African Voices - Heritage, Marginality and Hybridity in the Gold Fields of Southeastern Senegal
22 January 2016, 5:00 pm–6:30 pm
Event Information
Open to
- All
Organiser
-
Institute of Advanced Studies
Location
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IAS Common Ground, Ground Floor, South Wing, Wilkins Building
The Institute of Advanced Studies is delighted to host this lecture given by Dr Ibrahima Thiaw (University Cheikh Anta Diop of Dakar) and chaired by Professor Kevin MacDonald (UCL), part of the African Voices series, organised by the African Studies Research Centre.
Over the past millennia, south-east Senegal has gained a reputation as an important gold mining region. Today, it still lives by that reputation as it continues to attract global investments.
The region of has a fascinating past through the medieval period, slavery, colonialism and the recent effects of gold mining on national and regional population mobility, and on the preservation of cultural and natural resources. The effects imposed by culture and sociopolitical organisations on small-scale decentralised communities have been vast.
Dr Ibrahima Thiaw is the director of the archaeology laboratory of IFAN, a research institute based at the University Cheikh Anta Diop of Dakar. He has also directed the Musée d'Art Africain of Dakar for seven years. Over the past fifteen years, he has run several research programmes on sites associated with Atlantic slavery and European colonisation, including the UNESCO World Heritage site of Goree Island (Senegal), to collect comparative data on patterns of enslavement and impacts on local communities. He has also conducted several heritage management projects in Senegal, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Sierra Leone, Congo and elsewhere. His recent publications focus primarily on the Atlantic impact and on culture heritage management.
Dr Thiaw holds a PhD in Anthropology from Rice University (Houston, Texas, USA) and Masters degrees in both in Prehistory and History from from Paris X (Nanterre-France) and the University Cheikh Anta Diop of Dakar (Senegal) respectively.
This lecture will be followed by a reception from 6.30-7.30 pm which all attendees are welcome to attend.
Register here.