CHRISTINA CONCEICAO
Sports Editor
The senior history capstone class will be hosting a conference titled “Conflict and Crisis in Africa.” It will take place in the Williams Center room 204 A-E on Nov. 13, at 3 p.m.
During this conference the students will be presenting their preliminary research with a wide range of topics such as western representations of Africa, celebrity humanitarianism, the crisis of the African economy, the organization of African unity and several other topics. The conference is free of charge and is open to all.
The capstone is taught by Dr. Steven Fabian, the associate chair to the History Department, who is an African historian.
“The point of this is for my history students to get an exposure to undertaking a major research topic so they understand what it is like to be a historian, working on their own, how to access resources, put it all together to create an argument that attribute to knowledge,” Fabian said. “So, there is the independence part of it, but the conference is key because it tells students — or it shows students — that we are also part of a community. So, they are working together to put this together, and it provides a forum for them to talk about their projects”.
The conference will feature Brendan Bannon as a guest speaker, a native of Western New York. Bannon is a photojournalist who is based in Nairobi, Kenya. He has been a professional photographer since 2000 and has worked on projects in Romania and in Russia; however, Bannon has been living in Africa since 2005.
Since living in Africa, he has photographed places such as Kenya, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Congo and several others depicting the lives of African people. According to http://www.brendanbannon.com, his work has been featured in The New York Times, the Guardian, Christian Science Monitor and others. He also has clients such as UNICEF, CARE International, UNHCR and Medecins Sans Frontieres.
The class as a whole were the ones who decided to invite Bannon to come and speak at the conference, and his name was merely a suggestion by Fabian himself.
“It was important that the students chose someone who could relate to our theme. Brendan, one of my two suggestions, was relevant because he is a photojournalist who covers crisis and conflict in Africa, that is his career. He tries to go beyond that, I think he is one of those reporters who is a little more balanced,” said Fabian. “He isn’t an academic professor, he is someone who is in the field who deals with or has dealt with this on a daily basis.”
With his work, Bannon tries to introduce students and other people to the everyday life in African cities. He attempts to get behind the ideas of Africans as being rural people with a lot of animals, the landscape of Africa and the crisis and conflict that does occur in Africa.
“I think that it will be exciting to have him on campus to engage in this sort of academia versus on the ground journalism because they each have their own problems — challenges — that they have to deal with. How can we bring these two fields together,what can we learn from each other, how can we do a better job between academics and journalists in increasing the awareness of Africa accurately,” said Fabian
To view Bannon’s work, visit his website at www.brendanbanning.com.