With Professor Henrietta Moore (UCL) and Professor Caleb Adebayo Folorunso (Ibadan, Nigeria) I am coordinator and first Co-Investigator on a British Academy International Partnerships and Mobility grant network entitled ‘African Farming systems: an interdisciplinary pan-African perspective’. The project attempts to share knowledge from our research in Marakwet with other similar projects in South Africa (Bokoni/Mpumalanga; Dr Alex Schoeman) and Tiv Nigeria (Professor Caleb Adebayo Folorunso), while bringing in the archaeological science expertise of other Cambridge researchers.
The partnership runs from 2013-2015 and field workshops in Marakwet Kenya (Dec 2013) and South Africa (July 2014) have already been completed. We will visit Tiv in Nigeria in January 2015 followed later by Cambridge in the same year. The partnership has its own dedicated website which can be found here. We also regularly post on topics.
In addition I am currently involved in a less formal research network established by a wider range of researchers involved in the study of both African and comparative ‘intensive agricultural systems’ . The network is headed up by researchers from Stockholm University, especially Professor Mats Widgren and others, but including specialists from East Africa, the UK, Europe and the US. The network met in Bokoni South Africa in 2009 and Marakwet Kenya in 2011 and we hope to involve many network members in the above international partnership workshops in 2013-15. This network has a group-space page through which links, ideas and information can be shared.
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Relevant publications:
Davies, M.I.J. In press. The temporality of landesque capital: farming and the routines of Pokot life. In Håkansson, T. and Widgren, M. (eds). Landesque capital: the historical ecology of enduring landscape modifications. Left Coast Press, Historical Ecology series.
see also my publications
Dr Matthew Davies 