Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/University of Northern Colorado/LIVES AND AFTERLIVES Power, Legacy, and Women in African history (Spring 2024): Difference between revisions

Our class investigates women's history in Africa primarily through the lens of biographies. A key theme in this class is to think about knowledge production -- whose stories get told, and whose do not? Why and with what consequences? Given this focus, I'm especially excited about the prospect of collaborating with Wikipedia. This would allow students to both rectify some of history's "blind spots" (assuming it met with Wikipedia's notability standards) and/or add nuance to existing articles. (I also appreciated the excellent suggestion in the training that these notability policies serve as a conversation starter about knowledge construction and bias.) Many of my students at the University of Northern Colorado (founded as a teacher's training school) are future secondary teachers. I would be thrilled to give them practice writing for broader audiences, discussing citation practices, and developing confidence in their research abilities, writing skills, and contributions to public discourse about history. I have copied the official course description below for reference; please feel free to reach out to me with any questions. I have already identified some existing wikipedia articles that my students could expand, as well as one or two that they might be able to create from scratch, if that is of use to wikipedia -- please feel free to reach out to me if I can provide specific examples or suggestions.

Official course description: How have women shaped African history? How have various trends in African history shaped their lives? And how are these women remembered – by historians, foreigners, and Africans themselves? Who is forgotten – and why? This course investigates these questions by exploring the lives, careers, and legacies of 15 women from different time periods and regions of the African continent. Using a micro-historical approach, we will zoom in on each woman’s life to see what it can tell us about the context she lived in and the historical trends she contributed to. As we trace the lives of these women, we will examine how ideas about (and expressions of) gender and sexuality have varied across place and time. While we learn what made these women important, we will also ask what factors limited their fame, success, or legacies. What forces made Bibi Titi Mohammed less famous than some of her male nationalist counterparts? What can our partial stories about the life of Abina, a young woman who lived in 19th-century Gold Coast reveal about how colonialism and archival practices limit the voices that enter the historical record? How does the life of Ahebi Ugbabe, a woman in colonial Nigeria who became a king, enrich our understanding of the history of fluid gender expression and the limits of the category of “women” altogether?

It is important to note that this course does not attempt to be a comprehensive introduction to women and gender studies in Africa. Instead, it aims to provide a few illustrative case studies through which interesting questions about women in African history can be raised, and through which we can grapple with some of the most important issues in the discipline, asking how archival practices, social systems, and other imbalances of power shape our understanding of the past and of the world today.

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