found time to secure several major grants: In 1996-1997, I was a Fulbright Fellow in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Malawi researching on the Mozambique refugees' conditions; twice, with a colleague, I secured two $100,000-grants to study infant mortality in Cameroon and Zimbabwe (1986 and 1995); I have had four Group Projects Abroad grants on Africa; I have also been awarded major grants by the Lilly Endowment, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Gulbenkian Foundation. Over the years, I have continued to served as a proposal reviewer for the US Department of Education's Africa programs. Finally, I should mention that I have been a consultant on many academic and non-academic projects, including the review of five African and/or African-American Studies Programs in the Nation. 
 

Candidacy Statement

For those who have followed my interest in the affairs of the ASA, my candidacy represents proven commitment and experience. While on the Board (1986-1989), I kept my commitment to the members by ensuring that the Association remained faithful to its mission of promoting scholarship; maintaining affordable dues to all members regardless of institution; and continuing to be the free forum for all irrespective of ideology. I also raised the issue of fair representation on the Board on the basis of race, gender, discipline, and region. Thus, while on the Board in 1989, heeding President Nzongola's call, I single-handedly collected 35 signatures during that annual meeting, which ensured the nomination and the subsequent representation of an African-American on the Board. In 1994, I recommended to President Alpers the changes that have been enacted regarding the required presence of at least three members during vote counting, the disclosure of the tally, and the right of any candidate to contest the results (I hold in my possession the correspondence memoranda). Also, while on the Board, I registered in writing a grievance to President Nzongola about how skewed the Board minutes appearing in the Newsletter were. The Directorate subsequently promised to change the reporting by laying less emphasis on who said what. In Toronto in 1994, three or four members and I were critical of the fact that some of the Board's public (town) meetings were scheduled at a time when very few members could attend, such as 7:30 a.m. The Board eventually responded and such meetings have now been scheduled at membership-friendly hours. 

I believe we have weathered most of the storm and the Association is better off today than it was 10 years ago: Montreal 1969 is an episode of the past; the "gate-keepers," referred to by Thandika Mkandawire in The African Studies Review (1997), have lost their grip on power as well as the key to "the castle"; our elections are thoroughly transparent; the under-represented constituencies are being brought to the fold; and both the Board and the Executive Office seem to respond promptly to members' concerns. However, as the times change, every organization faces new challenges. I therefore believe the Association could explore various innovative ideas. For example, we all know that it is much cheaper to sponsor an African student's university education in Africa than in the Western. Our Association has never sponsored a single full-time university student in Africa or the US. In contrast, the small association, Educators United for Global Awareness, of which I am the Executive Director and whose members are mostly school teachers and a few college professors who have traveled to Africa, last year began sponsoring two students in Mozambique for a full four-year tuition package of $2,0000 each at the country's new Catholic University of Mozambique! Also, we have consistently complained that myths and stereotypes about Africa seem to never end, all our enlightened pronouncements and publications notwithstanding. I believe we fail to realize that we bear part of the responsibility, as we constantly put down the African leadership (rarely noting the exceptions), overplay the issue of corruption, castigate the African masses' passivity to tyrants, and sometimes demonstrate little sensitivity to African feelings, while showing amnesia of the impact of the past, the harshness of Africa's physical environment, and the kindness and decency of the African people. 
 

Likewise, we have done very little to confront one of the greatest obstacles to America's accurate understanding of Africa, the media! To borrow an analogy from a presidential campaign of almost 10 years ago, "it is the media, stupid!" Anything we say or write can be obliterated overnight by NBC and CBS (Peter Jennings' ABC seems to be a bit different), The New York Times (quite often), The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times (not The Washington Post), and the "scientific" documentaries of the National Geographic Society or Pat Robertson's TV pictures of hungry children in Sudan. Indeed, we may loudly mourn the passing of Julius Nyerere or hire a griot to praise the magnanimity of Nelson Mandela. Yet, it takes only a single news broadcast in which Tom Brokaw or Dan Rather speak of the "death of a tribal leader" and the greatness of a "former convict" to destroy all we have built over the years on a balanced portrayal of Africa, including its leaders. If elected, I would recommend the creation of a Scholar's Task Force to "monitor" and respond to the media's portrayal of Africa. In his platform, our new ASA president spoke eloquently of the need to involve African-American scholars in the ASA. I would urge the Association to find concrete ways of attracting them. This might include designating representatives at these institutions to systematically find out why their membership in the ASA has been minimal. A practical gesture would be to plan some joint annual meetings with the African Heritage Studies Association (the visible outcome of Montreal 1969), the National Council for Black Studies, and the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History, as we have done with the Latin American Studies Association. 

