New Issue of static: Cultural Infrastructures in Africa - global dis:connect

the centre
- The Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, funded by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space, investigates globalisation as a dynamic process shaped by the interplay of integration, disconnection, and disintegration. Our work focuses on understanding how connections emerge, fail, or remain absent, in both historical and contemporary contexts.
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- global dis:connect approaches globalisation through the lens of dis:connectivity, focusing on absences, detours and interruptions that shape historical and contemporary global processes. Rather than assuming linear integration, we examine the gaps, delays and disruptions that make globalisation uneven and socially significant.
  
  Our research is structured around six key areas – absences, detours, interruptions, laboratories, cultural infrastructures and temporalities – which foster interdisciplinary dialogue without normative assumptions or claims of completeness.
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- The cornerstone of global dis:connect is the fellowship programme, in which approximately ten scholars come to Munich each year. They research dis:connectivity on site and in close contact with the directors and their peers. Fellows also have the opportunity to host workshops on the topics of their research.
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- At global dis:connect, research is meant to circulate. Through publications, media formats and artist events, we connect academic research with public debate and artistic perspectives.
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- global dis:connect publishes innovative interventions on dis:connectivity across a range of media, from the blog, which covers the latest news, research and art at gd:c, to static, a periodical containing the best work from within and beyond global dis:connect, in addition to traditional scholarly formats.
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New Issue of static: Cultural Infrastructures in Africa

How are dominant narratives about Africa produced, archived and challenged?
The new special issue Cultural Infrastructures in Africa, edited by Andrea Kifyasi and Gideon Morrison, appears in the gd:c bulletin static and explores these questions through the lens of disconnectivity.

Against persistent Afro-pessimist narratives and long-standing Western representations of the continent, the issue approaches Africa not as disconnected from global processes, but as a space shaped by complex entanglements — marked simultaneously by connection, exclusion, integration, and erasure.

The contributions investigate:
• archival silences and colonial knowledge production
• museums, restitution, and contested cultural heritage
• festivals as alternative cultural archives and sites of postcolonial imagination
• contemporary cultural infrastructures and their political, economic, and social challenges

The issue brings together research originating from the workshop Archiving dis cultural heritage(s) in Africa at global dis and highlights how cultural infrastructure structures memory, visibility, and participation in global knowledge production.

Read the digital issue of static here: https://static.ub.uni-muenchen.de/index.php/static