Science, Technology, and Society Seminar: STS Circle at Harvard

Date: 

Monday, April 4, 2016, 12:15pm to 2:00pm

Location: 

Harvard University Center for the Environment, 24 Oxford Street, 3rd Floor Seminar Room

"Sudanese Economics: Between an Environmental and a Political Imagination"

Speaker:

Alden Young, Assistant Professor of African History; Director, Program in Africana Studies, Drexel University.

Co-sponsored by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University.

Lunch is provided if you RSVP via our online form by Thursday of the week before the event.

Contact:

Shana Rabinowich
shana_rabinowich@hks.harvard.edu

Chair:

Sheila Jasanoff, Faculty Associate. Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School.

Abstract:

In this paper, I examine Egyptian and Sudanese writings about the economy of Sudan between the years 1936 and 1958. This period is significant because the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936 created the institutional basis for an Arabic language economics discourse in Sudan; while, in 1958 the Department of Economics at the University of Khartoum became staffed by Sudanese lecturers. One of my key concerns in this paper is to demonstrate how this economic discourse reflected but also helped to shape the transformation of Sudan from a mere geographic expression into a sovereign political entity. In this paper, I also reflect on the ways in which technical discussions of issues such as tariffs, trade balances and the surveying for natural resources altered the political imagination of the boundaries of Sudan. In the final section of the paper, I explore the applicability of the concept of the sociotechnical imaginaries to the economic development of Sudan.

Bio:

Alden Young is an assistant professor of African History and Director of the Program in Africana Studies at Drexel University. He is working on a manuscript, currently under contract with Cambridge University Press, entitled Transforming Sudan: Decolonisation, Economic Development and State Formation. Dr. Young has a forthcoming article in Humanity "African Bureaucrats and the Exhaustion of the Developmental State."

He has begun working on a new project tentatively titled Elite Retreat: Sudanese Bureaucrats, Intellectuals, Traders and the Search for an Alternative to the State which follows the decisions of these three groups of elites as they alternatively attempted to reform or abandon the state-building project during the two decades between the popular Sudanese revolts of 1964 and 1984/85. Prior to coming to Drexel, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Africana Studies Department at the University of Pennsylvania. He completed his PhD in the History Department at Princeton University in 2013.