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Death in Africa Project - Project outputs

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Visual output

Lee, Rebekah, 'The Price of Death' documentary film on the township funeral industry in South Africa (2012)

Lee, Rebekah, curator, online Visual Archive and Gallery of photos and video content collected from the Death in Africa project (2013)  

Publications

Lee, Rebekah, ‘Entrepreneurism in South Africa’s emergent funeral industry’, in Ute Roschenthaler and Dorothea Schultz (eds), Entrepreneurs and Entrepreneurship in Africa [under review] 

Lamont, Mark and Rebekah Lee, ‘Africa! Arrive Alive: Road safety in Kenya and South Africa’, Technology and Culture Special Issue on global road safety in history, Mike Esbester and Jameson Wetmore (guest eds) [under review, projected publication date 2014]

Kalusa, Walima T. and Megan Vaughan, Death, Belief and Politics in Central Africa (Lusaka: Lembani Press, forthcoming 2013)

Lee, Rebekah and Megan Vaughan (guest eds), Special Issue on Death and Loss in Africa, African Studies, vol. 71, 2 (2012) [a volume of papers based on a selection of papers presented at the second international conference on death in Africa, April 2010] : 

  • deGelder, Mieke, '"It's not right!": Death as gendered experience in Contemporary South Africa', African Studies, vol. 71, 2 (2012)
  • Lamont, Mark, 'Accidents have no cure! Road death as industrial catastrophe in eastern Africa', African Studies, vol. 71, 2 (2012)
  • Lee, Rebekah, 'Death in slow motion: Funerals, ritual practice and road danger in South Africa', African Studies, vol. 71, 2 (2012)
  • Mususa, Patience, 'Topping up: Life amidst hardship and death on the Copperbelt', African Studies, vol. 71, 2 (2012)
  • Noret, Joel, 'Grief as social fact: Notes from southern Benin', African Studies, vol. 71, 2 (2012)
  • Nunez, Lorena and Brittany Wheeler, 'Chronicles of death out of place: Management of migrant death in Johannesburg', African Studies, vol. 71, 2 (2012)
  • Vaughan, Megan, 'The discovery of suicide in East and Southern Africa', African Studies, vol. 71, 2 (2012)
  • Vivian, Lauraine, 'Child deaths in the Paediatric Intensive Care Unit, Red Cross Children's Hospital, Cape Town, South Africa', African Studies, vol. 71, 2 (2012)

Lamont, Mark, ‘Decomposing pollution? Corpses, burial and affliction among the Meru (Kenya)’, in Michael Jindra and Joel Noret (eds) Funerals in Africa: Explorations of a Social Phenomenon (New York & London: Berghahn Books, 2011). 

Kalusa, Walima T. 'Death, Christianity and African miners: Contesting Indirect Rule on the Zambian copperbelt', International Journal of African Historical Studies, vol. 44, 1 (2011).

Kalusa, Walima T., 'The killing of Lilian Burton and black and white nationalisms in Northern Rhodesia in the 1960s', Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 37, 1 (2011), pp. 63-77.

Lee, Rebekah, 'Death "on the move": Funerals, entrepreneurs and the rural-urban nexus in South Africa', Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute, vol. 81, 2 (2011), pp. 226-47.

Vaughan, Megan, 'Suicide in late colonial Africa: The evidence of inquests from Nyasaland', American Historical Review, vol. 115, 2 (April 2010), pp. 385-404.

Lamont, Mark, ‘Interroger les morts pour critiquer les vivants, Ou l’exotisme morbide? A review of Francophone anthropology on African ways of death’, Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute, vol. 79, 3 (2009), pp. 455-62.

Special Issue on Death in African History, Journal of African History, vol. 49, 3 (Nov 2008) [A volume based on a selection of papers presented at the first Death in African History Conference, May 2007] :

  • Lee, Rebekah and Megan Vaughan. ‘Death and dying in the history of Africa since 1800’, Introduction to the Special Issue on Death in African History, JAH, vol. 49, 3 (Nov 2008), pp. 341-59.
  • Doyle, Shane. '"The child of death":  Personal names and parental attitudes towards mortality in Bunyoro, Western Uganda, 1900-2005', JAH, vol. 49, 3 (Nov 2008), pp.361-82.
  • Vaughan, Megan. ‘“Divine Kings”: Sex, death and anthropology in inter-war East/Central Africa’, JAH, vol. 49, 3 (Nov 2008), pp. 383-401.
  • Hynd, Stacey. 'Killing the condemned:  The practice and process of capital punishment in British Africa, 1900-1950s', JAH, vol. 49, 3 (Nov 2008), pp. 403-18.
  • Adebanwi, Wale. 'Death, national memory and the social construction of heroism', JAH, vol. 49, 3 (Nov 2008), pp. 419-44.
  • Ellis, Stephen, 'The Okija Shrine:  Death and life in Nigerian politics', JAH, vol. 49, 3 (Nov 2008), pp. 445-66.