I would still attempt to explore with the Board, the new Executive Directorate, and the membership the idea of holding one annual meeting on African soil in the future. I maintain that, in a sense, we owe Africa our jobs, and that holding a meeting on African soil would be a clear statement of our commitment to the continent that has allowed us to conduct our research projects even on very sensitive issues. So far, we have behaved like the G-7 and the IMF, who hold "aristocratic" meetings on poverty in the French Riviera and not in an African city or in Bangladesh where the delegates would have the "privilege" of witnessing poverty first-hand. The African Literature Association, the National Council for Black Studies, and the African African-American Summit have all met in Africa. I also believe that we must ensure that the books we send to Africa get into the university libraries. Hundreds of scholars go to Africa every year. We could make arrangements with them to see to it that our book donations get to their destination. We might also increase the number of books we send to Africa by empowering a Scholar's Council to sit down with the publishers that exhibit their books at our conventions for possible donations of the books they are unable to sell.

A major problem we face is voter apathy. If elected, I would attempt to convince the Board to further explore the issue by doing a survey with a view towards increasing participation in the electoral process. On outreach, I think that the ASA could do more to assist teachers by facilitating, through the African Studies Centers, the acquisition of materials for classroom use. The ASA might wish to hold a special ceremony at its annual meetings to also recognize members that have been consistently involved with the school system and those school teachers known to have spent much of their lives promoting the understanding of Africa. I am pleased to know that we are going to recognize our graduates' best papers and even publish some in the African Studies Review. It would be fairer now that, more than ever before, the dictum "publish or perish" dominates the Academy, for the ASA to devote perhaps one issue to works done by aspiring full-time tenure-track scholars. In contrast to others, our journal covers more than a dozen disciplines and is therefore much more competitive to the disadvantage of younger scholars. 

We are painfully aware that Africa is in an unprecedented health crisis. The UN Security Council has had a special meeting on the issue and so have the African Heads of State and Government. I believe the ASA should be actively involved in the debate and adopt "Africa's environment, health and quality of life" as a theme for one of its future annual meetings. Such a meeting should consist not only of substantive papers on the interaction of health with history, politics, economics, education, society, the arts, culture, and so on, but also of a series of highly informative roundtable discussions by invited experts on such diseases as HIV/AIDS, malaria, trypanosomiasis, onchocerciasis, schistosomiasis, and the children's major killer diseases. Guests would come from African hospitals and medical teaching universities, the World Health Organization, the CDC, and the National Institutes of Health. Many of the guests would come at no cost to the Association. Following the conference, a specific call to action could come from the Association.

I realize perfectly that the capabilities of the Association are limited and that not every new or old idea can be put into practice. Yet, what I am suggesting is an engaging dialogue on the adoption of new approaches to old problems and new challenges. Finally, to lessen the financial burden of the Association, if elected, I pledge not to request the Association's funds for my attendance at the 2002 annual and 2003 Spring Board meetings. 

I have devoted the whole of my scholarly career to Africa, and have lived in West Africa for seven years working as a school teacher, university lecturer, media consultant, and researcher. For ten years I was the chair and then founding director of the African Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania and its federally-funded Title VI consortium including Penn and Haverford, Swarthmore, and Bryn Mawr Colleges. Since 1996 I have co-directed the University’s Africa Health Group, a multi-disciplinary organization of medical, nursing, dental, veterinary, social science, business, social work, and education faculty who maintain collaborative relationships and research projects in universities and institutes in West, Southern, and East Africa. The group is dedicated to maintaining collaborative linkages for research and for training medical and social science students for careers in international health. Alone, I have trained more than a dozen PhDs who are now faculty members in African, European, and American institutions and another twelve are in process.

