- Associate Professor
Graduate Chair, Department of Global Development Studies
Queen’s University, Kingston
My father, Hans, comes from a small village near Turbenthal. His first job took him to England installing pumps in the early 1950s. There he met my mother and they decided to emigrate to Canada, which in those days probably seemed like el dorado. Still, over the years he took the family back to Switzerland a few times and I kept in touch with my aunts and uncles and cousins. This instilled in me a pretty deep wanderlust. Somehow I also acquired the belief that with hard work you can make the world a better place. Put the two together and that’s how I ended up as a professor in Global Development Studies with a research focus on southern Africa.
My job involves three roughly equal elements. I teach. In the last few years this has included courses ranging from an introductory first year class of 450 students (Canada and the ‘3rd world’) to a graduate seminar on research methods and ethics. I have also taught specialized courses on African history, on food systems, and on HIV/AIDS as a development issue. My main goals are to educate young people to the terrible inequalities that are built into the global economic system, and to inspire them to work toward or try to imagine a fairer, healthier, and sustainable future.
I do research. My interests go back to when I was a volunteer teacher in Zimbabwe and Lesotho in the late 1980s. At that time I was embarking on my own family, which made me curious about gender relations among other people. It soon became obvious to me that colonial and apartheid states had tried to re-shape African family culture to suit their own interests. Swiss missionaries had a role to play in this too, by the way, sometimes quite influentially through their propaganda. They called it modernization or civilization, and while it may have sounded good, it often backfired. My work has focused on that historical process and how the legacies of colonialism live on in sometimes harmful ways. For example, I recently looked at myths around “African sexuality” and how these were created and manipulated for political reasons. Some of those myths, such as “homosexuality is un-African,” have resulted in human rights violations and some glaring gaps in sexual health policies. These have contributed to the high rates of HIV/AIDS in southern Africa in particular.
Finally, I do service. That means helping to govern the university. It is not exactly a radical democracy here, but it is a place where all faculty members are expected contribute to decision-making and management. Service also means helping the wider community. In my case that includes providing affidavits for Africans seeking asylum because of persecution in their own countries, developing educational material for health care workers and police, and providing historical context for policy development. It helps not to re-invent the wheel every time government or donors think of some new initiative!
One of the benefits of doing so much of my work in Africa is that I get to stop in Europe on my way there. I travel through Zurich as often as possible to visit family or strap myself onto a snowboard for a day or two. And if all goes well, I will soon be spending a few months at an excellent African Studies centre at the University of Basel. My children are getting big now, but they have already asked me if I can pack them into my suitcase so they can come along.
Links:
Marc Epprecht’s presentation page on the website of Queen’s University in Kingston
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