Kansas African Studies Center UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS
NEWSLETTER
FALL 2014
KU Hosts 20th Annual MAAAS Meeting
This fall, the Kansas African Studies Center (KASC) had the great pleasure to welcome the Mid-America Alliance for African Studies (MAAAS) back to its KU birthplace for the organization’s 20th annual meeting. This was the 5th time that KASC has hosted the annual gathering since the inaugural MAAAS meeting was held at KU in 1995. The meeting provided an opportunity to reflect on past achievements and consider promising future directions. Discussions examined the relevance of African Studies scholarship for the Mid-America region and the benefits of African Studies to the university education mission. One enduring contribution of work in African Studies has been not only to illuminate how standard forms of knowledge bear the imprint of colonial power, but also to develop intellectual practices, rooted in everyday experience of life in African settings, that provide the foundations for broader human liberation. This idea found expression in the conference theme of “African Studies: Concepts and Practices for Decolonizing Knowledge.” Reflecting both the conference focus on decolonizing knowledge and the occasion of the 20th annual meeting, we welcomed back as keynote speaker former KASC Director, former MAAAS President, and founding member of MAAAS, Garth Myers. Dr. Myers is now the Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of Urban International Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, CT. He was present at the inaugural meeting of MAAAS and was a signatory to the original MAAAS charter. Dr. Myers has a long history of work that exemplifies the theme of decolonizing knowledge, most recently drawing on understandings and experience of African urbanism as a foundation for re-thinking conventional perspectives of urban studies in general. His keynote address, “Building from the South: Comparative Urbanism from African Knowledge Bases,” highlighted this work.
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