Invitation to 2019 Humanities and Social Sciences Symposium

The Principal of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHUSS), Makerere University cordially invites you all to the 2019 Humanities and Social Sciences Symposium scheduled to take place on 15th-16th May, 2019 in the University Main Hall.

Theme: “A New East African: Agency and Identity Debates in the Region”

Time: 8:30am- 4:30pm on each day

Guest of Honour: Prof. Charles Olweny

Keynote speaker: Prof. Ruth Mukama

Interlocutor: Prof. Joy C. Kwesiga

**About the Humanities and Social Sciences Symposiums

In 2018, CHUSS hosted the first Humanities and Social Sciences Symposium with the resolve that this intervention would become an annual academic event in the college. The symposia series are organised in pursuant with the college’s mandate, among which, is the need to foster a vibrant academic environment in the university and the country that can promote intellectual debate and knowledge production in the fields of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Consequently, the 2018 symposium brought together the region’s Humanities and Social Sciences scholars to debate issues affecting the Eastern African polity in the Fourth Industrial milieu. The central thesis of the discourse focused on the new tools and methods needed to interrogate the new world order ruled by information technology. It also argued that the long tradition of Humanities and Social Sciences’ leadership provides answers to perennial problems affecting the world and located these disciplines at the centre of envisioning new futures of the Fourth Industrial Revolution in the region. The symposium arrived at two important conclusions. First, information technology had and was fundamentally changing East African society and subjectivity. Second, that because of and/or in spite of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the East African region and its peoples had witnessed major changes and shifts in the political, social and economic arenas.

The 2019 CHUSS Symposium takes major shifts in the East African society that have occurred in the last two decades as its point of departure in order to explore how agency and identity of the regions subjects have morphed during this period. Such a discursive foundation cannot only extend, but also deepen and/or broaden debates related to how the region and its peoples have changed in the last two decades of the twenty-first century. This thematic concern concedes that the landmass that is located at the western rim of the Indian Ocean has for millennia acted as a contact space between the different worlds and worldviews. Consequently, agency and identity are always in a state of flux. However, the forces of nationalism, regionalism, trans-nationalism, trans-culturalism, globalism, commerce, conquest, racism and other cultural-political and socioeconomic processes have overlapped to produce a uniquely and complexly East African ethos that has reshaped and remapped the very idea of ‘East Africanness’ as manifested in violent eruptions, dispossessions, displacements and re-alignments.

Related link https://chuss.mak.ac.ug/events/call-abstracts-humanities-and-social-sciences-symposium-2019-0

Date: 
Wednesday, May 15, 2019 - 08:30 to Thursday, May 16, 2019 - 04:30
Event Venue: 
Makerere University Main Hall
College/School: 
Contact Information: 
1. Dr. Mugumya Levis, Chair of the Organizing Committee/Tel: +256772475807/+256702475807 2. Dr Edgar Nabutanyi, Member of the Organizing Committee/Tel: +256772971204/Email: nabutanyiedgar@gmail.com enabutanyi@chuss.mak.ac.ug