Imagining Gender Futures in Uganda (IMAGENU)
The IMAGENU project enhances research capacity through collaboration between Aarhus and Copenhagen Universities and Gulu University in Uganda. It will provide a new perspective on gender and futures by placing marriage in Uganda and its decline at the centre, showing how this most fundamental gender relation implicates the filiation of children, livelihoods, education, health and people's imaginations, expectations and hopes for the future.
Changing gender relations are widely discussed in Uganda today. They are so controversial that efforts to legislate family law have failed to achieve majority support in parliament for decades. Research in northern and eastern Uganda will provide input to these debates by showing the diversity of gender arrangements and their far-reaching effects.
The project consists of four subprojects, which are described in more detail below.
- Labour migration and hopes for better futures
- Changes in partnership and child filiation
- The Legal Protection of Marriage
- Bridewealth and the future of customary marriages
Hanne O. Mogensen and Julaina Obika focus on young men and women around Kampala, Jinja, Tororo and Gulu districts of Uganda to understand how their experiences of working in the Middle East have shaped their lives and imaginations of the future.
In particular, they look at marriage and partnerships and how these are formed, contested, negotiated and transformed in the pursuit of livelihoods outside Uganda. Through social media, they are also following men and women currently based in different parts of the Middle East, at different stages of their contract employment. Preliminary discussions show some gender differentiated experiences of partnerships, class mobility and livelihoods abroad.
Susan Reynolds Whyte and Michael Whyte are documenting changing marriage practices in Bunyole, eastern Uganda, over 50 years, repeating a village survey they carried out in 1970, 1994 and 2019.
Interviews with three generations of men and women reveal moral concern about current informal and unstable partnerships coupled with a variety of management strategies. Through in-depth interviews and participant observation, Susan Whyte is studying what filiation of children means in a situation where the old ideal of patriliny is blurred and many children grow up with their mother’s family.
Rose Atim, is a PhD student at Gulu University (co-supervised by Hanne O. Mogensen) with a Bachelor's Degree in Law, a Diploma in Legal Practice and a Master of Advanced Studies in Transitional Justice, Human Rights and the Rule of Law. She is exploring the legal protection of marriage in post conflict Acholi society.
The destabilisation of the institution of marriage during the Lord’s Resistance Army insurgency and its grave attendant effects on gender relations and child filiation form the basis of her interrogation of the socio-economic consequences of conflict on marriage in a society regulated by both statutory and customary law. Her research examines the legal framework on marriage in Uganda, evolving trends in marriage, cohabitation as an alternative to legal marriage, and the adequacy of the law in its current form in according marital protection to victims of sexual violence and children born out of sexual violence.
Jimmy Otim, PhD student at Gulu University, (co-supervised by Susan Whyte) focuses on contemporary bridewealth practices/payments and the future of customary marriage in postwar Acholi society.
The study uses ethnographic methodology to explore the experiences and perceptions of men and women concerning bridewealth practices, the role of churches, socio-economic dimensions and how they implicate current and imagined future unions, gender relations and children born out of wedlock. The study is conducted in Gulu City and Palaro Sub-county.
IMAGENU is a collaboration between Aarhus University (Institute of Culture and Society), the University of Copenhagen (Department of Anthropology) and Gulu University (Institute of Peace and Strategic Studies, IPSS) in Uganda.
See the project's homepage at Aarhus University.
The homepage of Institute of Peace and Strategic Studies, Gulu University.
Researchers
| Name | Title | Phone | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Search in Name | Search in Title | Search in Phone | |
| Hanne Overgaard Mogensen | Associate Professor | +4535323454 | |
| Susan Reynolds Whyte | Professor | +4535323477 |
Funded by:
Imagining Gender Futures in Uganda (IMAGENU) has received funding from FFU, The Consultative Research Committee for Development Research (Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs).
Project: Imagining Gender Futures in Uganda (IMAGENU)
Period: 2019-2024
Contact
Susan Reynolds Whyte
(UCPH Contact)
Susan.Reynolds.Whyte@anthro.ku.dk
Telephone: +45 35 32 34 77
External members:
| Name | Title | Phone | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lotte Meinert | Professor, PI Denmark, Aarhus University | ||
| Nanna Schneidermann |
Assistant Professor, Aarhus University | ||
| Anna Baral | Postdoc, Aarhus University | ||
| Julaina Obika | Senior Lecturer, PI Uganda, Gulu University | ||
| Stephen Langole | Senior Lecturer and IPSS Director, Gulu University | ||
| Lioba Lenhart | Associate Professor, Gulu University | ||
| Daniel Komakech | Senior Lecturer, Acting Director, Institute of Research and Graduate Studies, Gulu University | ||
| Rose Atim | PhD Student, Gulu University | ||
| Jimmy Otim | PhD Student, Gulu University | ||
| Mary Ejang | Senior Lecturer, Department of Public Administration, Lira University | +256-772368568 |