05/08/2024
The College's current Senior Fellows Sule Emmanuel Egya from Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University (Nigeria), Peter Woelert from the University of Melbourne (Australia), and Stephen Brown from the University of Ottawa (Canada) have recently published new articles in recognised journals: on the nexus of ecology and decoloniality, on strategic bureaucracy in university governance, and on country ownership and LGBTQI+ inclusion in hostile environments.
In his article about “Ecology and Decoloniality: Reading the Natural World in Twentieth-Century African Literature”, published in the journal Scrutiny2. Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa, Sule Emmanuel Egya argues that in pioneer African writing (in the frame of the empire writing back), the recourse to natures is a decolonial strategy, in that the writers deploy the natural world to counter the Western civilisation imposed on their epistemological order. Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” and Okot p’Bitek’s “Song of Lawino” are read as illustrations of how African writers of the colonial moment anchor their counter-discourse on the African natural world.
In the paper “Strategic Bureaucracy: The Convergence of Bureaucratic and Strategic Management Logics in the Organizational Restructuring of Universities”, Peter Woelert and co-author Bjørn Stensaker (University of Oslo) argue that over recent decades, reforms and changes to universities have given rise to a hybrid form of organisational governance: ‘strategic bureaucracy’ is characterised, the authors illustrate, by a strong focus on strategic leadership and the associated management techniques while also intensifying organisational features which are traditionally associated with bureaucratic governance, such as formalisation and hierarchical authority.
Stephen Brown’s new article “When development cooperation principles clash: Country ownership and LGBTQI+ inclusion in hostile environments” in the Journal of International Development focusses on how the principles of universal social inclusion (as prescribed in the Sustainable Development Goals) and of “ownership” of countries can be reconciled in “hostile environments”, where certain groups, such as LGBTQI+ people, are marginalised and even persecuted. Brown argues that adopting an emancipatory conceptualisation of ownership, under which the ultimate beneficiaries should determine priorities and strategies, eliminates the apparent contradiction and legitimises support to marginalised groups even if their own governments disagree.