Professor Charisma Acey, UC Berkeley, will present the 2025 Coleman Memorial Lecture on Thursday, May 29, 2025 (location/time TBD).

Thursday, May 29, 2025
Time to be announced
TBD

In this Coleman Memorial Lecture, Charisma Acey revisits Claude Ake’s foundational concepts of democracy and development, drawing from over two decades of scholarly research and fieldwork across the African continent. Reflecting on firsthand experiences, from Zimbabwe’s structural adjustment crises and humanitarian relief in Angola to urban struggles for water, sanitation, and environmental justice in Nigeria among other sites of scholarly and on-the-ground engagement, Acey critiques the persistence of authoritarian governance and externally driven economic models that obstruct genuine development. She challenges dominant top-down paradigms that favor elite interests and aesthetic modernization over inclusive planning and the lived realities of African communities. Drawing on legacies of resilience and resistance, including urban ecological marronage, the talk advocates for a renewed democratic praxis rooted in African traditions of participatory governance, centering collective agency, environmental justice, and human well-being as central elements for shaping Africa’s developmental futures.

Charisma Acey is an Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning and Arcus Chair in Social Justice and the Built Environment at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research and teaching center on urban sustainability, environmental justice, and democratic governance in cities across Africa and the United States, with a particular focus on equitable access to essential services such as clean water, safe sanitation, and healthy food. Prior to entering academia, she worked in humanitarian relief and international development throughout sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, experiences which continue to inform her critical engagement with questions of state power, informality, and grassroots resilience. Acey is the author of numerous peer-reviewed articles on urban governance and the human right to water, with her work appearing in journals such as World Development, Landscape and Urban Planning, The Lancet Global Health, and other leading publications. Her contributions have been recognized with fellowships and awards for community-engaged research and health equity leadership. She is currently developing a book project titled, "Extractive Utopias," examining how visions of progress in African cities, often built on exploitative relationships to land, labor, and natural resources, are contested and remade by communities through democratic and ecological practices.

The Coleman Memorial Lecture is given in memory and honor of James S. Coleman, founder of the UCLA African Studies Center.

RSVP requested for catering purposes to africa@international.ucla.edu.

Cost : Free

Sponsor(s): African Studies Center