I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Cologne, Germany. My research is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and forms part of the Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) ‘Africa Rural Futures: Future-making and social ecological transformation’ based at the Universities of Cologne and Bonn.
This CRC has brought together geographers, anthropologists, political scientists, agro-economists, and historians across fourteen multidisciplinary projects. The project is theoretically grounded in the concept of ‘future making’ in order to examine processes and practices that reflect visions of the future, influence contemporary decisions, and lay foundations for subsequent processes to shape future conditions. The CRC currently incorporates nine postdoctoral research fellows and eighteen doctoral students in its second four-year phase, for which it was collectively awarded €9.1m of funding (2022–25).
For more information, see here.
My doctoral research was carried out during the first phase of this project and traced histories of development in—and crucially, visions of development for—the Kilombero valley of south-central Tanzania. Prof David M. Anderson served as both supervisor to the doctorate and continues as PI for the second phase of our sub-project, which applies a similar conceptual and methodological approach to the Kavango-Zambezi (KAZA) Transfrontier Conservation Area of southern Africa, in which five countries diverge: Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
I previously completed an MSc in African Studies at the University of Oxford, and graduated with a BA in History and Swahili (First Class) from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.
For several years I served as an Assistant Examiner in Swahili for Cambridge International Examinations and have more recently tutored undergraduate students on the option course ‘Modern Africa: History, Politics, and Societies (c.1940 to present)’ for the Middlebury College–Oxford Humanities Program.
More information may be found on my home institution profile page.
Twitter: @mkunazini
Research Discipline: History
Research Keywords: Borderlands; development; underdevelopment; (re)settlement; nationalism; resistance to colonialism; mobilities
Countries: Tanzania (mainland and Zanzibar); Namibia; Botswana; Zambia
Contact information
jonathan.jackson@africa.ox.ac.uk
Publications
‘Coercion and Dissent: Sleeping Sickness ‘Concentrations’ and the Politics of Colonial Authority in Ulanga, Tanganyika’ The Journal of African History, 63:1 (2022).
‘“Off to Sugar Valley”: the Kilombero Settlement Scheme and “Nyerere’s People”, 1959–69’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 15:3 (2021), 505–526.
‘The Lost Library of the English Club, Zanzibar’, London Library Magazine 31 (2016), 24–26.