I have served on several national bodies, including the ASA Board of Directors from 1987-1990, and Chair of the ASA Development Committee that began the campaign to create the Association’s endowment from 1989-1992. I have just begun a second four-year term on the ACLS Board of Directors (and the Board’s Executive Committee) where I have been instrumental in bringing Africa into its programmatic concerns. Throughout my days as an academic I have also been a research associate of the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ibadan.

My research has been devoted to understanding contemporary cultural issues, the social history of people in West Africa, particularly those in African cities, and practices associated with globalization. I have published numerous articles on life-styles and political outlets of the urban poor in West Africa; the transformations of ritual ideology over time and space in Africa and the Western Hemisphere; and pre-colonial social history along the coast of Benin. My first book, Patrons and Power: Creating a Political Community in Metropolitan Lagos, was awarded Britain’s Amaury Talbot Prize and was a finalist for the Herskovits Prize. An edited volume, Africa’s Ogun: Old World and New, was first published in 1989 and then expanded into a second edition in 1997. I am currently completing a volume on West Africa in the Diaspora: 1760 to 1860. 
 

Candidacy Statement

The ASA is facing an extraordinary challenge. In the wake of events and sentiments surrounding the September 11 tragedy, there is an enormous need for information that can reliably shape public opinion concerning Africa–to say nothing of other parts of our interdependent world. Almost daily, as Africanists, we struggle to respond to innumerable questions about the peoples and countries that are part of our intellectual and personal lives. Yet distortions abound; they are unchallenged; and underlying causes of recent events are largely unperceived or unaddressed. As an association, we must take responsibility for shaping national discourse, preparing new generations to assume the responsibilities of global citizenship, and make sure that African voices are at the forefront of humanitarian and policy considerations.

How can this be done? For one, in recent years members and officers of the ASA Board have worked to increase the Association’s public outreach and membership. I applaud their efforts and will devote my energy to intensifying them. We need to expand our academic membership from hard core Africanists to, among others, would-be Africanists; K-12 teachers; science and professional-school faculty; policy-makers; NGO staff and activists; members of the media; and people from related fields including African-American, Middle-East/North African, and Diaspora Studies. It is also imperative that we strengthen collaborative ties and linkages with scholars in African universities and research institutes, and Africanists in still other regions of the world. Their views and the contemporary theoretical trends they embody must be taken into account if we are to develop and maintain effective intellectual scope. Dual intellectual citizenship is an essential ingredient in what makes us viable students of other areas of the world. 

For another, we need to develop closer ties to, and learn from, outreach experts. It is important that we cultivate media outlets and become known as a primary source of reliable and intelligent information. No single group in this country is as well endowed with expertise concerning the 54 highly diverse countries of the African continent as the ASA. No single group of experts is able to weigh and balance the historic and cultural complexities of this continent’s heritage, its current events, or the hopes and fears of its peoples as our members. It is essential that we make this knowledge available to the media, policy makers, the corporate world, and non-governmental organizations as they work to shape the way the world responds to the voices of the dispossessed or the jarring acts of violence that increasingly become the lethal ‘weapons of the weak.’ 

For still another, many more of us need to be public intellectuals. It is incumbent upon Africanists to develop strong and fearless voices in the discourse of contemporary affairs. Negative stereotypes of Africa that dominate the media or the inner circles of decision makers should be confronted. At no time has the outside world been in a better position to see Africa in a new light. The information highways, among many media avenues, are available, and we must empower ourselves to use them. 

Finally, the annual ASA meetings are critical to our development as individuals and responsible Africanists–whatever our professional specialty. The ability to learn from other Africanists has been a significant source of my personal inspiration, and I will endeavor to maintain high standards and challenging programs, providing the kind of leadership that keeps us at the intellectual forefront of our various disciplines and occupational undertakings.

If elected, I will work toward realizing the goals outlined above and leading the organization in ways that will bring credit to ASA and its members. 
 

