scholarly journals Renewing Cultural Resources and Sustaining J.H. Kwabena Nketia's Vision for an African Music Archive in Ghana

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colter Harper ◽  
Judith Opoku-Boateng
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Cultural Policy ◽  
Cultural Resources ◽  
African Music ◽  
Cultural Legacies ◽  
Conducting Research ◽  
Local Students ◽  
A Site ◽  
The University ◽  
University Of Ghana

This article examines the processes through which the J.H. Kwabena Nketia Archives has struggled to build a sustainable model for audio-visual archiving within an African university and looks to how its contents may serve future students and scholars in an effort to locate African cultural materials and knowledge production in Africa. The archive, operated within the University of Ghana’s Institute of African Studies, was named in honor of Professor Nketia in 2015 and is the realization of over six decades of gathering audio and visual data, acquiring new collections, conducting research, and preservation efforts. The core collection of quarter-inch reels were recorded by Nketia in the early decades of his extensive career shaping Ghana’s cultural policy, building teaching and research institutions, and studying music, culture, and language in Africa. As a part of the University of Ghana, the Nketia Archives provide a valuable resource for local students and scholars and creates a site in which broader conversations about the country’s cultural legacies are brought into the socio-political discourse. The archive is also a resource for housing and making available new acquisitions including over 300 recently digitized recordings of Ghanaian popular music from professor John Collins’ Bokoor African Popular Music Archives Foundation (BAPMAF). With ongoing challenges in accessibility, the Nketia Archives provides a valuable case study for how an African audio-visual archive is created and sustained.

scholarly journals Introduction

Popular Music ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-191 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Frith ◽  
Martin Cloonan
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Cultural Policy ◽  
Music History ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Cultural Conditions ◽  
National Music ◽  
The University

This special issue of Popular Music has its origins in a seminar organised at the University of Stirling in 2004. This meeting, one of a series on cultural policy, brought together researchers from a number of European countries who were asked to describe state music policy in their respective countries and to reflect on what differences, if any, such policies had made to recent national music history. As the seminar’s organisers, we were interested in a couple of issues: first, how policy approaches to popular music had changed since it first began to appear on the European political agenda in the 1970s; second, how local political and cultural conditions had affected ideas of what popular music policy could or should be.

scholarly journals The Union Trade Company and Its Recordings: An Unintentional Documentation of West African Popular Music, 1931–1957

2004 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 393-405
Author(s):  
Veit Arlt
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Leisure Activities ◽  
West African ◽  
Cape Coast ◽  
Trading Company ◽  
Field Recordings ◽  
Musical Cultures ◽  
Postcolonial Africa ◽  
The University ◽  
University Of Ghana

This paper introduces a unique collection of roughly 700 historical recordings of African popular music generated by a Swiss trading company, which today is located at the archives of mission 21 (formerly Basel Missioin) in Basel. The music was recorded and distributed by the Union Trade Company of Basel (UTC) during the 1930s and 1950s in the Gold Coast and Nigeria. The collection represents a rich resource for the study of African history and cultures and caters for the growing interest shown by social historians of Africa in everyday life and accordingly in leisure activities and consumption.As music and dance undoubtedly play an important role in African social and religious life, they have received much attention and there is a longstanding tradition of ethnomusicological research that has led to a great number of sound collections. The historian interested in the “modern” and “postmodern” or in popular culture, however, tends in many cases to be frustrated by the material contained in these archives. The ethnographic collectors often showed a blind eye to the modernizing forces within the African musical cultures they researched and concentrated on documenting what they perceived as the “original” or “traditional.” Furthermore the collection and documentation of the popular music of the day was rarely on the agenda of national research institutions and archives in postcolonial Africa. In the case of Ghana at least three initiatives have resulted in important collections of music that go beyond a narrow ethnographic documentation. The first, by Prof. Kwabena Nketia at the Centre of African Studies at the University of Ghana, features a mixture of field recordings and a few commercial records. The others focus specifically on the commercial and popular. These are the Gramophone Records Museum in Cape Coast, discussed below by its founder Kwame Sarpong and the Bokoor African Popular Music Archives Foundation (BAPMAF) of John Collins in Accra.

scholarly journals Research on Popular Music conducted at the Institute of Musicology of the University of Warsaw in 1953–2015

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-105
Author(s):  
Mariusz Gradowski ◽  
Przemysław Piłaciński
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Large Body ◽  
Good News ◽  
Rock And Roll ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Conducting Research ◽  
The One ◽  
New Research ◽  
The University

Abstract The article presents a survey of research on popular music carried out at the Institute of Musicology, University of Warsaw. It discusses the contents of valuable studies undertaken at the Institute but still unpublished and kept at the Library of the Institute of Musicology. The authors’ aim has been to facilitate the exchange of ideas with other musicological centres conducting research on popular music, as well as providing other musicologists and scholars working in the field with an overview the research undertaken to date. Popular music will be defined here as music composed in the 20th and 21st centuries, circulating in mass distribution in the form of various types of recordings, as well as performed in music clubs and at outdoor events; music that has its roots in jazz on the one hand and the youth revolution of the 1950s (the rise of rock and roll) on the other. We present a survey of B.A. and M.A. theses discussed under a number of key headings (jazz, folk, rock/pop, and electronic music, as well as works dealing with popular music in the context of research into musical culture at large). We also describe the University’s study framework, which was the original context for those texts. Our survey of the library holdings reveals an unexpectedly large body of writings on popular music submitted for a degree at the Institute of Musicology, University of Warsaw. The research has already opened many doors, defined and more than outlined many fields of study, describing them in quite a detailed manner. This is obviously good news: the existing works pose new questions, highlight areas of controversy, and suggest new research methods. In due course, the research has also begun to yield PhD dissertations written on this subject at the Institute.

