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Music and Sports in
the Making of Child and Youth Identities in Contemporary Africa |
The 2005 session of the Institute will explore Music and
Sports in the Making of Child and Youth Identities in
Contemporary Africa to reflect on the power of mobilisation
and expression that music and sports convey and the increasingly
important place they occupy in the lives and outlook of the
younger members of society. Furthermore, personal and collective
immersion in music and sports has, perhaps more than ever
before, become both a coping mechanism in the face of
local/global adversity and an empowerment strategy for dealing
with such adversities. Some even suggest that music and sports
have come to play an important role in liberating the youth in
an era characterised by widespread disillusionment and
alienation. The emergence of the global television – and its
round-the-clock, dedicated musical and sport programming –
mobile telephony, and the internet has facilitated the growth of
new local and global youth cultural communities around music and
sports that are fed into the making and re-making of child and
youth identities, including dress, dance, and language forms.
New civic identities are emerging which carry varying
implications for traditional modes of mobilisation of the youth
as citizens of specific nation-states; they are also directly
impacting on family strategies for the development of the
careers of their children and the preferences which children set
out for their own post-school professional livelihood. The huge
commercial opportunities offered by the growing youth market in
music and sports have resulted in the emergence of different
corporate strategies for exploiting and expanding the market;
corporations have also taken a frontline role in shaping youth
tastes in music and sports, as well as the associated
paraphernalia, in a trend which has revived discussions about
cultural imperialism and the erosion of local musical genres and
sports. Through the theme of the 2005 session, participants in
the Institute are being invited to undertake a critical
assessment of the different dimensions of the interface between
music, sports and child and youth identities. Participants will
be encouraged to review the relevant literature that is emerging
on the subject; analyse the empirical evidence which is
available both from their own field work and other sources;
construct conceptual, theoretical, and methodological tools that
could help to deepen knowledge, as well as advance debate; and
consider the challenges for further research which arise from
their scholarly interventions. For this purpose, the resources
of the CODESRIA documentation and information centre (CODICE)
and the expertise of a team of experienced resource persons will
be made available to the participants in the Institute.
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