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Staff Profile

Chloé Josse-Durand

Research Associate Afterlives

Background


BACKGROUND

 

I am currently a Research Associate on Leverhulme Trust funded project Afterlives of colonial incarceration: African prisons, architecture and politics.  Principal investigator is Dr. Laura Routley, Senior Lecturer, Newcastle University: https://www.ncl.ac.uk/heritage/research/current-projects/afterlives-colonial-incarceration/

 

My role is to devise original methodologies and undertake qualitative research on the Kenyan sites of the projects, namely Kapenguria ex-prison and now a Museum; and Mweru and Kangubiri High School, both of which were Mau Mau detention camps.

 

I examine how the memory narratives and policies in the present about colonial carceral practices and ex-carceral sites are vividly participate in the making of identity, political and land claims in the political arena.

 

From 2017-2021, I was based in Kenya as a post-doctoral research fellow and the Deputy Director of the French Institute for Research in Africa (IFRA-Nairobi), a public research institute in social sciences under the umbrella of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS): https://ifranairobi.hypotheses.org/165

 

My role included conducting individual and collaborative research initiatives, promoting the social sciences and humanities in East Africa through collaborations with African researchers and universities, and disseminating academic information.

 

I hold a Masters in African Studies and I received my Ph.D. in Political Science in 2016, at the University of Bordeaux, Institut d’Études Politiques, France.

 

In my PhD, I analyzed the memory politics related to the creation of “lieux de mémoire” (Pierre Nora) heritage institutions such as community-led and State-led museums, mausoleums and heroes’ monument in Kenya and Ethiopia.

 

 

Memberships

 

Since 2016, I have been an associate fellow of the French research laboratory Les Afriques dans le Monde (LAM-UMR5115), a multidisciplinary and comparative research center for the analysis of politics in African and transoceanic spaces, Bordeaux, France.

 

RAJA - Réseau Aquitain des Jeunes Africanistes – Aquitaine Young Africanist Network

 

REAF - Rencontres des Études Africaines en France – French Conference of African Studies

 

ANCMSP - Association Nationale des Candidats aux Métiers de la Science Politique National –  Association of Candidates for Political Science Professions

 

JCEA - Rencontres des Jeunes Chercheurs en Études Africaines – Early Carreer African Studies Researcher’s Conference

 

Editorial Activities

 

I am a member of the editorial board of 5 journals:

Sources. Materials & Fieldwork in African Studies - https://www.sources-journal.org/?lang=en

AfricaE - https://books.openedition.org/africae/2244?lang=fr

Les Annales d'Ethiopie - https://www.persee.fr/collection/ethio

The East African Review - https://journals.openedition.org/eastafrica/

Mambo! - https://mambo.hypotheses.org/

Research

 

Research themes

 

Memory politics; the political use of heritage; identity and ethnogenesis; corruption; local and national elites; devolution and governance; the construction and formation of the State; the uses of identity and collective memory in local mobilizations; the construction of collective grievances over the long term in relation to colonial legacies; post-colonial injustices (land in particular).

 

Research Interests

 

I investigate the politics of historical narratives and memorialization and the growing salience of ethnic identities in the political sphere with an emphasis on African contexts.

 

Therefore, my research leans toward memory politics, identity politics, cultural actors and entrepreneurs and the political (mis)use of heritage in Kenya and Ethiopia.

 

I have also conducted research on Developmental States and Development actors in Kenya and Ethiopia, focusing on the impact of Ethiopia’s Ethno-federalism and Kenya’s Devolution on local identities, power relations and governance, with a particular interest in the grassroots transformations of clientelism networks, the political role of traditional authorities and the voting patterns of a working-class and/or rural electorate.

 

Major research project work includes:

 

  • Afterlives of colonial incarceration: African prisons, architecture and politics

1st October 2022  -  30th September 2025

 

Carceral practices were central to colonialism and prisons were often the first buildings erected during the colonisation of Africa. This project explores the memory politics of former sites of colonial imprisonment in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa. It investigates struggles over how these sites have been repurposed (or not), through the preservation or alteration of buildings and spaces. These explorations illuminate postcolonial tensions around identity, Africa’s place in the international, and imagined futures.

 

This project aims to:


  • Investigate the official narratives African states and heritage bodies create around sites that were once places of imprisonment either under colonial rule or during anti-colonial struggles.
  • Explore the ways in which these official narratives are contested: What elements are disputed? By whom? And with what effects?
  • Examine how these processes interact with broader socio-political contexts in different states.

 

These insights will be used to:

 

  • Illuminate the politics surrounding the memory of colonial imprisonment.
  • Uncover what the struggles over the heritage of colonial imprisonment reveal about current penal policy debates.
  • Reflect on what this deeper understanding of colonial penal heritage in Africa tells us about struggles over colonial memory across the globe.

  • 2019-2022: African Workers and Workplaces (Kenya-Ethiopia-Tanzania-Burundi)

I was the Project Leader and Principal Investigator of the “Afriques Ouvrières” research program on wage labor and workers in Africa.

 

The program focused on studies that are helping to bring labour in Africa back to the forefront by focusing on different trades and industries, such as Tanzanian seaweed harvester, Kenyan horticultural greenhouse and tea plantation workers, urban and domestic work in Burundi, or industrial activity in Ethiopia.

 

My objective was to initiate collective reflections on the transformations of the working spaces and employment in Africa, to promote cross-views on the study of workers between Africa and Europe, to favour the structuring of a researcher network around shared theoretical, bibliographical and practical knowledge, and to encourage individual or collective field research: https://afriquesouvrieres.hypotheses.org/

 

Through the “African Workers” program, I investigated the issue of autochthony by observing interactions between migrant workers from diverse ethnic backgrounds and “native” leaders and authorities during election seasons. I also looked at land claims that were made by traditional authorities, notably the Nandi Council of Elders, based on the localization of undocumented heritage sites (graveyards, prisons, battlefields) only mentioned in a few colonial archives and oral narratives.