It was a visit to Cairo that sparked my interest in Africa and turned my interest toward Northeast Africa, Islam and Arabic, when I was still an undergraduate in History at the University of Amsterdam in the early 1970s. This interest would take me to Somalia (as a result of  MA studies at SOAS, where B.W. Andrzejewski introduced me to Somali language and literature), and Sudan (as a result of a five-year stay in the northern Sudan, where I taught at the university of Khartoum and did dissertation research in the area bordering on Chad). As will be true for so many of you, my African experience, especially my work and friendships with Sudanese and Somalis in and outside of Africa, has shaped me as a scholar and a person in more ways than one. 

Having entered the field of African history at a time that African scholars were only beginning to be acknowledged in the West as significant contributors, I found myself fascinated with the voices (and thus sources) from within the societies I studied. As a result, source publications, some of the most important of which were co-authored with Jay Spaulding of Kean College, have been an important strand in my work.  Most recently I authored, together with Maryan Omar Ali, a book on Somali oral texts of different kinds entitled Women's Voices in a Man's World: Women and the Pastoral Tradition in Somali Orature, c. 1899-1980 (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1999). Since 1994 Boston has become the home of an extensive community of Somali immigrants and refugees; as a result Africa has become even more central to my life than ever before. 

At Wellesley College I teach classes in both African and the Middle Eastern history. I am currently chairing the History Department; in the past, I have also chaired the Women's Studies Department

Candidacy Statement

This year is (I believe) my twentieth year as a member of the ASA. As my co-conspirators of the Women's Caucus will agree, much has changed for the better in the Association - perhaps so much so that it might be enough just to say that I am willing to sign on to the Board and participate in its ongoing tasks. However, let me mention three interests that might be relevant to the road ahead.

First, I would bring to the Board a longstanding interest in the preservation, transcription, editing, and translation of African historical sources, and would like to contribute to the work the ASA does in this area. Second, I would like to see the ASA somehow promote the writing of books of popular history (and their equivalents in other disciplines).  Best-selling books on African history are often written by journalists. Even when they are good or passable - and often they are not - understandings of Africa in the U.S. and elsewhere would benefit, I believe, if scholarly insights would reach a wider public. 

Third, having learned so much from Somali and Sudanese colleagues and communities,  I would like to contribute to the ASA's efforts to offer research and other opportunities to African practitioners and fellow-scholars, and to strengthen African research and teaching institutions. Apart from being willing to do my share of the undoubtedly not so exciting routine tasks membership in the Board will bring, I would like to see the ASA be as relevant as possible to as many communities and institutions that care about Africa as possible, including African and African American youth in the U.S. 

After my undergraduate studies at the Institut Supérieur Pédagogique in Lubumbashi and Bukavu in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I received an M.A. in Applied Linguistics in 1984 from the University of Durham, U. K., with a thesis on the Generative Transformational Grammar of Copperbelt Swahili (DR Congo). I received my Ph.D. in Comparative Literature with a concentration on African/Caribbean Literatures from Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee in 1992. The same year, I joined the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Richmond where I am currently an Associate Professor of French teaching Francophone African literature. 

At the University of Richmond, I do not limit myself to my area of expertise, but I have instead expended my offerings to include substantial portions in Caribbean, Maghrebian and Quebecois literatures. From 1995-1998, I was involved in the strengthening of the Africa Concentration track in International Education with a Title VI Grant from the US Department of Education. My task was to create a self-paced Swahili program that I ran for four years. The nature and the size of my department call for close interdisciplinary cooperation between language sections. It is in this spirit that in 1995, two colleagues and I, co-directed an Undergraduate NEH Seminar entitled “Construction of Identities.” We brought in prominent outside speakers namely Homi Bhabha, V. Y. Mudimbe, Paul Gilroy, Noami Schor, Arjun Appadurai, Elena Poniatowska, and Antonio Benítez-Rojo. For the last three years, I have been on the faculty at the Middlebury College Summer French Language where I have brought an Africa-focused component to the curriculum. My most recent service to African studies is a three-year (1999-2002) mandate on the Executive Council of the ALA (African Literature Association) as secretary. I want to consider this experience a training ground for the ASA. I have wholeheartedly devoted myself to my duties while at the same time learning the scope, the width, and the relevance of the main issues of the day-to-day operations of a professional organization. I will transfer this experience to the ASA if elected to the Board of Directors. 

