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   Zeb Larson (zeb_larson@zirk.us)'s status on Friday, 22-Mar-2024 22:24:41 JST Zeb Larson

   A former cooperante recently reached out to me about an oral #history project.

   Cooperantes are people who volunteered to work in Mozambique and Angola when the Portuguese left in 1975. Basically all of the trained civil servants and others left with them, and as colonizers they never bothered to train anybody around them. It jumpstarted a lot of people's work in development spaces; it also created long-term links for people in Southern Africa.

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     Zeb Larson (zeb_larson@zirk.us)'s status on Friday, 22-Mar-2024 22:24:38 JST Zeb Larson

     in reply to

     And this is one of the limits of independent scholarship -- we actually have NO INFRASTRUCTURE in place to support being an independent scholar. If you do it (and I don't really do it), you do it like a TT scholar but without any of those supports. Unless you're independently wealthy, it ain't happening. But even if you are, it still imagines a single author/lone genius model for producing scholarship, and that's not an effective way to work.

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     Zeb Larson (zeb_larson@zirk.us)'s status on Friday, 22-Mar-2024 22:24:39 JST Zeb Larson

     in reply to

     Simply put, I do not have enough bandwidth to do this the way I'd like to do it (probably making a glossy coffee table book and making it a pictorial history). I have no institutional funding. My time is split between work, my family, the computer book I'm desperately trying to finish, my own dissertation which I still want to publish, and then all the other freelance writing I do.

     What I really need are grad students who could use it for their research and a university to archive it.

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     pettter repeated this.
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     Zeb Larson (zeb_larson@zirk.us)'s status on Friday, 22-Mar-2024 22:24:40 JST Zeb Larson

     in reply to

     I would *love* to be able to take this on. The stories need to be recorded, and it was a history I at least knew in grad school. Hell, I wanted to write about it at the time -- I had some article ideas, one dealing with ex-cooperantes who tried to lobby against U.S. support for UNITA in Angola. (Who helped UNITA in this country? Paul Manafort -- that Paul Manafort).

     But I also need to find a way to balance it against the fact that I'm no longer an academic.

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