Lead the African way!

PurposeCountries in Africa have undergone an unprecedented transformation that has shaped the continent as they move ahead from the clutches of colonialism. The evolution of leadership and how organisations function optimally has given rise to the review of leadership approaches and practices, revolutionising its position in the global markets. With the recent spate of global suffering from the pandemic, the formal and traditional work structures are becoming transient. At the same time, the economic consequences of the Russo-Ukrainian crisis have catastrophic effects globally.Design/methodology/approachThe research was conducted via a systematic review of scientific sources from various academic websites. Eligibility criteria were defined with the agreement of pertinent themes and concepts.FindingsBy evaluating and analysing characteristics and success indicators from the blend of leadership competencies ascertained from Afrocentric principles in response to African associated problems, Africa can cement its leadership concepts without following the global north principles. These philosophies are resilient enough to contend with a range of VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) complexities, including the impact of the recent global pandemic of immeasurable proportions and the prospect of war as the Russo-Ukrainian conflict intensifies.Originality/valueWithin the African environment, there is a greater focus on the human element in shared values, holistic well-being, cooperation and experience. The global community band together to deal with these complexities. This is a typical example of global connectedness with positive and negative connotations.

‘Did COVID-19 exist before the scientists?' Towards curriculum theory now

We live in an era that normalized absurdism and abnormality. From successive devastating economic and environmental havoc, the world is now before a pandemic with a lethal footprint throughout the planet. The pandemonium became global. This paper situates the current COVID-19 pandemic within the context of an endless multi-plethora of devastating sagas pushing humanity into an unimaginable great regression. In doing so, the paper examines, how such pandemic reflects the very colors of an intentional epistemological blindness that frames Eurocentric reasoning, which crippled the political economy of global capitalism deepening and accelerating a never-ending and non-stop crisis that started in 2008. The paper explores also the social construction of the current pandemic and argues for alternatives ways to think and to do education and curriculum theory alternatively to challenge Modern Western Eurocentric reasoning. In doing so, advances itinerant curriculum theory as a just approach, a just alter-curriculum ‘theory now', one that respects the world's pluri-epistemological diversity, and aims to walk way from utopias framed within the borders determined by coloniality towards an anti-decolonial climax, and ‘heretopia'.

Settler colonial bordering and post-pandemic futures: disrupting the nation state in Aotearoa/New Zealand

In Aotearoa/New Zealand, the relative safety offered by border regime closures during Covid-19 promised to ease uncertainty surrounding perilous futures, yet it did so by extending nation building into more intimate areas of life, exacerbating existing lines of discrimination. While justified in terms of crisis management, state expressions of citizen care during the pandemic were largely modelled in terms of a particular conflation of nature, society and economy peculiar to settler colonialism. Using bordering practices during the pandemic as a point of departure, this essay draws on scholarship on borders to interrogate settler colonialism in Aotearoa. This allows for four innovations: First, it situates Covid-19 as structure rather than event, one which accentuated historical patterns of nation-making. Second, it underscores continuities in Indigenous relations of ownership, belonging, social reproduction, kinship ethics and environmental engagements. Third, it suggests alliances between migrants, non-white and colonized peoples;those for whom borders do not remain at the periphery, but rather penetrate deep into the informal spaces of the everyday. And fourth, it recalibrates resistances as expressions of sociality aimed at reclassifying nature, economy and society. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Cultural Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

COVID-19 and the View from Africa

In Africa, refusal of COVID-19 and other vaccines is widespread for different reasons, including disbelief in the existence of the virus itself and faith in traditional remedies. In sub-Saharan countries, refusal is often made worse by opposition to vaccines by the religious establishments. This is a pressing problem, as Africa has the highest vaccine-avoidable mortality rate for children under the age of five in the world. Dialogue between those wishing to promote vaccines and those who resist them is essential if the situation is to be improved. This article argues that Western and other aid agencies seeking to promote vaccination programs need to develop a dialogue with resisters, and in this process to embrace and commend the ancient African philosophical tradition of Ubuntu, incorporating it into these programs as a way to overcome such entrenched resistance. The paper concludes with concrete recommendations for how to accomplish this goal.