 

I have engaged in curating a socio-photographic exhibition titled “African Workplaces” with my colleague Constance Perrin-Joly, Senior Lecturer at the Sorbonne Paris Nord University, that is currently touring France and East-Africa. Nine researchers and photographers from France and East-Africa were invited to share their experience and views on both their professional photography practices about Labour in Africa. I believe exhibitions convey powerful information about complex African realities and can be used as a tool to disseminate academic knowledge beyond the walls of universities.

 

The exhibition is quite ambitious in its content and shape: it gathers 46 pictures, divided in 3 sections, with bilingual catalogs available online on the Exposure platform : https://ifra.exposure.co/african-workplaces?source=share-ifra.

 

 

  • 2017-2020: Portraying Devolution in Kenya

Devolution was set in motion in Kenya in 2010 with the promulgation of a new constitution that introduced two tiers of government, the national and county level, and devolved certain functions to the counties. The 2013 elections led to the establishment of 47 county governments from the previous 8 provinces.

 

The main objective of this program was to explore the implementation and the perception of Devolution by Kenyan citizens, leaders and civil society actors to take the pulse of devolution five years down the line, as well as to create the conditions for both a scientific and public debate on identity politics and the constitutional regulation of the “living together” in Kenya.

 

I organized a two-day academic conference at IFRA (June 12-13, 2018); 5 research missions carried out in 5 counties (Nandi, Marsabit, Meru, Migori, Mombasa), led by 4 Kenyan researchers (Hassan Kochore-NMK, Fathima Baburdeen-Technical University of Mombasa, Mwongela Kamencu-University of Nairobi, Castro Barraza-Maseno University) and myself, accompanied in their investigations by a French documentary filmmaker (Laurent Gaillardon).

 

The project resulted in the production of a collaborative research-documentary titled “Portraying Devolution in Kenya. A Journey Through 5 counties (Marsabit, Meru, Migori, Mombasa, Nandi)”, 48 min. English & Swahili (with subtitles) Production: IFRA-Nairobi Directors : Chloé Josse Durand & Laurent Gaillardon: https://youtu.be/F_wlCcD4L0o

 

I was able to carry out nine debates around the screening of the documentary among various Kenyan partners, actors and county officials and staff in the presence of the program’s researchers between September 2019 to March 2020. This program also led to the publication of a book chapter in French and English.

 

  • 2011- 2016 –  Ph.D. in Political Sciences. University of Bordeaux, Institut d’Etudes Politiques, France.

Title: Building Local Memories, « Pluralizing » the National Narrative: Community Museums and the Political Use of Heritage and Memory in Kenya and Ethiopia.

 

My dissertation aims to understand the political scene in two East African countries – Ethiopia and Kenya – by analysing the political dynamics surrounding the creation of memorial institutions such as museums, mausoleums and other memory spaces. I argue that these institutions must be first and foremost understood as intermediary spaces of negotiation between groups that are supporting them; the State that is financing and / or authorising them; as well as international organisations that are assisting and influencing the countries’ patrimonial policies.

 

The two case studies of this research - the Konso Museum in Ethiopia and the museum-mausoleum of Koitalel Samoei in Kenya – are institutions that relate to specific political context: in Kenya, where political pluralism has been effectively accepted in the 2000s, the negotiation surrounding the political interpretation of the past takes place within the mausoleum-museum. In Ethiopia, where authoritarianism has been reinvigorated, local power relations are structured and reorganised by the presence of the South region’s first ethnographic museum.

 

Both in Kenya and Ethiopia, the contemporary emergence of community museums illustrates the growing salience of ethnic identities in the political sphere – used as a resource and category of action both by the State and “patrimonial entrepreneurs”. By using a new kind of capital – heritage and its conservation – the latter strengthen their position both as “self-entrepreneurs” (in the sense of Michel Foucault) and “we-entrepreneurs”, occupying an intermediary position in negotiations and public decision-making. Thus, we must look not only at what politics do to museums but also how museums do impact on political dynamics.


Through the study of community museums, I analyse the political uses of State and international memories, thus aiming at understanding the determinants and modalities of nation (re)building. I have adopted a microsociological and ethnographic approach within the framework political science. This “bottom-up” approach, articulated with macro levels of analysis (the State, ideologies, and institutions) as well as micro levels (institutions and actors of heritage, local political elite) leads my argumentation to a larger debate on construction, qualification and perceptions of political regimes, the nature of the State as well as the role played by these new “patrimonial entrepreneurs” in the reconfiguration of political competition.

Teaching

I am qualified to teach in Political Science by the French National Council of Universities – Qualification registration N° 17204282660, qualification campaign 2016.

I served as a Lecturer during my Ph.D. at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Bordeaux, France (2013-2016) and in Classe Préparatoire where I have developed the course materials and taught the following courses:

 

·      History of Political Philosophy, Classe Préparatoire ENS Cachan, Lycée Gustave Eiffel, 53H (2014-2015)

·      Methodology of Research in Social sciences, pedagogical integration course of two weeks for foreign students, IEP Bordeaux, 15H (2014).

·      Political Science and Theory, BA, Institut d'Études Politiques de Bordeaux, 76H (2013-2014)

·      Readings in 4 post-graduate Courses: “Politics and Development in Africa and Developing Countries”, “Risk Management and Development in the Global South”, “African Interdisciplinary Studies”, “Research Methods”, Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Bordeaux (2012-2014).

Publications