Rochester, New York – The Liberian Studies Association (LSA) last weekend held its 50th annual conference at the Rochester Institute of New York.
Several papers were delivered covering a range of issues tackling democratization, lessons learned from and implications of the recent elections and gender base violence.
At the end of the two-day conference organizers and participants agree that Facebook has the potential of being an extremely useful tool for political parties, interest groups and government to reach Liberia audiences.
Dr. D. Elwood Dunn, a retired professor at Sewanee: The University of the South where he previously served as head of the Department of Politics, and subsequently the Alfred Walter Negley Professor of Politics, who served as keynote speaker, urged the LSA maintain the all-important nexus between scholarship and development. “We must continue to study Liberia in order to advance the frontiers of knowledge, but we must also do so in context of service to the country and its people,” he said.
Growing Challenges
Dr. Dunn who has been a member of the association since the early 1970s when the association was not more than four years old averred that he has grown up with LSA and experienced much of its growing challenges as he paid homage to the visionary founders of LSA.
Dr. Dunn recalled: In 1968 Professor Svend E. Holsoe, then of DePaul University and Professor David M. Foley of the University of Georgia, two American scholars of the Liberia experience secured a grant from the Carnegie Foundation and launched in the Fall of that year the Liberian Studies Journal (LSJ), forerunner of the Liberian Studies Association (LSA). From the first, and unstructured gathering at Stanford University in 1969 of scholars and students from the United States, Liberia and other countries, the LSA has endured through the vicissitudes of Liberia’s own turbulent history.
Dr. Dunn, who was the last minister of state before the 1980 coup explained that it is necessary to devote a lot of time and energy in the study of Liberia in a bid to pursue the advancement of knowledge, and aid the development of the nation and people of Liberia.
Drawing from his own inspiration from the life work of the late Dr. Mary Antoinette Brown Sherman, Dr. Dunn proposed that the LSA dwell on the research/development nexus or the quest to make research relevant to Liberia’s development. “Though many other perspectives are conceivable, I have come here today to suggest that LSA at 50 consider taking a critical look at the state of scholarship on Liberia with a view to addressing some of the issues bearing on the welfare and wellbeing of the Liberian people.”
Though still an under-studied country, Dr. Dunn said, scholars at home and abroad have for long busied themselves with trying to understand Africa’s first republic. “There is an impressive and growing list of fine Liberian scholars but they seem to be of recent vintage.”
Dr. Dunn added that the efforts at systematically studying Liberia have hardly been a sustained one before the beginning of LSA. “Interests have waxed and waned. And Liberian scholars have themselves remained largely at the margins of Liberian studies both before and since the start of LSA. The fact must be inserted, however, that there were early Liberian thinkers and literary figures who sought to define a Liberian national purpose. But in more contemporary times John Payne Mitchell earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1955 and chose the career of a government bureaucrat. Augustus Feweh Caine similarly earned a Ph.D. from Michigan State University and ended his career as chairman of the National Democratic Party of Liberia. Though Dr. Abeodu Bowen Jones and her spouse, Dr. A.E. Nyema Jones earned doctorates respectively from Northwestern University and the University of Chicago and made contributions to scholarship, they too were largely generators of ideas within governing bureaucracies. Liberia cried out then, and she does today, for Liberians trained in the various professions to define, deepen and broaden the scope of Liberian studies.”
Dr. Dunn said since his retirement from Sewanee: The University of the South in 2012, he has spent a good deal of his time in Liberia engaging as a consultant with a few government reform efforts, including constitutional review and national symbols review.
Non-partisan Think Tank Key
He trumpeted the contributions of the late Dr. Byron Tarr and a few other colleagues who initiated an independent nonpartisan think tank, the Center for Policy Studies/CERPS. “We created CERPS because we felt that the ideas that went into public policy-making or governance reform had been generated almost entirely by either the various Liberian governments and/or their foreign partners/donors. Tarr has left an interesting unpublished study titled “To Rouse Liberia, Long Forlorn: Overcoming Challenges to Economic Governance.” Here the late Liberian political economist attempts to examine three-dozen Liberian public sector reform projects between 1908 and 2008, all of them with minimal Liberian thinking/input. I understand there are now a number of other fledgling think tanks such as the Center for Liberia’s Future, which is doing some pioneering work on post-Ebola preparedness and the plight of Ebola survivors, orphans and caregivers. One thing the two fledging initiatives suggest to my mind is the need for serious independent non-partisan think tanks. Such bodies could offer alternative perspectives on public policy issues and enrich considerably the process of policy making in Liberia.”
Social Media Impact
One of the papers presented by Prof. Welma Redd and Mouna Farhat looked at the role of that Social Media particularly Facebook, placed on the 2017 elections. The paper showed a correlation between increased political activities and engagement by Liberian Facebook users in the diaspora and Liberia.
Prof. Redd, a former newscaster at state radio, ELBC and currently a professor at Morgan State University and Ms. Farhat argued that a growing number of Liberians get their news about elections of government officials from social media, particularly, Facebook. “In this digital age, data can be gathered using analytic tools, such as Facebook Insight, to understand how public engagement on social media impacts elections and other socio-political activities. Mobile phones, tablets, computers and other electronic devices provide Liberians across the country and around the world access to information from news sources, partisans, influencers, featured videos, campaign events and discussions, in real time, about election trends.”
The study, according to the panelists uses analytics to gather engagement data from the most active Liberian groups (chat rooms) on Facebook during the 2017 Liberian presidential election. “It evaluates posts referencing the top five presidential candidates on the number of comments, votes (likes) and reposts/sharing. The study also looks at engagement in these groups on the two final candidates, George Weah and Joseph Boakai, leading up to the runoff election that was held on December 26, 2017.”
Jackie Sayegh, Cornell University offered an overview of Liberia’s literary development.
T. Debey Sayndee of the University of Liberia examined the issue of gender-based violence (GBV) citing fieldwork in Grand Bassa County. “The statutory system remains largely unavailable to the majority of the Liberian population, due to costs, travel distance, etc. However, the statutory system offers a more standardized procedure, with the potential of ensuring a more gender-equal form of justice. On the other hand, the customary systems are readily available, and are also efficient in handling various kinds of cases.”
Krystal Smalls, from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, The Future is Black: Transnational Liberian Youth and the Making of Black Modernities explored the ways they have imagined and constructed the present and future by reproducing, refusing, and reconfiguring central epistemes of European modernity.
The LSA is a non-profit, scholarly organization created to provide a means for effective cooperation among persons interested in furthering research in all scholarly disciplines, including the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, on topics relevant to the Republic of Liberia and adjacent areas; to publish and otherwise disseminate the results of such research; to cooperate with scholarly organizations, and cultural, scientific, and educational institutions, nationally and internationally, having mutual interests in the exchange and presentation of information and ideas resulting from research in the subject field; to encourage interest in Liberian affairs; and to stimulate and facilitate academic contacts and educational exchanges between Liberia and the United States.
The LSA annual conference convenes a range of students, academics, and policy-makers to develop new ideas and thinking about scholarship on Liberia and to establish networks that sustain the conversation and the exchange of ideas.
The conference was hosted by the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Rochester Institute of Technology.
The department supports an interdisciplinary approach to the study of global, urban, historical, and cultural experience, practices, and change. Our faculty are scholarly experts in archaeology, cultural anthropology, economics, education, folklore, history, linguistics, psychology, and sociology which represent academic disciplines dedicated to the understanding of human social life, past and present.