Disease discourses, African knowledge systems, and COVID-19 in Senegal

Too often African knowledge systems are excluded from formal discussions surrounding public health, as they are often perceived traditional mechanisms that operate outside the sphere of mainstream science and medicine. Yet with the diffusion of COVID-19 across the globe, new conversations have emerged in relation to Africa's community-based successes in responding to the virus and its impacts. This chapter employs a geographical analysis of Senegal in order to highlight the ways in which Senegalese have approached the diffusion of COVID-19 and successfully controlled its spread. Using maps and qualitative data, this chapter underscores the ways in which global public health experts can draw from the expertise of African nations given the complex ways they have responded to both this pandemic and previous health emergencies. Findings indicate that science and community-based response systems are the key to Senegal's management of coronavirus. This chapter aims to subvert dominant discourses, which suggest that African states somehow stumbled upon their pandemic-related successes. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023. All rights reserved.

Digital welfare state and problem arising: an exploration and future research agenda

PurposeThe penetration of technology and the strengthening of evidence-based policies have paved the way for the automated delivery of social services. This study aims to discuss the inherent risks of this automatization, particularly those associated with the discrimination, exclusion and inequality problem, which the authors package under the theoretical umbrella of a digital welfare state (DWS).Design/methodology/approachThis conceptual article reviews the literature on the welfare DWS, with an empirical focus on the recent experience of selected countries from India, Kenya and Sweden. These countries reflect three different types of welfare regimes but are connected by the same digital social risk. The authors' exploration also includes questions about what this DWS has in common with and how it differs from the previous era. This article illustrates that there has been a very similar trajectory in regards to the development of the DWS and the associated risks in the examined countries.FindingsDWS has triggered new social risks (e.g. discrimination, exclusion and inequality in welfare access) that are a result of data breaches experienced by citizens. Further, vulnerable groups in the digital age should be viewed not only as those who lack access to welfare services, such as education, health and employment, but also as those without internet access, without digital skills and excluded from the DWS system.Originality/valueThe article calls for the development of scholarly research into the DWS in particular and the contemporary one in general. The authors also predict that a critical aspect of the future regime typology rests in the ability to mobilize resources to address contemporary digital risks, as every country is equally vulnerable to them. Overall, this article can be considered to be one of the initial works that focus on cross-national comparison across different meta-welfare regimes.

Indian Act Philanthropy: Why are Community Foundations Missing from Native Communities in Manitoba, Canada?: Revue Canadienne de Recherche sur les OSBL et l'Économie Sociale (ANSERJ)

Un modèle philanthropique axé sur le développement communautaire serait-il en train de renforcer les politiques coloniales plutôt que d'offrir des bénéfices économiques équitables? Cette étude analyse les transcriptions de vingt webinaires publics sur la philanthropie et la Loi sur les Indiens et évalue les 54 fondations communautaires établis au Manitoba, Canada. Ces 54 fondations servent seulement les villes et municipalités des colons-il n'y en a pas une seule dans les communautés autochtones. Comme elles ne desservent que leurs régions géographiques spécifiques, les fondations communautaires au Manitoba concentrent la richesse dans les villes et municipalités dominées par les colons, accaparant des ressources qui pourraient aider les communautés autochtones. Ce modèle philanthropique, en excluant les communautés les plus pauvres du Manitoba, renforce la marginalisation, la pauvreté et les risques de santé dans les communautés autochtones.Alternate :Could a philanthropic model aimed at community development enforce colonial policy rather than providing equitable economic opportunity? This research analyzes the transcripts of 20 public webinars on philanthropy and the Indian Act and maps the 54 community foundations in Manitoba, Canada. All 54 community foundations in Manitoba service only settler-dominated cities and municipalities, with none on Native communities. As community foundations serve only their specific geographical areas, the community foundations in Manitoba effectively concentrate wealth in settler-dominated cities and municipalities, taking away needed resources from Native communities. In excluding the poorest communities in Manitoba, this philanthropic model further entrenches marginalization, poverty, and health risks for Native people on Native communities.

Care as (re)capture: Data colonialism and race during times of crisis

This article examines the role that data-driven technologies play in expanding and reasserting the legitimacy of the US racial state during times of crisis. Specifically, I examine how prison officials used a software called Verus to reinforce the perceived necessity of penal institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Government officials used Verus to produce narratives that (1) recast criminalized communities as dangerous and therefore disposable and (2) shielded carceral institutions from liability for systematic neglect. Ultimately, the aim of this article is to contribute to emerging critical concepts such as "data colonialism,” a term that has largely been used to describe the social and economic consequences of parasitic data extraction and monopoly control of digital infrastructure. In addition to these issues, I argue that data-driven technologies are used as vehicles for movement capture and the reproduction of prison logics that enable modes of racialized economic exploitation that extend far beyond the high-tech innovation economy. © The Author(s) 2023.

