CFP: Farooq Kperogi, The Digital Age and US-African Diaspora Diplomacy

[Toyin Falola]

CFP: Farooq Kperogi, The Digital Age and US-African Diaspora Diplomacy

 

 

Host: African Centre for the Study of the United States, University of Pretoria

 

Convener:  Toyin Falola, Extraordinary Professor of Political Science, University of Pretoria

 

Book Reviewer:  Dr. Dannica Fleuss, Centre for Future Media, Democracy and Society, Dublin City University

 

Keynote Speaker: Professor Christopher Isike, Director, African Center for the Study of the United States, University of Pretoria (ACSUS-UP)

Date: 15 June 2023

 

 

 

CONCEPT NOTE

 

The conference aims to use Toyin Falola’s forthcoming publication, Citizenship and the Diaspora in the Digital Age: Farooq Kperogi and the Virtual Community (https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781666933413/Citizenship-and-the-Diaspora-in-the-Digital-Age-Farooq-Kperogi-and-the-Virtual-Community) to reflect more broadly on the impact of social media on Africa, as well as United States-Africa relations.

 

Culture, the aggregating nomenclature for every aspect of a people’s past and present existence, has always had technical or technological innovations as one of its material aspects and technical or technological knowledge in its immaterial components. The earliest known humans of the hunter-gatherer era had technology that suited their time and needs, such that they could craft tools from stones and sticks to make life easier and actions quicker for themselves. From that period to now, there has been a huge evolution, one that its pace increases by the day. It all started with the invention of fire.

Since the boom and full blossoming of the digital age in the early 2000s, technology has brought about globalization in all ramifications, with the growth of one simple, single, virtual super-society that is regrouping humans of different ages, races, and backgrounds being one of the most phenomenal results of technology in today’s world. This technological advancement moved from the one-sided information and online communication system that dominated the early years of the internet and the world wide web to Web 2.0, the game-changer that made interactive communications in real-time possible, significantly changing how humans use the internet, connect, relate, and

transact online.

 

In this age, one of the biggest uses of digital media is communication and information sharing, a human activity that is mainly being furthered and advanced through a suite of platforms categorized under the common nomenclature of social media. Social media has brought about an exponential increase in access to information while greatly reducing the period between event occurrence and access to event information. As a result, human reliance on traditional media platforms like the radio, television, and newspapers for news on events and happenings is dwindling by the day, especially as dependence on traditional media comes with the burden of having to wait a long period for news preparation and eventual broadcast or publication, as against the instantaneity that is one of the core features of all social media platforms.

 

Two phenomena are the most prominent at this point in the digital age. First is the increasing competition among social media platforms to deliver better on the promise of immediacy, relevance, and satisfying users’ content consumption needs. This competition has brought about several trends in the digital media space, such as innovative features that keep the audience engaged, increase usage time, and promote positive user experience on social media platforms. The second phenomenon has been the race among these social networking sites to be the best at delivering a unified virtual community experience to users in furtherance of globalization and world unification goals, especially in light of the insights the COVID-19 pandemic has brought on the common humanity and inter-dependence of the human race.

 

Incidentally, these two phenomena — which meant that the platforms focus on features such as video and audio to enhance real-time communication — have brought about a spike in citizen journalism and individualized information sharing. However, the disadvantage is that citizens are now more prone than ever to being fed disinformation and misinformation, especially in a way that makes it difficult to separate truth from untruth, seeing as technological advancements have made room for the fabrication of believable proof to support maliciously distributed information. This problem, along with the seeming inability of traditional media organizations to seamlessly transition to digital media, paved the way for the rise of individual media experts.

 

The rise in the usage and adoption of social media platforms and the increasing ease in the creation and management of blogging and content creation platforms all form part of the emergence and growth of the creator economy, democratized content publication, journalism, and social criticism. This meant that citizen writers and journalists, especially social critics, did not have to fully rely on traditional means like a newspaper column or a weekly television or radio show to critique societal happenings and contribute cumulatively to the media’s effect on governance.

