Abdoulie Jabang, Ph.D.

Education

Ph.D., African History, Michigan State University (2023)
MA, African Politics, Ohio University (2017)
BA, Development Studies, Minor in History, University of The Gambia (2014)

Courses Taught

HIST 10113 World History since 1500 - Africa and the World

Areas of Focus

African Environmental and Social Histories, Oral History, Gender History, History of Technology and Food Production, History of the Islamic World, History of Waste, Sanitation, and Public Health

Biography

I am an environmental historian of West Africa, focusing on the eighteenth through the late twentieth centuries. Prior to coming to TCU, I held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of History, Rice University.  I teach undergraduate courses on diverse topics in African History, Environmental History, and World History, with the goal of unravelling historical and ecological forces that shaped and reshaped state-making, political and cultural formations, and environmental injustice in the obscure corners of Africa. My research and teaching sits at the intersection of social and environmental history, analyzing the intricate connection among the environment, technology, statecraft, power dynamics, and social difference in the West African region of the Gambia River. Through an environmental lens, my work offers new insights into the nature and workings of power in West Africa, the environmental and technological experiences of everyday Africans living under African and European rule and the multilayered human interactions with the non-human world.

My current book project, Reproducing Environmental Inequalities: Power, Dispossession, and Injustice in the Gambia River Region, 1800-1986, examines statecraft, power hierarchies, and structured inequalities through the prism of environmental resource control and change. Drawing on previously underutilized oral histories and archival sources, this study argues that successive environmental control and management schemes produced and reproduced states for the dominant ruling class, while subjecting lower classes, marginalized non-Muslims, and women to environmental dispossession and injustice. Through a variety of strategies such as flight, restructuring communities in hard-to-reach ecologies, and contesting elites’ confiscation of their environmental resources, the disinherited communities demonstrated environmental resilience and autonomy, revealing the fissures within state power. By centering the various ways that the actions of marginalized groups subverted elites’ control over environmental resources, my work reveals historical continuities in ways that human interactions with the environment were reshaped by social difference before and during colonial rule. At the same time, it unravels historical dynamics behind elites’ acquisition of environmental power and the limits of such power.

My research has been funded by various organizations and institutions, including the Social Science Research Council’s International Dissertation Research Fellowship, Michigan State University’s Center for Gender in Global Context, and Rice University’s Department of History. I earned a B.A. in Development Studies and History from the University of The Gambia, an M.A. in African Politics from Ohio University and a Ph.D. in African History from Michigan State University.