Dr Harri Englund

Photograph of Dr Harri EnglundReader; Fellow, Churchill; Director, Centre of African Studies.

email: hme25 [at] cam.ac.uk

Research interests: South-Central Africa; human rights and the moral imagination; liberal governance and socio-economic inequality; African-language media and literature; African Christianities; displacement and migration; translation and poetry.

Dr Harri Englund has held several research positions in British, Nordic and African institutions, most recently as Fellow of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) in the UK. He is also Honorary Research Associate in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town and Docent of African Studies at the University of Helsinki.

Dr Englund’s extensive fieldwork among Chichewa/Chinyanja-speakers in Malawi, Mozambique and Zambia has involved research with refugees, smallholder farmers, Pentecostal pastors and laity, radio broadcasters, human rights activists, and migrants in urban peripheries.

Publications

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Human Rights and African Airwaves by Harri Englund
Human Rights and African Airwaves focuses on a popular Chichewa news bulletin, Nkhani Zam’maboma, broadcast on Malawi’s public radio. Highlighting obligation and mutual dependence, the programme expresses grievances and injustices that are closest to Malawi’s impoverished public in popular idioms and local narrative forms. The book argues that the most effective claims against injustices are [...]
November 8th, 2011
» Full List of Publications

Projects

Image of a boy holding a radio
Human Rights and the Chichewa Radio
Are human rights the most effective way of making claims under the conditions of stark socioeconomic inequalities? One of Dr Harri Englund’s recent projects, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), has explored popular alternatives to human rights talk in African-language radio broadcasting. The radio is – not only still, but increasingly – [...]
September 3rd, 2010

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