Preparing to See Hope: On the Utopic Potentiality of the Stories We Share

I framed my response to your presidential address as a letter in hopes that this intimate form will find you and others in the vein of the words you cite from Audre Lorde, "the personal as political.” Writing to you in this way allows me to aspire after the intimacy denied by the virtual 2021 ASA conference, to imagine what it would have been like to be in a shared space, feeling the urgency of your call for "Love and Resistance in a time of COVID.” This letter, then, might be read as a yearning for social and intellectual associations that have been made dangerous, not least by the COVID-19 pandemic, but also by the increased policing of our work as scholars and teachers in a nation and within institutions organized around the violences of settler colonialism and white supremacist politics hostile to the flourishing of minoritized life and knowledges. Let me begin by thanking you for the story of your experience growing up as a mixed-race Cambodian American adoptee in Valdosta, Georgia. Your evocative descriptions helped ground me in time and place, from the significance of Valdosta as a site of "refuge” during the American Civil War to its transformation over the course of Reconstruction and Jim Crow to the 1980s, when it became the scene of the "most formative” years of your childhood. The reflections you shared on the loneliness you experienced, and the painful "lesson of indifference” instructed by your father, who believed it best to keep the racist crimes committed against your family "to oneself simply because ‘no one cared' and doing otherwise would lead to undeniable trouble and unreconciled hurt,” were deeply affecting and illuminating. Your story finds resonance with the work of Leslie Bow, Lee Isaac Chung, and Monique Truong, who elucidate histories of Asian racial formation and sociality in the US South.1 As a recent transplant to Tallahassee, a north Floridian city that often feels like a part of south Georgia, these texts and your words have helped me negotiate the conflicting feelings and palimpsestic temporal geographies of a place I am still trying to make into home

Microbes of Empire

In the ancient world, plague spoke in the language of the gods: it was the natural—which is to say divine—world's way of manifesting a rupture in the social order. The ancients' understanding of the connection between these worlds has been severed over time, but perhaps the contemporary moment can return us to that sacred insight. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world has witnessed a proliferation of devastating climate disasters in the form of record-setting temperatures, especially heat waves, and accompanying droughts, fires, hurricanes, cyclones, tornados, monsoons, and landslides. In the analysis that surfaced at the 1989 conference, the new viruses emerged as evidence of the unforeseen and disastrous consequences of that progress: the technological and other advances that contributed to increasing globalization and development practices, including improved transportation that moved people and goods more rapidly around the globe and the settlement of a growing population in previously sparsely inhabited or uninhabited areas around the world. [...]just as the social and global inequities are etched in the health outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic, they are expressed, as the environmental justice movement has shown, in the inequitable distribution of environmental risks: manifestations of the practices of human exploitations intrinsic to colonialism and empire. Writing in Science in 2000, the Nobel Prize–winning molecular biologist Joshua Lederberg, who had given a keynote address at the 1989 conference, noted how the very human innovations that had spelled evolutionary success (increased longevity, for example) had "fostered new vulnerabilities: crowding of humans, with slums cheek by jowl with jet setters' villas;the destruction of forests for agriculture and suburbanization, which has led to closer human contact with disease-carrying rodents and ticks;and routine long-distance travel.

Imagining Feminist Academic Collaborations Beyond Exceptionalized Crises

In March 2020, in response to the COVID-19 global pandemic, universities and colleges across the United States began to unroll plans to shift residential teaching to remote or virtual learning environments. As feminist scholars primarily located in the US academy, we are invested in mapping longer genealogies of crises in the settler-colonial US academy, delineating how racist, imperial, and hierarchical structures that are replicated and reinstated by the academy formulate continuous and ongoing discursive and material violence towards racialized, classed, and gendered minorities. By centering what we refer to as feminist modalities of care tthat center collective, communal, and transnational feminist interventions, this article challenges the imperatives of academic success and survival beyond the logics of emergency and crisis. We explore the interlinked transnational discourses of emergency and crisis, mapping their travels and circulations in local and global academic networks in ways that reproduce systemic inequalities and the politics of value that inform power hierarchies within the academy. Energized by a refusal to normalize crises, this essay is invested in showing how feminist interventions, here explored under three modalities, including research and teaching collaborations and coalitions that take place inside and beyond the academy and against its competitive logics, can challenge the imperatives of academic survival premised on notions of individualistic care, productivity, and worth.

Introduction: Do we really want a return to normal?

