New Media and Religious Transformations in Africa casts a critical look at Africa's rapidly evolving religious media scene. Following political liberalization, media deregulation, and the proliferation of new media technologies, many African religious leaders and activists have appropriated such media to strengthen and expand their communities and gain public recognition. Media have also been used to marginalize and restrict the activities of other groups, which has sometimes led to tension, conflict, and even violence. Showing how media are rarely neutral vehicles of expression, the contributors to this multidisciplinary volume analyze the mutual imbrications of media and religion during times of rapid technological and social change in various places throughout Africa.

New Media and Religious Transformations in Africa casts a critical look at Africa's rapidly evolving religious media scene. Following political liberalization, media deregulation, and the proliferation of new media technologies, many African religious leaders and activists have appropriated such media to strengthen and expand their communities and gain public recognition. Media have also been used to marginalize and restrict the activities of other groups, which has sometimes led to tension, conflict, and even violence. Showing how media are rarely neutral vehicles of expression, the contributors to this multidisciplinary volume analyze the mutual imbrications of media and religion during times of rapid technological and social change in various places throughout Africa.

Intimate Strangers tells the story of the everyday tensions of maids and madams in ways that bring together different worlds and explore various dimensions of servitude and mobility. Immaculate travels to a foreign land only to find her fianc refusing to marry her. Operating from the margins of society, through her own ingenuity and an encounter with researcher Dr Winter-Bottom Nanny, she is able to earn some money. Will she remain at the margins or graduate into DUST - Diamond University of Science and Technology? Immaculate learns how maids struggle to make ends meet and madams wrestle to keep them in their employ. Resolved to make her disappointments blessings, she perseveres until she can take no more.

The scarcity of conviviality in universities, within and between disciplines, and among scholars suggests that the position in and production and consumption of knowledge are far from neutral, objective, and disinterested processes. They are socially and politically mediated by webs of humanity, hierarchies of power, and instances of human agency. Given the resilience of colonial education in Africa and among Africans, endogenous traditions of knowledge are barely recognised and grossly underrepresented.

Conviviality in knowledge production would entail not just seeking conversations and collaboration with and across disciplines in the conventional sense but also the integration of sidestepped popular epistemologies informed by popular universes and ideas of reality.

Such scholarship is predicated upon recognising and providing for incompleteness as a necessary attribute of being, from persons to disciplines and traditions of knowing, and knowledge making.

Drawing material from Sub-Saharan Africa's two most economically successful nations, this book delves into the paradox of accelerated flows of capital and information, and the social closure and exploitation they generate when people cross national borders. In both countries relative economic progress has lured immigrants to seek a living, often as undocumented 'aliens'. The reaction among ordinary Botswanans and South Africans has been a heightened xenophobia that exploits and excludes. This book is an incisive commentary on a globalizing world that reaches down into the grassroots of southern Africa with consequences that have received little attention. Nyamnjoh documents the new politics of insiders and outsiders in these societies, delivering a telling commentary on the global rhetoric of open societies in an era of increasing closures and exclusions.