I have published several articles on Caribbean and African Literatures in Études Créoles, The West Virginia University Philological Papers, The Journal of Afro-Latin American Studies & Literatures, and Französisch heute. Book contributions have appeared in Le destin unique de Sony Labou Tansi, edited by Drocella Mwisha Rwanika & Nyunda ya Rubango, and in Nomen est omen : L’Afrique au miroir des littératures et sciences humaines edited by Mukala Kadima-Nzuji & Sélom Gbanou Komlan. I have contributed to The Journal of Asian & African Studies, and to the Revue Canadienne d’Études Africaines. A book manuscript on the criticism of African novel is being discussed with Heinemann. I am also working on Congolese literature within the confines of nationhood of disputed interests in the Great Lakes region. 
 

Candidacy Statement

The tragedy of September 11 has demonstrated that the world has become smaller and no one is a minor player. No other organization stands in suitable position than the ASA to ensure the strengthening of a spirit of cooperation with Africa. In this respect, the ASA ought to maintain its focus on strengthening ties with Africa in order to foster genuine, respectful, and mutual understanding between the two continents. In a context where mistrust spurred by isolationist tendencies could potentially reinforce old stereotypes to the detriment of our profession and expertise, it is essential to remain focused on the positives that Africa can contribute to world peace and mutual understanding. If elected to the Board of Directors, I would like to contribute to reaching that objective. 

The reinforcing of ties with Africa requires that sustained and meaningful research continue to better grasp the continent’s realities. There is a pressing need to define areas seeking immediate attention such as education, health, peaceful resolution of conflicts, and economic empowerment. If elected to the Board of Directors, I would like to work for imagining creative ways of sustaining research. 

The ASA is not the only professional organization that has taken Africa to heart, but one that has accomplished much. Therefore, if elected, I would work and advocate for a collaborative relationship with other sister organizations so that resources, expertise, and other specific skills could be pooled and shared for the best possible outcome. In short, I would like to have the chance to serve an organization to which I owe so much. 

Lisa McNee, Assistant Professor of French/Francophone Studies at Queen’s University (Kingston, Ontario), PhD Indiana University (African Studies/Comparative Literature), M.A. University of Cincinnati (French), magistère Université Paris IV-Sorbonne (French Civilization), B.A. Northwestern University. Languages (in descending order of fluency): English, French, German, Wolof, Swahili, Portuguese, Spanish, Bambara.

Currently a Visiting Professor in the Department of Modern Literatures at the University of Grenoble in France, Lisa McNee’s primary research and teaching focus is francophone Africa. Her book Selfish Gifts: Senegalese Women’s Autobiographical Discourses (SUNY Press, 2000) received the biennial Joel Gregory Award of the Canadian Association of African Studies in 2001. At present she is preparing an edited interdisciplinary volume on the influences of the Diaspora on colonial and post-colonial Africa, titled Back From Babylon: Repetition and Difference in Post/Modern African Cultural Production (SUNY Press, forthcoming). She has published articles in Research in African Literatures and Mots pluriels, as well as in edited volumes and various encyclopedias. Strongly in favor of interdisciplinary approaches to the study of African literatures and cultural production, McNee is keenly interested in the dialectic between the written and the oral. She has conducted fieldwork in the Democratic Republic of Congo (1990), Senegal (1992-1994, 1998) and Burkina Faso (1997, 1998), and hopes to conduct further research in Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal. Past honors include Queen’s University Principal’s Research Fund grant (1998), participation in the NEH Institute on Caribbean Performance and Literature (University of Puerto Rico, San Juan, 1997), research grants from the West African Research Association (1997), visiting researcher fellowships at the University of Bayreuth, Germany (1995, 1996), Regional Africanist research fellowship from the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana (1994), Fulbright-Hayes Doctoral Dissertation grant (1992-1993), Social Science Research Council pre-doctoral research grant (1990).

