African Studies Research Programs

African Media Program

Begun in 1977, this program was renewed with grants in 1994 to create the authoritative international reference guide to Audio-Visual Media on Africa by comprehensively identifying, evaluating, and critically reviewing all extant films and videos on Africa in the U.S. and selected African media. The program seeks documentaries and feature introductions to Africa of high quality, positive, balanced, and factual accounts of Africa, free of prejudice and stereotypes, to commend to professional Africanists and teachers in school, college and community. The African Media Program assists in locating and reviewing media on Africa and incorporating these in courses, research, community education, and video media. The African Media Program website can be reached at http://www.amp.msu.edu/.

The Program previously published Africa on Film and Videotape, 1982: A Compendium of Reviews, which it will update in electronic format in 1995-96. "The AMP web-searchable database of circa 8,000 films and videotapes on Africa, including African cinema, will be available in 1998." The AMP is supported by funds from the U.S. Department of Education and the African Studies Center at MSU. Professor Kenneth Harrow (English, African Studies) also is organizing an African Cinema Project which studies and disseminates literary films from Africa.

African Media Program - CO-Directors:

African Studies Center
100 International Center
E. Lansing, MI 48824-1035
(517) 353-1700

Program on the Lakes of East Africa (PLEA)

Begun in 1989, this program of the African Studies Center focuses on the socio-economic and ecological issues of the changing lakes, lake basins, and aquatic resources of East Africa, focusing thus far on Lakes Malawi and Victoria. PLEA offers a continuing program of research, training, and service concerning the changing lake and aquatic ecosystems in East Africa and focusing on the human impacts on the freshwater resources and the impacts of changes in those resources on the human users and owners. Current activities are directed toward developing participatory management structures for the multi-national fisheries of the region. The Program has received funding from the MacArthur Foundation, the MSU Foundation, the College of Social Science, and the African Studies Center. The program is collaborative with the governments, academic communities, villages, and urban areas of the East African countries and seeks to link scientific information with management for sustained human well-being. PLEA also plans better access of the lakeside research institutes to documentation on the lakes and to training in socio-economics for academics and officers of the lake-owning nations. Others at MSU working on East African lakes at MSU include:

PLEA CO-Leaders:

MSU African Diaspora Research Program

MSU African Diaspora Research Program - studies the dispersion and settlement of African peoples beyond the continent of Africa and conducts international comparative studies of communities of African descent and trains scholars in the social sciences in the field of African diaspora studies, primarily on Latin America and the Caribbean, where the largest number of peoples of African descent have settled outside of Africa and also in Canada, Ethiopia, Germany, India, and Mexico. http://www.msu.edu/unit/uap/africa.html.