Makerere University College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHUSS) with support from the Mellon Foundation is framing a book on pedagogies to guide humanities scholars conduct Archival research in the Global South. The book will be two special issues of the Journal of Mawazo and the Journal of Languages, Literature and Communication.
The college has also created a community (in terms of reading groups, symposium and colloquium) and inaugurated discussions and debates around archiving in its various forms.
In addition, an international conference is being planned for November 2024 as a gift to humanities research in Archiving, Memory and Method from the Global South.
The College received a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation of New York to support research in Archiving, Memory and Method from the Global South.
The primary aim of the research project was to build capacity for Makerere faculty and students to engage in archival research and theoretical debates that reconfigure the archives as sites of power, memory and social struggle.
Thus, the funding has congregated Makerere University scholars and students to collaborate with archival institutions and communities to ethically shape future trends and debates in archival preservation in Uganda, including in the repatriation and decolonisation of colonial-era archives.
This project’s research trajectory, public engagements and outputs will significantly contribute to Makerere University’s strategic direction of becoming research led university.
Over the last 24 months, the 15 scholars, 3 post-doctoral researchers and 8 graduate students have, through quarterly reading groups, symposium and archival fieldwork, not only contributed to and increased academic vibrancy in the College in terms of archival research, but they have also generated substantial data that can inform the future methodological and theoretical direction of archiving scholarship in the region.
By this cohort of Makerere University based archival scholars approaching fieldwork, archival documents, oral histories, linguistic data, archaeological artifacts, they have unearthed a productive intersection between archival research, fieldwork, and the archiving of knowledge in contested domains of public life.