Candidacy Statement

As member of the Board of the African Studies Association, I hope to represent the large Canadian contingent within the Association, and voice the concerns of members who have slightly (or very) different issues than members working in the United States. I would also like to see more interaction between the Association and the Canadian Association of African Studies in future, and an extension of the current efforts to coordinate conferences and other activities. One example of such coordination concerns the Book Fair, which is a major attraction at the conference. Few Canadian publications are represented at the Fair, and I would like to see a stand devoted to Canadian publications in African Studies.

In addition, I believe that the efforts to promote the participation of scholars in the humanities in the Association must continue. Despite the work of Board members of the past, the social sciences dominate the conference to such an extent that some scholars of African literature, for instance, prefer to attend the African Literature Association conferences and rarely or never attend the ASA conference. As I am committed to interdisciplinary research, I would like to change this tendency. I have various ideas as to how we might do this, and I hope that we can make the conference a place for greater dialogue between the social sciences and the humanities.

I am also concerned about graduate student participation, and hope to encourage inclusion of graduate students who are building careers in African Studies. Small travel grants to graduate students could enhance student participation, as relatively few universities offer travel grants to graduate students attending conferences. CAAS already offers such grants, and I believe that ASA could do so as well. In this way, we could bolster the current “best graduate student presentation” competition, for more candidates would be able to apply.

I was born in the United Kingdom to Finnish and American parents and grew up in Tanzania (1960-1974) speaking Kiswahili, Finnish, and English. I attended public school in Dar es Salaam and learned about Tanzania through my Tanzanian friends, through travel, and through the eyes of my social scientist parents, who had a long-standing and deep understanding and appreciation of Tanzanian coastal cultures and of the country's history and politics more generally.   This gave me a distinctly internationalist or cosmopolitan outlook on life in my formative years and an intense curiosity about the differences and similarities in the human experience.  It has also made me see myself later in life as a bridge between cultures, as one who seeks common understanding across cultures in my teaching, research and public activities.

I received my BA (Political Science) and MA (Middle East Studies) from the University of Chicago and my PhD (Political Science) from Northwestern University in 1990.   I worked for two years as a program officer at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and then in 1992 joined the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I am currently an associate professor in the Department of Political Science and Women's Studies Program and am Director of the Women's Studies Research Center at the university. At the Center I have sought to build close links with women's studies programs and scholars worldwide but especially in Africa.  As an active participant in the African Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I initiated and co-directed a four-year USIA funded faculty exchange between UW and Makerere University in Uganda. I have organized workshops and symposia from Mwanga in rural Tanzania to UW-Madison concerning women's economic and political empowerment and helped coordinate the panels for the 8th International Interdisciplinary Congress on Women being organized by the Department of Women and Gender Studies at Makerere University, Kampala, in July 2002.

I have done extensive fieldwork in Tanzania and Uganda since 1987.  I published Changing the Rules:  The Politics of Liberalization and the Urban Informal Economy in Tanzania (University of California Press, 1997) and Women and Politics in Uganda (University of Wisconsin Press, James Currey and Fountain Press, 2000).  The latter book won the 2001 Victoria Schuck Award of the American Political Science Association for the best book published in women and politics.  It also received a 2001 Choice Outstanding Academic Titles Award. I also have published a co-edited volume What Went Right in Tanzania? People's Responses to Directed Development  (University of Dar es Salaam Press, 1996) in addition to articles appearing in Development and Change, Journal of Democracy, Journal of Modern African Studies, African Studies Review, Signs, and Comparative Politics in addition to other articles and book chapters. I am currently working on a co-authored book with four scholars and women's rights activists: Isabel Casimiro (Mozambique), Joy Kwesiga (Uganda), Shireen Hassim (South Africa) and Alice Mungwa (Cameroon) on the political impact of women's movements in Africa.  Two edited volumes are forthcoming: one on the womens movement in Uganda (with Joy Kwesiga) and another on the status of women in ten African countries. 

All of my research has involved close collaborations of various kinds with African scholars.   My work on African informal economies, associational life, and institutional and political change has attempted to highlight some of the more positive developments and models for change amidst political and economic crisis; critique Western political concepts that masquerade as universals, while recognizing those aspects of African realities that are both distinct from and part of global trends in practice and thought; to bring African experiences and thinking more into the field of vision of mainstream academia in the U.S.; and to draw on interdisciplinary insights while addressing disciplinary concerns in political science and women's studies.