Governments in many nations responded to these upheavals with public spending programmes on vaccines and medical equipment, and financial support for businesses and workers during lockdowns and public safety mandates. Taking a visual approach to borders, through the photographic self-representations of the study's participants, Biglin finds that legal status and a sense of belonging, being at home in one's space, do not correspond. BRETT NICHOLLS is Head of Media, Film and Communication at the University of Otago in New Zealand.

Abolition as Durational Performance: Mutual Aid Aesthetics in Chicago's Southeast Asian Neighborhood

Responses to rising anti-Asian violence during the COVID-19 pandemic prompted multiple, often conflicting, actions including calls to defund the police, calls for more police, bystander interventions, and the exploitation of violence to promote influencers' brands. In Chicago's "Argyle" Uptown neighborhood, an area known as a Southeast Asian refugee business district, Asian Americans and local white government officials promoting liberal multiculturalist urban renewal projects used the news after the Atlanta spa shooting to advance their plans for gentrification and increased policing. How do we understand the colliding narratives of racial antagonisms, racial solidarities, and the genocidal logics of urban renewal, as they emerge at the intersection of settler colonialism and the afterlife of slavery? How is this question complicated by the entwined issues of refugee resettlement and multiculturalist solutions to anti-Asian violence? In this article, I argue abolition as durational performance offers an embodied, performance studies based analytic and methodology for the study and praxis of abolition. Abolition as durational performance centers the creation of life-affirming institutions, relations, and spaces while navigating the histories and bodily impacts of white supremacy, anti-Blackness, native genocide, and US liberal war on refugee resettlement as it is enacted through urban renewal and redevelopment projects. I focus on Axis Lab, a community-based arts and architecture organization based in Chicago, which launched its mutual aid and public arts project in June 2020. This is an abolitionist project inspired by the Black Panther breakfast and political education programs.

Decolonizing Time, Knowledge, and Disability on the Tenure Clock

We consider the tenure clock's enmeshment in the neoliberal academy's settler colonial and ableist modes of organizing labor and valuing knowledge, modes in turn informed by heteropatriarchal spatiotemporal logics. The tenure clock in the settler academy relies on labor performed by those positioned outside of its time—such as those in temporary or semi-temporary positions, staff, graduate students, and undergraduate students. Our motivation in tracing these logics and formulating feminist strategies to undo them stems directly from observing "faculty with disabilities" at our university struggling against the tenure clock;as well as seemingly abled women faculty, faculty of color, and contingent faculty, who have strained against the academic clock and ended up debilitated in the process. We articulate ways in which more collaborative understandings of university culture and knowledge production might serve to challenge the peculiar temporalities produced by the tenure clock. Listening and learning at the intersections of feminist, Indigenous, and disability studies scholarship teaches us to work toward imagining a different approach to tenure, and from there, the way to a different academy.

A/Moral Divide: Questions for an Asian American Studies Research Paradigm

Research for the community ultimately aims to effect social change. Transpacific studies offers an analysis about global power, war and colonial presence, and unequal exchanges between nations that explores the transnational ties of Asian Americans.11 For instance, Laura Kina and Wei Ming Dariotis's work examines the intersection of American empire and the racialized/gendered representations of mixed-race Amerasians. The promise of transpacific studies and critical refugee studies is that they not only assess the traumas, needs, and conditions of Asian American communities, but they also examine the subjectivities, hopes, and futures of migrants and refugees as active, creative agents themselves.14 For example, transpacific scholar Wesley Ueunten writes about resistance to the construction of an American military base in Okinawa: Old people, as old and tiny as my Baban [grandmother] in my memories of her, have come to sit on the beach every day in quiet but unrelenting resistance to American Manifest Destiny and Japanese fatalistic dependency on that Destiny. In theory then, the genealogical and discursive analyses of transpacific studies and critical refugee studies would shed light on how we view social realities, and illuminate what's often missing in the analysis of these concepts.

Lives More Recognizable Than Individual: Indigenous Communities in the Face of Pandemics

In light of these actions, the pandemic could be perceived as having bolstered the autonomy and jurisdiction of Indigenous governments relative to local municipalities, provinces, and the federal government. [...]these assertions should not be mistaken as a signal that the structures of Indigenous political subordination relative to state power have been, or stand to be, transformed in any significant way. With all eyes attuned to the need for "economic recovery," Indigenous people have predictably been invited to play a role in mainstream postpandemic economic recovery strategies. Any semblance of intergovernmental cooperation between Indigenous and Canadian governments, then, has once again been tethered to Indigenous participation in capitalist economies, which presumes an association between economic development and the transformation of Indigenous political subordination and excludes Indigenous people whose interests do not align with these ideals.

