ORCID Profile
0000-0003-2862-7203
Current Organisation
University of Western Australia
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In Research Link Australia (RLA), "Research Topics" refer to ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes. These topics are either sourced from ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes listed in researchers' related grants or generated by a large language model (LLM) based on their publications.
Social and Cultural Anthropology | Anthropology | Anthropology of development | Religion and Society | Development studies | Socio-economic development
Cultural Understanding not elsewhere classified | Climate Change Models | Expanding Knowledge through Studies of Human Society | Ethnicity, Multiculturalism and Migrant Development and Welfare | Religion and Society |
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 06-2021
DOI: 10.1017/HIA.2021.8
Abstract: This report describes the official photographic archives of Idi Amin’s government held by the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation (UBC). During his reign from 1971 to 1979, Idi Amin embraced visual media as a tool for archiving the achievements of populist military rule as his government sought to reorient Ugandans’ relationship with the state. Only a handful of the resulting images were ever printed or seen, reflecting the regime’s archival impulse undergirded by paranoia of unauthorized ways of seeing. The UBC’s newly opened collection of over 60,000 negatives from Amin’s photographers, alongside files at the Uganda National Archives, offers the first comprehensive opportunity to study the Ugandan state under Amin’s dictatorship through the lens of its own documentarians.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 09-2021
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 18-07-2008
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 09-03-2012
DOI: 10.1093/AFRAF/ADS017
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 12-2010
Publisher: Academy of Science of South Africa
Date: 2020
DOI: 10.17159/2309-9585/2020/V46A2
Abstract: ABSTRACT This article examines the output of Uganda's official Photographic Section from the years of the Idi Amin regime (1971-9), an archive of 60,000 black and white images from which have recently come to light in the stores of the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation in K ala. Drawing on recent developments in African visual studies, the article focuses in particular upon what this archive reveals about photographic circulations in and from Amin's Uganda. It finds that this new trove of negatives -when compared with press archives from around the world - is especially revealing of a growing nexus between official photography and all kinds of commercial photographies in the 1970s. This nexus played a key role in shaping both how the Amin regime was pictured at the time, and how its afterlife has continued to reflect down to the present time.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 06-2010
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 05-2019
DOI: 10.1017/S0001972019000019
Abstract: In recent years, all kinds of African photographies, both on the continent and in the diaspora, have undergone a digital ‘revolution’ (Ekine and Manji 2012). Without doubt, the key driver of this trend has been the rapid, and massive, influx to practically all African countries of ever more affordable third generation/advanced mobile phone handsets, or smartphones. Even compared with earlier technological revolutions on the continent, both the speed and the scale of this spread have been simply breathtaking. For ex le, the establishment of transistor radio sets – the process through which personal radios became ubiquitous across Africa – occurred over the period of at least a decade and a half (between roughly the late 1950s and the early 1970s). Similarly, the original mobile phone revolution – i.e. the process through which early generation/low functionality mobile phones went from being a source of novelty, to a domain for experimentation, to technologies that were routinized in everyday life, throughout the continent – took more than a decade to unfold (the crucial years being those between roughly 1999 and 2010) (Vokes 2018b). Against both of those earlier processes, the emergence of smartphones occurred over a much shorter timeframe. Between 2011 and mid-2015 alone, the number of smartphones being imported into Africa – the majority of them sub-US$100 Android-based systems – jumped from around 10 million units per annum to almost 100 million (Tshabalala 2015), as a result of which these devices became quickly established as a common feature of everyday life. Today, more than one-third of all mobile phones in Africa are smartphones, and this percentage is set to rise to two-thirds by 2020 (GSMA Intelligence 2017).
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-04-2015
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Date: 11-2013
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-07-2020
Publisher: Emerald
Date: 27-08-2019
Abstract: Little progress has been made since then, including on critical security arrangements, and the parties have given little indication of willingness or capacity to end the deadlock. Continued failure to reach agreement on the number and boundaries of states could prove another major source of tensions. Despite a projected return to positive growth after years of contraction, uncertainty and mismanagement will still weigh on the economy. The majority of South Sudan’s more than 4 million displaced persons will not return home until there is greater certainty about security.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 15-01-2016
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 05-2019
DOI: 10.1017/S0001972019000081
Abstract: This article contributes to recent scholarship on an emergent public political visual culture in Africa. Through an ethnographic study of political billboards and other government-sponsored public political imagery in Uganda, it argues that this new visual culture is primarily characterized by African states’ extensive use of post-photographic techniques as a means for projecting fantastic visions of their future development goals. However, drawing on recent insights from the ‘material turn’ in visual theory, it finds that – in Uganda's case at least – the potency of these new public visual artefacts may stem less from what they show than from how they invoke in their citizen-viewers an embodied sense of future possibilities. Once generated, this affective response can be mobilized by the state and its agents in the ‘here and now’, for political gain. The article looks at how this worked in the run-up to Uganda's 2016 presidential elections, when, in the context of major new spending on national infrastructure projects, the images and artefacts of this new visual culture served to greatly lify the sense that all citizens would benefit from an emergent global capitalism. This inflated aspiration was mobilized in turn by the National Resistance Movement government as an integral part of its election c aign, and played a key role in returning the government to power.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 27-04-2016
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-01-2017
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Date: 2013
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 10-2002
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 16-11-2007
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 18-07-2008
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 28-04-2016
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-01-2021
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 06-09-2013
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-01-2018
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-07-2023
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-04-2023
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 2021
DOI: 10.1017/S0010417520000365
Abstract: In May 2019 we launched a special exhibition at the Uganda Museum in K ala titled “The Unseen Archive of Idi Amin.” It consisted of 150 images made by government photographers in the 1970s. In this essay we explore how political history has been delimited in the Museum, and how these limitations shaped the exhibition we curated. From the time of its creation, the Museum's disparate and multifarious collections were exhibited as ethnographic specimens, stripped of historical context. Spatially and organizationally, “The Unseen Archive of Idi Amin” turned its back on the ethnographic architecture of the Uganda Museum. The transformation of these vivid, evocative, aesthetically appealing photographs into historical evidence of atrocity was intensely discomfiting. We have been obliged to organize the exhibition around categories that did not correspond with the logic of the photographic archive, with the architecture of the Museum, or with the experiences of the people who lived through the 1970s. The exhibition has made history, but not entirely in ways that we chose.
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Date: 03-2021
Abstract: We have been conducting collaborative ethnographic research together for over 20 years. Over the past 12 months, this collaboration has included face-to-face encounters, both in K ala, Uganda, and in Perth, Australia. However, since the advent of COVID-19-related ‘lockdowns’ in our respective countries, our engagements have been conducted exclusively over online platforms, including WhatsApp, Facebook and – increasingly – Zoom. In this article, we reflect upon our shared experience of conducting ethnography through this platform as a tool for understanding the effects of the pandemic in Uganda. We argue that, despite all kinds of material constraints (at both ends), Zoom has much to off er the ethnographer particularly because it can generate an intimate understanding of experience and time. However, against this advantage, some aspects of social life remain beyond the range of its channels, for which an assemblage of additional methods are required. We finish by reflecting upon what these methods have contributed to our long-term study of emergent cultures of mobility in Uganda – a study which is now being conducted in an ostensible context of immobility.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 12-2010
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 10-2016
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 10-2017
Start Date: 05-2015
End Date: 03-2020
Amount: $125,840.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 2023
End Date: 12-2026
Amount: $603,010.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 05-2019
End Date: 12-2023
Amount: $279,000.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded Activity