This panel is seeking papers that investigate the ways in which displacement and restructuring are experienced, contested, and imagined in Northern Nigeria. It emphasizes the daily experience of life in the face of insurgency, militarization, climate pressures in the Sahel, and economic precarity, while also addressing emerging forms of religious reform, youth mobilization, and artistic experimentation. We are interested in contributions that investigate the ongoing influence of colonial rule and its afterlives on collective memory, hierarchy, and authority. In contexts characterized by political transformation, migration, and insecurity, how are citizenship, indigeneity, and belonging negotiated? What are the methods by which digital infrastructures and diasporic networks generate new publics and restructure political and cultural engagement? We also encourage research on the role of youth, gendered actors, and creative practice in imagining alternative futures, as well as on ecological crisis and extractive economies, religious reform and moral imagination, language politics and epistemic sovereignty.
We encourage empirical, historical, and theoretical approaches, particularly those that capitalize on localized archives, personal epistemologies, and cross-border interactions.
Please submit a 250-word abstract to tpam@umich.edu by March 12, 2025.
Displacement and Remake in Northern Nigeria