Project conferences

First International Conference:
Death in African History: An Interdisciplinary Conference, University of Cambridge, 5-6 May 2007.

Second International Conference:
Managing Uncertainty: Death and Loss in Africa, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, 8-10 April 2010,

Seminar and conference papers

Rebekah Lee, ‘A new gospel of the self? The ‘living and dying’ workshop and refashioning citizenship in post-apartheid South Africa’, paper presented African Studies Association UK Biannual Conference, Leeds, 6-8 September 2012.

Rebekah Lee, ‘Roads, risk and the changing moral economy of death in South Africa’, paper presented at 4th European Conference on African Studies, Uppsala, Sweden, 15-18 June 2011.

Walima Kalusa (History, University of Zambia), 'The Killing of Lilian Margaret Burton and Black and White Nationalisms in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) in the 1960s', paper presented at Managing Uncertainty: Death and Loss in Africa conference, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, 8-10 April 2010.

Mark Lamont (Anthropology, Goldsmiths College, University of London), 'Accidents Have No Cure: Road Deaths and Material Witnessing in East Africa', paper presented at Managing Uncertainty: Death and Loss in Africa conference, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, 8-10 April 2010.

Rebekah Lee (History, Goldsmiths College, University of London), 'Death "on the move": Funerals, Entrepreneurs and the Rural-Urban Nexus in South Africa', paper presented at Managing Uncertainty: Death and Loss in Africa conference, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, 8-10 April 2010.

Megan Vaughan (History, University of Cambridge), 'The "Discovery" of Suicide in East and Southern Africa', paper presented at Managing Uncertainty: Death and Loss in Africa conference, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, 8-10 April 2010.

Lee, Rebekah, 'New "ways of dying": Embalming and exhumation in contemporary South Africa', Centre for African Studies, University of Edinburgh, 3 March 2010.

Lee, Rebekah, ''Mobility, migration and the changing management of death in South Africa', paper presented at the African Studies Association Annual Meeting, New Orleans, 19-22 November 2009.

Lamont, Mark. 'Death and dilemma among transnational Kenyans living in London, paper presented at Nordic Africa Days conference, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway, 1-3 October 2009.

Lee, Rebekah. 'Death "on the move":  Funerals, entrepreneurs and the rural-urban nexus in South Africa', paper presented at Nordic Africa Days conference, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway, 1-3 October 2009.

Kalusa, Walima. 'Death, Christianity and African Miners: Contesting Indirect Rule on the Zambian Copperbelt, 1935-1962', History Seminar, History Department, University of Zambia, 26 August 2009.

Lamont, Mark. ‘The tortured tomb and the baobab: Islamization, death, and the Shomvi cemetery, Tanzania’, Panel 13: Encounters with the Past: the emotive materiality and affective presence of human remains, Association of Social Anthropologists, Bristol, 7 April 2009.

Lamont, Mark. ‘The social afterlife of Swahili tombs on the Mrima coast, Tanzania’, African Studies Seminar, London School of Economics, 17 March 2009.

Lee, Rebekah. ‘Mobility, migration and the changing management of death in South Africa’, Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine Seminar, University of Oxford, 9 March 2009.

Lee, Rebekah. ‘The new “gold mine”?: Buying and burying in contemporary South Africa’, Death in African History: An Interdisciplinary Conference, University of Cambridge, 5-6 May 2007.

Vaughan, Megan. ‘“Divine Kings”: Sex, death and anthropology in interwar East/Central Africa’, Death in African History: An Interdisciplinary Conference, University of Cambridge, 5-6 May 2007.

Lee, Rebekah, ‘ “The debt we cannot avoid”: Researching the funeral frenzy in contemporary South Africa’, Department of Anthropology Seminar, Goldsmiths College, University of London, 22 November 2006.