Thursday, May 15, 2025
11:00 a.m. - 12:15 p.m. EDT
Location: Online (5:00 p.m. - 6:15 p.m. CET)
This webinar is postponed until a later date. Please check back for updates.
The complexity and challenges of Africa are often clouded by prejudice and a lack of knowledge of its history, cultures, and the characteristics of a very large and diverse continent. The objective of this panel is to bring out some of the challenges facing Africa, while at the same time trying to provide analytical tools to understand them.
In this panel, an African journalist, a missionary journalist, and two scholars with field experience will offer different perspectives on these challenges and use various methodologies to analyze them. The result will not be a single perspective, but the restitution of a complexity that will help rethink Africa.
The webinar is co-sponsored by the Georgetown University Representative Office in Rome and by the Office for Social Communications and the Office for Social Communications and the Missionary Office of the Vicariate of Rome.
Featured
Rev. Giulio Albanese, MCCJ, is a Comboni priest and journalist, director of the Office for Social Communications and the Missionary Office of the Vicariate of Rome, and member of the Council of the “second section” of the Vatican Secretariat of State. A columnist for L'Osservatore Romano, he also collaborates with various newspapers on issues related to Africa and the Global South, including Avvenire, Limes, Nigrizia, Città Nuova, Messaggero di Sant'Antonio, Italia - Caritas, Vatican Radio, Swiss Radio, and the Giornale Radio Rai. He is also the author of numerous books and essays related to geopolitics, journalism, and missionary theology. He has won numerous journalistic and literary awards, and in 2003 he was appointed Grand Officer of the Italian Republic by President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi. Africas: Hell and Heaven (Libreria Editrice Vaticana, Roma, 2025) is his latest book.
Annalisa Butticci is an assistant professor at Georgetown University and a religious studies and anthropology scholar focusing on world Christianity, particularly Catholicism in Southern Europe and West Africa. She has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Nigeria, Ghana, the Gambia, and Italy. She is the author of the award-winning book African Pentecostals in Catholic Europe (Harvard University Press, 2016), and her work has appeared in various academic journals and several edited volumes.
Filomeno Lopes, originally from Guinea-Bissau, is a writer and journalist at Vatican Radio. Since 1998, he has been dividing his time between journalistic work and literary and artistic commitment to peace and development in his country. He holds a bachelor’s degree in missiology and missionary catechesis from Pontifical Urbanian University and a licentiate in fundamental theology and a Ph.D. in social communication from Gregorian University. He is the author of several books, including Amílcar Cabral. Un ponte fra Italia e Africa (Castelvecchi, Rome, 2024), Non amo i razzisti dilettanti (Castelvecchi, Rome, 2020), and Per una democrazia post-razziale. Lettera aperta ai Vescovi dell'Italia e dell'Africa sul problema dell’immigrazione (San Paolo Edizioni, Rome, 2021).
Lahra Smith is an associate professor and the director of the African Studies Program at Georgetown University. She is a political scientist with a particular interest in African politics, migration and refugees, and citizenship and equality. Her book, Making Citizens in Africa: Ethnicity, Gender and National Identity in Ethiopia, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2013. She teaches courses on migration, women and politics, and theory and policy in Africa. She was the Center for Social Justice Research, Teaching and Service faculty fellow for African migration and is currently a research fellow with the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University. Smith has taught and conducted research in refugee camps in East and Southern Africa, and she has ongoing research on civic education programs in Kenya, particularly focused on the role of teachers as active agents of citizen-creation.
Debora Tonelli (moderator) is Georgetown University representative in Rome and co-editor with Gerard Mannion of Exiting Violence: The Role of Religion (De Gruyter, 2024). She is research fellow at the Georgetown University Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, permanent researcher at the Center for Religious Studies of Fondazione Bruno Kessler, affiliated at the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies at the University of Southern California in Dornsife, and invited lecturer at Pontifical Athenaeum St. Anselmo and at Collegium Maximum - Pontifical Gregorian University. With a background in political philosophy and theology, her researches and teaching activities are focused on the legacy of the Bible in modern political thought, interreligious dialogue, religion and violence, and nonviolence.