Relatedly, the digital age has also contributed to the rise of citizens’ engagement and participation in the public policymaking process. For example, the democratization of content publication, journalism, and social criticism enables people to participate in setting the public policy agenda. The affordances of social media as interactive platforms that democratize popular speech and enable new forms of sociality are not limited to geographical borders of states. It crosses state boundaries and connects people in cyberspace, where they freely engage in public diplomacy and diaspora diplomacy that impact international relations. For instance, diaspora populations are increasingly connecting and engaging with their home countries in cyberspace, using social media as a tool for awakening consciousness. They are also invoking their dual-citizenship agency to influence inter-state relations between their home and host countries.

 

Farooq Kperogi, a Professor of Journalism and Emerging Media at the Kennesaw State University in the US, is a Nigerian social critic and citizen journalist whose work, influence, and achievements have charted new perspectives to the study of digital media in citizen journalism, citizen engagement, and social criticism. Traditional journalistic practices position field work as the Holy Grail of information collection and accurate reportage. However, emerging media and the practices of Professor Farooq Kperogi, who resides in the United States but is one of Nigeria’s most vocal and factual socio-political critics in Nigeria, challenge the tenets of journalism practice as advocated by traditional journalism.

 

The Nigerian diaspora’s involvement and contributions, although largely in the economic and financial aspects of Nigerians’ lives, extend to active citizen engagement and socio-political discourses. Having witnessed other countries’ processes, conditions, and operations, Nigerians in the diaspora serve the purpose of politically and socially awakening Nigerians to the need to not settle for the less-than-humane realities of the average citizen. Aside from the structured and semi-formal social criticism and citizen engagement of the likes of Farooq Kperogi, there is an emerging category of diaspora Nigerians heavily involved in citizen engagement through video content on new-age and youth-targeted social media platforms.

 

Through his citizen engagement and socio-political criticisms, Farooq Kperogi’s work has fast-tracked the rolling back of unfavorable policies. The professor has also, through research, produced a body of work focused on the Nigerian citizenry and the use of digital and emerging media. Kperogi belongs to the select class of academics who have found a nexus between their research and its applicability worldwide. He has successfully put his research to practice, building a socio-political criticism ecosystem that engages the citizenry, informs, provides contextual analyses of happenings in the country, and influences positive government decisions.

 

Through the years, Kperogi’s works have presented a holistic view of political, social, religious, and economic crises. Drawing on his body of work and digital milestones, this conference’s thematic focus is based on the book Citizenship and the Diaspora in the Digital Age: Farooq Kperogi and the Virtual Community by Toyin Falola. The African Centre for the Study of the United States at the University of Pretoria (ACSUS-UP), therefore, calls for papers examining various themes in the following and other related areas: 

 

•        Traditional Media: Survival and Limitations

•        Social Media and Global Politics

•        Social Media and the Democratic Process in Africa

•        Digitalization and Citizen Engagement in Nigeria

•        The Multidimensional Role of Nigerians in Diaspora in Nigeria’s Development

•        The Diaspora Diplomacy Agency of the Nigerian Diaspora

•        The Soft Power Value of the African Diaspora

•        Citizen Journalism in the Digital Age

•        Citizen Journalism and Government Policies in Africa

•        Citizen Journalism in Nigeria

•        Digitalization and Social Criticism in Africa

•        Change and Chaos Agents

•        Farooq Kperogi and Citizen Engagement

•        Farooq Kperogi and the Virtual Community

•        Farooq Kperogi and the Reinvention of Journalism

•        Social Media Trends and Citizen Journalism

•        The Digital Age, Government Surveillance and Control

•        The Emerging Media, Citizen Journalism, Misinformation and Fake News

•        Web 2.0, Web 3.0 and Virtual Community Building

•        Social Media and the Future of the World

 

Submission Guidelines

We welcome submissions from researchers from multi-disciplinary perspectives across the humanities and social sciences. The criteria for selection are originality, quality of research, and relevance. Comparative perspectives are welcome.

Paper proposals should include the paper title, names, affiliations of author(s) and a 200-word abstract that specifies the key research question, methodology and main findings.

 

The deadline for abstract submissions is 15 April 2023, and acceptance will be communicated on 30 April 2023.

