From 31 October to 4 November, SALDRU co-hosted the final colloquium of the Anthropology of Human Security (ANTHUSIA) programme.
ANTHUSIA has been a three-year multidisciplinary European-funded project harnessing and blending anthropological, human security and African studies disciplinaries’ richness. The project was hosted in a consortium of four European universities and brought together sixteen doctoral candidates to ethnographically explore human security dimensions in sub-Saharan Africa. One of those doctoral students was Evelien Storme, who was hosted at SALDRU during the fieldwork stages of her studies and was co-supervised by Filip De Boek (Leuven University), Christian Gade (Aarhus University) and SALDRU’s Ariane De Lannoy.
Working closely with a host of African partners both in academia and the non-governmental sector, the ANTHUSIA students have explored human security concerns that offer critical insights into continental and global vulnerabilities, speaking to the interconnectedness of the globe. The doctoral candidates’ research foci have been thematically centred on Health and Well-being, Politics and Governance, Infrastructures, Environment, and Livelihoods concerns. Through these broad categorizations, the students have articulated issues of uncertainty, fragility in the protection of fundamental freedoms and rights, instability, precarity, threats to autonomy and more, across the continent.
The key themes formed the structural framework for the end-of-programme colloquium, which brought together the PhD cohort, their supervisors, and a number of the partners for one last, rich conversation between themselves and a number of South African students and scholars.