210 books match the query 'African Studies' and 5 start with h

cover of Histories of Global Health in Africa

Histories of Global Health in Africa

Melissa Graboyes and Jennifer Tappan

Ohio University Press, 0

Histories of Global Health in Africa offers a concise and compelling introduction to the development and practice of global health on the African continent over the past century. Rather than centering institutions, the book foregrounds the people whose lives and labor have shaped global health—including African communities receiving care and the practitioners and experts who have long driven biomedical work across the region. 

Drawing on cutting-edge scholarship, the book traces the colonial roots of global health and examines how these legacies continue to influence contemporary interventions, from vaccination campaigns and disease eradication efforts to epidemic responses. Its accessible thematic chapters explore key topics, including data collection, demography, ethics, and equity. 

Designed for classroom use and ideal for nonspecialists, Histories of Global Health in Africa provides a flexible structure and a rich suite of teaching materials, including online multimedia components. It is an essential resource for students and readers seeking to understand how global health has evolved—and why its future depends on confronting its past.

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cover of Home Is Where Your Politics Are: Queer Activism in the U.S. South and South Africa

Home Is Where Your Politics Are

Queer Activism in the U.S. South and South Africa

Jessica A. Scott

Rutgers University Press, 2024

Home Is Where Your Politics Are is a transnational consideration of queer and trans activism in the US South and South Africa. Through ethnographic exploration of queer and trans activist work in both places, Jessica Scott paints a vibrant picture of what life is like in relation to a narrative that says that queer life is harder, if not impossible, in rural areas and on the African continent. The book asks questions like, what do activists in these places care about and how do stories about where they live get in the way of the life they envision for the queer and trans people for whom they advocate? Answers to these questions provide insight that only these activists have, into the complexity of locally based advocacy strategies in a globalized world.
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cover of Hottest of the Hotspots: The Rise of Eco-precarious Conservation Labor in Madagascar

Hottest of the Hotspots

The Rise of Eco-precarious Conservation Labor in Madagascar

Benjamin Neimark

University of Arizona Press, 2023

Continually recognized as one of the “hottest” of all the world’s biodiversity hotspots, the island of Madagascar has become ground zero for the most intensive market-based conservation interventions on Earth.

This book details the rollout of market conservation programs, including the finding of drugs from nature—or “bioprospecting”—biodiversity offsetting, and the selling of blue carbon credits from mangroves. It documents the tensions that exist at the local level, as many of these programs incorporate populations highly dependent on the same biodiversity now turned into global commodities for purposes of saving it. Proponents of market conservation mobilize groups of ecologically precarious workers, or the local “eco-precariat,” who do the hidden work of collecting and counting species, monitoring and enforcing the vital biodiversity used in everything from drug discovery to carbon sequestration and large mining company offsets.

Providing a voice for those community workers many times left out of environmental policy discussions, this volume proposes critiques that aim to build better conservation interventions with perspectives of the local eco-precariat.
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cover of Hungry Subjects: Mapping Appetites in the African Cultural Landscape

Hungry Subjects

Mapping Appetites in the African Cultural Landscape

Njeri Githire

University of Michigan Press, 2026

Against the backdrop of media representations of Africa through persistent and pervasive images of emaciated, starving Africans and the critical need to marshall food aid in response, Hungry Subjects places Africa’s food anxiety within a broader historical context and expands ongoing food scholarship beyond its current confines in the social sciences. Njeri Githire weaves together coming-of-age texts across the African and African diasporic literary landscape in English, French, and Portuguese expression to ask how African writers incorporate food into their storylines to transmit cultural information, question norms, and propose alternatives. Eating is an intimately personal yet inherently social experience codified by public rituals and commerce, invariably linked to a larger tapestry of historical, cultural, economic, and political dynamics. Delving into the political dynamics of food as a tool of power and control alongside subversive potentialities, Hungry Subjects appraises the narrative and political thrust of (not-)eating and exposes the ways in which postcolonial manifestations of colonial-era power relations are symbolized in food’s many functions and meanings. 

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cover of Hustle Urbanism: Making Life Work in Nairobi

Hustle Urbanism

Making Life Work in Nairobi

Tatiana Thieme

University of Minnesota Press, 2025

Exploring hustle as a social, cultural, and economic phenomenon in contemporary Nairobi

In Nairobi’s underserved neighborhoods, “hustle” has emerged as both a vital survival strategy and a way of life for youth. Exploring the multiple meanings and manifestations of the hustle economy across different scenarios of provisioning, distribution, exchange, learning, and mobilizing, Hustle Urbanism draws on more than a decade of ethnographic engagement to center the logics, perspectives, and inventive strategies of a group of youth who constantly navigate job scarcity, inadequate basic services, and climate-induced harms.

Tatiana Thieme shows how young people develop tools of resistance against the legacies of colonial violence and uneven urban development while carving out spaces of opportunity for themselves and their peers. The stories she includes bring thick ethnographic detail and longitudinal perspective to the lives and livelihoods of youth whose diverse skill sets and knowledges span from circular economies and eco-activism to hip hop and local leadership. Filling a significant gap in both existing scholarship and popular discussion, Hustle Urbanism offers critical theorization of precarious urban environments and the affirmative modes of making life work in the city against the odds.

While Thieme cautions against fetishizing hustle as a form of social and economic uplift, she calls for a greater recognition of the ingenuity and skill involved in hustle urbanism, arguing that studying hustle narratives and practices opens up timely empirical and theoretical questions about overlapping urban struggles and possibilities that coexist in the everyday city.

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