Doctoral Training of Psychology Students in France

2003 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Roland-Lévy
Keyword(s):  
Doctoral Programs ◽  
Psychology Students ◽  
Doctoral Training ◽  
University System ◽  
The Third ◽  
Conducting Research ◽  
The University ◽  
Psychology Doctoral ◽  
Phd Programs ◽  
Phd Program

Abstract: The aim of doctoral programs in psychology is to help students become competent psychologists, capable of conducting research and of finding suitable employment. Starting with a brief description of the basic organization of the French university system, this paper presents an overview of how the psychology doctoral training is organized in France. Since October 2000, the requisites and the training of PhD students are the same in all French universities, but what now differs is the openness to other disciplines according to the size and location of the university. Three main groups of doctoral programs are distinguished in this paper. The first group refers to small universities in which the Doctoral Schools are constructed around multidisciplinary seminars that combine various themes, sometimes rather distant from psychology. The second group covers larger universities, with a PhD program that includes psychology as well as other social sciences. The third group contains a few major universities that have doctoral programs that are clearly centered on psychology (clinical, social, and/or cognitive psychology). These descriptions are followed by comments on how PhD programs are presently structured and organized. In the third section, I suggest some concrete ways of improving this doctoral training in order to give French psychologists a more European dimension.

Learning the anthropology of development: the university as a site of knowledge construction and identity formation

Journal ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanya Jakimow
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Lifelong Learning ◽  
Knowledge Construction ◽  
Multiple Identities ◽  
Classroom Teachers ◽  
Practical Skills ◽  
Student Reactions ◽  
A Site ◽  
The University ◽  
Anthropology Of Development

Recent work exploring student reactions to the anthropology of development highlights the importance of going beyond simply imparting practical skills, or alternatively delivering content that offers an unrelenting critique (Djohari 2011; Handler 2013). In this paper, I argue that by casting an anthropological eye on the classroom, teachers can provide a learning environment in which students transform into reflective ‘novice’ practitioners equipped for lifelong learning. This involves making explicit the processes of knowledge construction in the classroom, and by extension, the development field. It entails providing the resources through which students can become social beings in the development sector, with attention to expanding the possibilities for the formation of multiple identities. 

scholarly journals LAW, RELIGION, AND SAME-SEX RELATIONS IN AFRICA

2021 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-71
Author(s):  
M. Christian Green
Keyword(s):  
Moral Issue ◽  
African Continent ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Biblical Law ◽  
Moral Issues ◽  
International Conference ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Political Act ◽  
The University ◽  
University Of Ghana

Some years back, around 2013, I was asked to write an article on the uses of the Bible in African law. Researching references to the Bible and biblical law across the African continent, I soon learned that, besides support for arguments by a few states in favor of declaring themselves “Christian nations,” the main use was in emerging debates over homosexuality and same-sex relationships—almost exclusively to condemn those relationships. In January 2013, the newly formed African Consortium for Law and Religion Studies (ACLARS) held its first international conference at the University of Ghana Legon. There, African sexuality debates emerged forcefully in consideration of a paper by Sylvia Tamale, then dean of the Makarere University School of Law in Uganda, who argued pointedly, “[P]olitical Christianity and Islam, especially, have constructed a discourse that suggests that sexuality is the key moral issue on the continent today, diverting attention from the real critical moral issues for the majority of Africans . . . . Employing religion, culture and the law to flag sexuality as the biggest moral issue of our times and dislocating the real issue is a political act and must be recognised as such.”

Invented Dances, Or, How Nigerian Musicians Sculpt the Body Politic

2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-22
Author(s):  
Dotun Ayobade
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
African Music

AbstractPopular dances encapsulate the aliveness of Africa's young. Radiating an Africanist aesthetic of the cool, these moves enflesh popular music, saturating mass media platforms and everyday spaces with imageries of joyful transcendence. This essay understands scriptive dance fads as textual and choreographic calls for public embodiment. I explore how three Nigerian musicians, and their dances, have wielded scriptive prompts to elicit specific moved responses from dispersed, heterogenous, and transnational publics. Dance fads of this kind productively complicate musicological approaches that insist on divorcing contemporary African music cultures from the dancing bodies that they often conjure. Taken together, these movements enlist popular culture as a domain marked by telling contestations over musical ownership and embodied citizenship.

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