The ACC is delighted to announce that Dr Jenny Fatou Mbaye has been awarded the prestigious Ray Pahl Fellowship in Urban Studies for 2013. The Fellowship is funded by the Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies.

During her tenure of the Fellowship at the ACC, Jenny will be reworking her PhD thesis for publication as a research monograph. A graduate of the London School of Economics, Jenny's research is concerned with cultural entrepreneurship and social change in urban West Africa. Her work focuses specifically on the hip-hop music economy of Dakar (Senegal) and Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso). She argues that recognition of this specific urban economy is a valuable way of understanding and managing African cities and the dynamics of their creativity.

Jenny's Fellowship proposal noted that "the entrepreneurial dimensions of a specific urban culture in Francophone West Africa, has opened up a new field of study between cultural policy, urban politics and the study of cultural industries (particularly music)". She envisages her book enriching knowledge about cultural entrepreneurship generally by attending to the phenomenon in the urban global South, and by researching in new registers. Dr Mbaye's expectation is that the rewrite will be the better for drawing on the ACC's experience and perspectives on critical urban research and policy discourses for the production of vibrant, democratic and sustainable urban development in the Global South, and from an African vantage point.