The project was primarily focused on fieldwork. Despite the travel restrictions created by COVID 19, the team carried out substantial fieldwork in South Africa, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (Gallagher); Ethiopia and Nigeria (Daniel); Ghana and Ethiopia (Tomkinson); Malawi, Lesotho and Zimbabwe (Ncube) and Ghana (Manful). Work included archival research, ethnographies of key public buildings, elite interviews, non-elite focus group discussions and the use of pop-up exhibitions to engage broader groups of people.
We held three academic workshops for scholars working across the continent on politics and architecture, in Johannesburg with the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Studies (2019), in Ghana with the Centre of Africa Studies, University of Ghana (2022) and with SOAS in London (2024) and a workshop for young African architects and urban planners in Accra with the Institute for African Futures (2022). These projects led to the publication of two edited books and a further edited book and two edited journal Special Issues are in progress.
The research team – Prof Julia Gallagher, Dr Daniel Mulugeta, Dr Joanne Tomkinson, Dr Kuukuwa Manful and Dr Innocent Batsani-Ncube – have published their findings in ten peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals and two edited book collections. Three monographs from Gallagher, Batsani-Ncube and Manful are under contract.
Findings include:
- how state authority and state-society relations in Cote d’Ivoire, DR Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana and South Africa are configured, with a particular focus on how citizens think about state buildings.
- how popular ideas of pan-African and regional relationships exist in tension with assessments of the performance of the African Union.
- how pan-continental airlines and airports project and help realise the developmental state in Ethiopia and Ghana.
- the ways in which school buildings in Ghana have shaped education and citizenship.
- how Chinese-made parliaments in Malawi, Lesotho and Zimbabwe are changing African-Chinese relationships and attitudes towards parliamentary democracy.
The team has disseminated their work more widely through exhibitions in Ethiopia, Ghana, South Africa and the UK.
Our two PhD students, Manful and Batsani-Ncube were awarded their PhDs in 2022. All members of the team have gone on to win major post-doctoral grants or permanent academic positions.
