Building-States: political authority and architecture in Africa

Summary

Julia will explore how states are made and why they matter in South Africa, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ethiopia. She’ll do this by looking at state buildings, from parliaments to hospitals; from supreme courts to police stations, exploring their aesthetics, their role in public life, how they came to be built, who uses them and – most importantly – what citizens think about them.

Biography

Julia Gallagher is a Professor in African Politics at SOAS and a Reader in International Development at Kings College London. Her research is about how citizens think about and help make states, combining political, social, aesthetic and psychoanalytic theory with extensive fieldwork. She has written on UK-Africa relations, Images of Africa and Zimbabwean conceptions of the state in relation to the wider world. She currently leads an ERC-funded project about Architecture and the State in sub-Saharan Africa and is finishing a book on State-Building/s in South Africa, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ethiopia.