 

Email all paper proposals to: u191...@tuks.co.za

and

bcma...@toyinfalolanetwork.org

 

Publication

Selected papers shall be peer-reviewed for publication in an edited book by Toyin Falola and Christopher Isike, which will be published by a reputable publisher.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

woooooooow

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[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

Fantastic.

Reminds me of the great but also controversial achievement of regrettably late Pius Adesanmi.

The description of the logic of this book is conceptually beautiful and rhetorically tight.

It provides a very rich framework for the study of the general field of social media and of influential figures in social media  such as Adesanmi and Bisi Silva, the great art curator in Nigeria, whose Facebook wall is a striking legacy of her engagements, possibilities which may be extended to the study of such a figure as the great internationally influential but relatively unknown in his native country  Nigeria, the Western based art curator Okwui Enwezor, perhaps the first Black person to operate at the stratospheric levels he worked at in the Western centred, global art establishment, a prolific author in the field, with prestigious publishers,  and a professor of art though his only degree was a BA in Political Science, visibility and opportunities he gained partly through founding NKA, perhaps the first and certainly one of the most prestigious scholarly journals focusing on post-classical African art.

Textualization, formal and informal, scholarly and general, journals and books to social media,  as a means of breaking from the margjns to the mainstream,may be seen as unifying these figures, if I may take this chance to correlate  through the inspiration of the Falola text I am responding to, influential figures and ideas I have been thinking of.

Falola's work remain inspiring in their creative transparency, the visibility of his methods of creating unified knowledge out of disparate material, available to all but requiring particular sensitivity and drive to synthesise and interpret, particularly in the definitive form of a book, Falola's primary expressive mode as a person committed to breadth of exploration of ideas and the culture of the book as a means of permanently shaping knowledge, a quitessential academic,  but one who has mastered the culture of achieving multiple specialisations, operating fluidly in terms of the disciplinary languages and techniques of various fields of knowledge in the social sciences and humanities, history to literature-  as writer and scholar-to religion to the visual arts to communications and media theory and practice and more.

Falola's work also drmonstrates a fact about scholarship that needs better appreciation by African scholars.

Sholarly and cultural  traditions  grow through intereferentiality,  through scholars and cultural creators explicitly referencing, critically engaging each other's ideas and studying each other's work and lives as creative journeys giving something new to the world.

Such intereferntiality is foundational to the gargantuan achievement of the globally dominant  Western scholarly and cultural tradition, an orientation perhaps hyperbollically suggested by A.N.Whitehead's description of Western philosophy as a series of footnotes to Plato, suggesting the continually unfolding sequence of ideas, of agreements and disagreements,  represented by what another scholar refers to as " the great conversation", a ceaselessly unfolding dialogue between culture bearers operating in terms of related points of reference.

Academia, the world's highest concentrations of scholars, may be seen by some as emphasising focus on one's own ideas, how else, it may be thought, can one's originality be demonstrated?

But academia and readers generally also recognize and reward studying the achievements of other people, in appreciation of the fact that knowledge and other engagements with reality are constructed by human beings, at the intersection of self and society, even as these constructs shape people and societies as they are processed by human cognitive abilities.

Studying the work of creatives in  various fields is critical to understanding how those fields of knowledge, how those social configurations develop in terms of society as a knowledge distilling and generating agent.

Falola's books and perhaps his essays-the latter being significant productions he does not publicize-on other scholars and cultural creatives, such as the scholar of religion Ogbu Kalu, the visual artist Victor Ekpuk, the writer and activist Wole Soyinka, the philosopher, theologian and economist Nimi Wariboko, the culural activist Isaac Delano,the collection of celebratory essays and poetry in In Praise of Greatness- an incomplete collection of that genre in which he is continuously active-and now this book centred on Kperoqi, among perhaps other texts unknown to me, would represent a very significant and perhaps even a great, multidisciplinary achievement from a scholar.

Yet this same scholar is perenially active in other genres of scholarship and writing, sowing seeds of knowledge contributing to configuring the entire field of African humanities and social sciences, helping to construct the field as one that feeds on its own insights,  its own idea networks developed from dialogue between contemporary African, classical African, Africanist thought and thought from beyond those configurations, generating a globally cosmopolitan, pluriversalistic vision, regionally grounded but universally integrative and resonant.

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