How Africa Has Been Made to Mean with Prof. Amah Edoh
03/04/20 • 27 min
“How has Africa been made to mean?” For a long time, Africa has been depicted in the arts and media as a place of famine and dysfunction. More recently, the continent has been increasingly portrayed as the next frontier for business and artistic innovation. In this episode, we talk with MIT Professor of African Studies M. Amah Edoh about how Africa, as a concept, is produced through cultural practices--things like music, film, theatre, clothing, etc. She shares how she engages MIT students with this concept in 21G.026 Global Africa: Creative Cultures, a course she’s shared on MIT OpenCourseWare. Topics include how her own experiences with formal education shape how and why she tries to value students’ voices in the classroom, redefining students’ relationships to scholarly texts to make academia feel less alienating, giving students language to articulate relationships of power, encouraging students to experiment with creative cultural production, getting off campus to experience cultural performance in a social context, and living the life of a new faculty member (spoiler alert: it’s a lot like engaging in marathon improvisational theatre, and it’s exhausting!).
Relevant Resources:
Professor Edoh’s course on OCW
“The Price of Love” [PDF] (Wedding Project) by Nwamaka Amobi and Gabrielle Ballard
Blog post on Professor’s Edoh’s approach to creating a supportive academic culture
Faculty profile: 3 Questions with M. Amah Edoh on Africa and Innovation
Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions
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Call us @ 617-715-2517
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Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.
Support OCW
If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!
Credits
Sarah Hansen, host and producer
Brett Paci, producer
Dave Lishansky, producer
Jackson Maher, producer
Show notes by Peter Chipman
“How has Africa been made to mean?” For a long time, Africa has been depicted in the arts and media as a place of famine and dysfunction. More recently, the continent has been increasingly portrayed as the next frontier for business and artistic innovation. In this episode, we talk with MIT Professor of African Studies M. Amah Edoh about how Africa, as a concept, is produced through cultural practices--things like music, film, theatre, clothing, etc. She shares how she engages MIT students with this concept in 21G.026 Global Africa: Creative Cultures, a course she’s shared on MIT OpenCourseWare. Topics include how her own experiences with formal education shape how and why she tries to value students’ voices in the classroom, redefining students’ relationships to scholarly texts to make academia feel less alienating, giving students language to articulate relationships of power, encouraging students to experiment with creative cultural production, getting off campus to experience cultural performance in a social context, and living the life of a new faculty member (spoiler alert: it’s a lot like engaging in marathon improvisational theatre, and it’s exhausting!).
Relevant Resources:
Professor Edoh’s course on OCW
“The Price of Love” [PDF] (Wedding Project) by Nwamaka Amobi and Gabrielle Ballard
Blog post on Professor’s Edoh’s approach to creating a supportive academic culture
Faculty profile: 3 Questions with M. Amah Edoh on Africa and Innovation
Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions
Connect with Us
If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!
Stay Current
Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.
Connect with Us
If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!
Call us @ 617-715-2517
Stay Current
Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.
Support OCW
If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!
Credits
Sarah Hansen, host and producer
Brett Paci, producer
Dave Lishansky, producer
Jackson Maher, producer
Show notes by Peter Chipman
Previous Episode
Nuclear Gets Personal with Prof. Michael Short
It’s a safe bet that Professor Michael Short’s 22.01 Introduction to Nuclear Engineering and Ionizing Radiation is the only course at MIT where students are encouraged to bring their toenail clippings to class. In this episode, Professor Short discusses one of the core principles of his teaching philosophy: the importance of making abstract concepts tangible by means of hands-on activities. Want to know how much gold or arsenic is in your body? Bombard the aforementioned toenail clippings with neutrons in a reactor and see what gamma rays they give off! Want to know whether the stone in your ring is a genuine diamond or just a cubic zirconia? Put it under the electron microscope! Professor Short also emphasizes the value of opening “knowledge gaps”—awakening his students’ curiosity by focusing on interesting questions they don’t yet know the answer to. Later, Professor Short describes how he designed the course with a built-in mechanism for collecting real-time feedback so that he can respond immediately to students’ concerns. As a bonus, near the end of the podcast, Professor Short answers various nuclear science questions posed by actual OpenCourseWare users.
Relevant Resources:
Professor Short’s Nuclear Engineering and Ionizing Radiation course on OCW
Professor Short’s Do-It-Yourself Geiger Counters on OCW
Professor Short’s faculty page
Blog post on Professor Short’s work in Mongolia
Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions
Connect with Us
If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!
Stay Current
Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.
Connect with Us
If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!
Call us @ 617-715-2517
Stay Current
Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.
Support OCW
If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!
Credits
Sarah Hansen, host and producer
Brett Paci, producer
Dave Lishansky, producer
Jackson Maher, producer
Show notes by Peter Chipman
Next Episode
Making Deep Learning Human with Prof. Gilbert Strang
Mathematics Professor Gilbert Strang is one of MIT’s most revered instructors; his courses, especially the perennially popular linear algebra course 18.06, have received millions of visits on OpenCourseWare, and his lecture videos have won him a devoted following on YouTube as well. (A sample YouTube comment on one of his lectures: “This is not lecture, this is art.”) A few years ago, Professor Strang began teaching a new course (18.065) focusing on the application of mathematical matrices to deep learning and AI. This new course is very unlike a typical undergraduate math course. For one thing, there’s no final exam—in fact, there are no exams at all! Instead, Professor Strang asks each student to spend the semester developing a project that applies the techniques they’re studying to some topic or problem they personally find interesting. In this episode, we hear from Professor Strang about his efforts to humanize math teaching, the value of thinking through problems in real time during lectures—even if it means getting stuck and having to backtrack!—and the importance of staying continually conscious of your students.
Relevant Resources:
Professor Strang’s faculty page
Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions
Connect with Us
If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!
Stay Current
Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.
Connect with Us
If you have a suggestion for a new episode or have used OCW to change your life or those of others, tell us your story. We’d love to hear from you!
Call us @ 617-715-2517
Stay Current
Subscribe to the free monthly "MIT OpenCourseWare Update" e-newsletter.
Support OCW
If you like Chalk Radio and OpenCourseware, donate to help keep these programs going!
Credits
Sarah Hansen, host and producer
Brett Paci, producer
Dave Lishansky, producer
Jackson Maher, producer
Show notes by Peter Chipman
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