Privates: Theorizing Private Space in Trans Care

By "space," I mean a physical or digital, real or imagined, virtual and material environment in which social relations—individual or collective—can take place. Private property in the form of the home and land ownership—also a core element of American capitalist colonialist dream—continued to define legal claims to land that furthered policing, racial segregation, cisheteropatriarchal marriage, and other state violence. [...]community publics presume designers can produce environmentally-determined "community," Third, liberal publics are accessible to all—in a fictional world where everyone is equal. Relatedly, when nineteenth century, WASP, upper-class policies, laws, and norms deemed sex a private matter, gay men were forced to create their own counterpublics for their sexual rendezvous.

Strengthening critical allyship in social work education: opportunities in the context of #BlackLivesMatter and COVID-19

COVID-19 has shifted social work education and widened the gaps in services for historically marginalised communities, including people of diverse cultural, sexual and gender identities and social classes. Existing inequities based on cultural differences have been magnified, perhaps most recently evident in George Floyd's slaying and the subsequent #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations across the globe. Learning to be an ally for diverse communities and working towards the betterment of all people is a goal of social work education. We argue that simple allyship is not enough given the structural inequities present in North America and Australia the civil unrest amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Social work education's focus should trend towards allegiance with disadvantaged communities or critical allyship and include a commitment to undertake decisive actions to redress the entrenched colonial, capitalist, systemic and structural inequities that oppress many and provide unearned privilege and advantage to others. We explore strategies used in classrooms to promote allegiance and make recommendations for social work education, policy, and practice in this time of change.

Editorial Introduction: Special Issue: Time, Urgency, and Collaboration in the Corporate University

Elite universities saw huge gains on their endowments while community colleges are struggling to survive4 and lipservice to "diversity" does not translate into job security.5 We began this work with the conviction that transnational, intersectional collaborative strategies are urgently needed in response to the global rise of neo-nationalism within a persistent system of neoliberal racial capitalism: violence, poverty and displacement are escalating while wealth disparities continue to increase. Productivity translates into numbers and speed, resources are distributed based on seemingly neutral algorithms, while teaching and scholarship are assessed in terms of numerically measurable outcomes. [...]while right wing movements frame academia as a hub of subversive, radical thinking and activism, innovation and collaboration in the service of transformation often face institutional obstacles. The emphasis in the essays in this volume is not just on identifying injustice and violence but on creating paths for alternatives to emerge, to, with cover artist Althea Murphy-Price, position anew, create new spaces and paces, new materials, notions of beauty, and forms of resistance, to build communities and collaborations that will "imagine otherwise" (Sharpe 2006, 115)7 and make different collaborations and worlds possible. On Our Cover Art Althea Murphy-Price received her B.A. in Fine Art from Spelman College before completing her Master of Arts in Printmaking and Painting at Purdue University and her Master of Fine Arts at Tyler School of Art, Temple University.

Love of Empire by Dissociations

In the past two years, as the whole world has been deeply mired in the COVID-19 pandemic, we may have observed neoliberal capitalism's crisis of care: exposed and exacerbated by the global pandemic, made explicit alongside examples such as the collapsing of health systems, the shortage of care labor and overwork of nurses, the serious outbreaks in aged care facilities, the increased burden of domestic labor and care work due to school closures, and the worldwide rise of domestic abuse. Feminist calls for economic independence for (mostly middle-class) women to work for equal pay as men certainly do not resolve the care problem but, instead, further obscure colonial divisions of labor under which the racialized labor mostly from formerly colonized nations is made to fill up the gap.2 I consider the discursive formations of love as a point of departure to review how the global pandemic bears on our everyday practices of intimacy. The historical effects of racialized displacement can be seen as consisting of three sets of often-dissociated social relations during the pandemic crisis: archetypical angel-heroines in white (nurses), angels in the house (housewife and mother), and fallen angels (prostitutes).3 During the pandemic, many of us constantly experience fears about the health systems being overwhelmed, even while we express growing appreciation for the essential care provided by health workers. The virus eventually spread to the teahouses of Taipei's Wanhua neighborhood—also known as an adult entertainment red-light district in Taipei. Since Wanhua was reported as the center of a major cluster, the workers in the sexual venues, in particular, became a singularized target of public criticism.