My experience as a foundation officer and in raising funds (both institutional and for my own research) is a skill that potentially could be of use to ASA fundraising efforts.  I have also tried to share my expertise in fundraising by assisting African scholars seeking grants through the ASA's Women's Caucus and other means, including the publication of a "A Directory of Fellowships, Scholarships & Grants Available in the U.S. to African Women Students and Scholars" that is available on the web. 

Candidacy Statement

I have been attending ASA meetings regularly since 1986. I have also been an active member of the Women's Caucus and served as treasurer of the ASA affiliate Tanzania Studies Association for four years. African Studies Association meetings are markedly different from the other professional meetings I attend because of their diversity and energy. There is a real excitement one finds at ASA meetings among those who share an interest in and a love for Africa that is quite unique. Part of what has attracted me to the Association has been its interdisciplinarity as it has provided a forum where I could learn what anthropologists, historians, specialists in African literature and others had to say about the issues that interested me most and from whom I as a political scientist always had so much to learn. 

I am convinced that most of the cutting edge work in academia comes from the intersections of disciplines and so an organization that encourges conversations across disciplines opens up possibilities for such excellence in scholarship.  At the same time, I think we need to find ways to do more to use our expertise in African studies to speak to and influence more mainstream debates and scholarship in the disciplines, especially given that funding and scholarly trends have increasingly challenged the role of area studies.  All too often, the African perspectives and experiences are relegated to the margins, partly because non-Africanist scholars have not bothered to educate themselves sufficiently about African realities to incorporate them into their research agendas and teaching in a meaningful way.  But perhaps we too as Africanists have not always effectively contributed to debates in a way that would bring African similarities and differences into comparative analysis in a useful way. I would like to see the Association continue to expand its efforts to make sure that Africa is well represented in cross-regional dialogues, initiatives and studies as well as to take the lead in many such initiatives.

In addition to bringing Africa into focus in cross-regional initiatives, I would like to see more creative efforts to encourage cross national research between scholars internationally and in Africa.   Based on first hand experience, I am certain that all can benefit from mutually collaborative research initiatives. These relationships are not without difficulties, but I believe that the payoffs generally outweigh the challenges of intercontinental collaboration. I also think we need to encourage more creative ways of sharing resources across continents using collaborative research grants, the internet, faculty and student exchanges, developing short term fellowships to places with the best Africa-related library resources, and strengthening ties with African universities and research institutions. We should be especially encouraging of those groups like women and junior scholars who have not always been strongly represented in collaborative research, in exchanges and as visiting scholars.  We should similarly seek to strengthen ties with scholars from countries that have suffered from isolation due to civil war.

As an association we could do a lot more to assist graduate students and junior scholars, who represent the future of the field.  We could do more to organize panels, workshops, and publish articles in the ASA Bulletin or on the ASA website on issues like "the Zen" of writing grant proposals, landing a job as an Africanist, publishing articles in African studies, publishing books in African studies, teaching about Africa, teaching about Africa as an African in North America, and other such nuts and bolts topics.  Syllabi could be collected and posted on the web.  Graduate student papers of exceptional quality presented at the ASA meetings could be awarded prizes (non-monetary).   In the Midwest, graduate students have been organizing their own Graduate Student Conference in African Studies. Such initiatives should be strongly encouraged.

We need to get better at self-promotion of the superb work by Africanists that all too often goes unrecognized by non-Africanists in academia unless it is extremely controversial.  Although there is a lot that could be done outside of the ASA, we in the Association could do more to promote our own scholarship as Africanists by awarding more paper prizes for select categories at the ASA meetings and a book award for the best book on women in Africa, for example. I would like to pursue these and many other ideas to promote Africanist scholarship more generally.

Finally, we need to continue taking concrete steps to engage the media, policy makers, foundations, grade school and high school educators, and the general public. We need to find more effective ways of challenging the racist and dehumanizing depictions of Africans in public discourse.