 Good afternoon everyone I'm going to let everyone kind of filter in here for a minute or two and then we will get started. I think we have everyone so good afternoon everyone thank you for joining us for our spring 2022 authors at Alden with Dr Laura and Tujira she has a lot of information to share with us today so I'm very quickly going to I am. I'm Harvey I'm the library's events coordinator I'm very quickly going to share our housekeeping slide and then I will turn it over to Beth Pratt for introductions and then Laura and and air but Dawson and oh for our discussion. We will have time at the end for audience questions so we look forward to hearing what you all have to say so bear with me one moment while I share my screen. So we have for those of you who are maybe not as familiar with teams. There are some features that I'd like to point out to you. If you could please keep your microphones muted until you're you're called on. We will offer the opportunity to raise your hand to ask your question. You can use the three dots to find our chat feature. That's also where you will find the option to raise your hand and if you would like to turn on live captioning that is where you will find that as well so the different colored arrows on this slide will kind of direct you there. So I hope that was brief enough and if you have any questions during the presentation at all please feel free to message me individually and I will do my best to help you out so. So I'm going to turn it over to Beth Pratt who is the director of the Ohio University Press and she will be introducing our speakers today. Thank you. Thank you Jen. Yes, I'm Beth Pratt and as director of OU Press. It is a special pleasure to welcome Laura and Twitter to authors at Alden OU Press publishes about 35 books a year and we have a strong reputation in publishing books in African studies. This book is a recent release in our award winning new African studies series. Laura Antwajira is an associate professor in the history department at Wesleyan University where she also chairs the African studies program. In addition, she is an affiliated faculty member of West Wesleyans Science and Society program and feminist gender and sexuality studies. She has been recognized by the International Committee for the history of technology and the American Historical Society. While completing her recent book which she's going to speak about today embodied engineering, gendered labor food security and taste in 20th century Mali. She was supported as a scholar in residence at the Schoenberg Center for Research and as a fellow at the Wesleyan Center for the humanities. The research for the book was also supported by a Fulbright Hayes Research Fellowship, the International Committee for the history of technology, the Society for the history of technology and Wesleyan University. In addition to the book, Professor Twajira recently edited the special issue of Africanizing technology for the journal Technology and Culture, which appeared in 2020. She is also published in the journal Gender and History and is written for the public history of technology site technologies stories. Her current research centers on the technobody politics of the colonial encounter in Mali with a focus on vernacular understandings of public health and population, early vaccination programs, the census and baby weighing. She will be interviewed and speaking today with our very own Ereba Dawson Ando. Ereba is a septic librarian for African Studies and the social sciences at Ohio University Libraries. She received her MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh School of Computing and Information, and she authors the Africa section of magazines for libraries and has published journal articles and presented at various African Studies and Library conferences. Ereba is also a member of Ohio University Press Advisory Board for which we are eternally grateful. She also serves on the Executive Committee of CRL Camp as past chair and as the editor, African History, Literature and Languages section of the ACRL Choice Resources for College Libraries. So welcome, Laura Ann and Ereba. And I'm sharing. Someone let me know if it's not. We can see it, Laura Ann. I'm also new to teams. Thank you for that introduction and it's a pleasure to be with you all today to talk about my book embodied engineering. I'm just going to say a few things before I'll take questions from from from Ereba. But the book that that I wrote is really about women as technological agents in West Africa and more specifically in Mali. The women's engineering work that I talk about that's why it's in the title there. But that engineering work talk relates to food production in a region that is predominantly rural and has faced significant ecological crises at different moments in the 20th century. And which have thus prompted specific technological interventions by women to ensure daily meals. Those technological interventions were also specifically embodied. Broadly speaking, that meant women's physical labor and new techniques, but also the transformation of women's bodies in many cases. This entailed physical labor and techniques for pounding millet or stirring the pot, for example, but also included innovations such as the wrapping of cloth. So as to hide bundles of fresh rice under a woman's clothing during what was a period of militarized control over the harvest in the 1970s. So there's a range of technological acts and innovations and engineering that I'm looking at. The technique with the cloth in particular often transformed the appearance of a woman's body to appear pregnant when she attached the bundle to her stomach in the front. And one of my interviewees who told me about the technique said that when she carried rice in this way to the market and then retrieve the bundle, it was like you gave birth. So for this reason and others, I call the bundles of rice harvested by women in this manner rice babies. This is just to give you a taste of some of the things from the book. Women's Embodied Engineering changed over the course of the 20th century and also responded to specific ecological concerns such as the need to conserve labor and wood fuel during the earlier period of the 1940s. In this case, women adopted new metal pots in the place of clay ones because they cooked faster and they actually required less wood to do all of that work. So this major technological shift actually could have occurred much earlier because metalworking in the region was very well developed in prior centuries. But women drove this shift in the 1940s to respond to a particular colonial deforestation crisis. So it's through these shifts and other innovations in women's labor that the vast majority of women in Mali engaged with and took a formative role in shaping the region's 20th century history from the colonial era under the French to its post-colonial transformations. This labor that I talk about in the book involved food cultivation and preparation, but also the reshaping of landscapes, marketing and cash production, meaning that women were at the center of the region's political, economic and environmental history, right, if you draw it all together. One other key takeaway point from the book that I'd like to highlight is that I push back at a persistent image of rural women in Africa as subjects without access to or knowledge of technology. I do so with the aim of reorienting conversations about technology that too often frame the continent in need of technological aid rather than recognizing it as a space of technological knowledge production. These have been stubborn stereotypes and have obscured really to serve to obscure women's creative work and innovation. So what I narrate in the book is this technologically dynamic women's world of food production in Mali. And I also present the domestic arena as one of creativity and innovation, even in moments of ecological or other crisis. As I was conducting research for the book, I learned that much of this dynamism was actually recorded in regional folk tales and I would like to share a quick example. In one story, a woman asks her female neighbor to borrow a cooking pot. The neighbor obliges the request and after a few days the first woman returns the original pot along with the smaller one. The first woman and giving her neighbor the two pots calls the smaller one the daughter of the big pot. Not long after this episode in the story, the same woman returns again to borrow the big cooking pot, but this time she does not return it. When the neighbor inquires after the pot, she is told the pot is dead. The audience for the story is then prompted to ask, how is it the pot to die? And the first woman in the story replies, since they have daughters. The big pot's transformation into a mother serves as a comic of the dark explanation for the woman's failure to return the pot. When I first read this story, for me, it signaled the importance of the larger technological infrastructure managed by women, but also it's potentially shifting nature. Cooking pots, like in the story, were central to this woman's infrastructure, and both women in the story negotiate their access to a number of different cooking pots, just as women throughout the 20th century innovated and managed transformations in the range of tools and technologies that were available to them for food preparation and production. This particular story also connects women and their means of cooking with physical labor, specifically the experience of childbirth. Food preparation is a similarly distinct woman's task associated with sexuality, social reproduction, environmental fertility, and women's embodied labor. So the naming of one of the pots a daughter also alludes to women's difficult and potentially dangerous labor, both in childbirth and food production. But it also highlights the complex relations between women who must work together. At first glance, it does seem to be a story of failed female co-operation, but I think the humor suggests a more positive interpretation, as if women heed the lesson. Collective female labor was essential to ensuring food every day. And finally, one more thing on the story, the daughter pot suggests that there's a transmission of feminine knowledge and social continuity. So ultimately what women did with their pots matters a great deal. This story circulated in the first decades of the 20th century, but most of my book focuses on women's rural engineering at a major development scheme created by the French in the 1930s and is still in operation today. I'm going to share a map to orient us a little bit here. From the beginning of this particular development scheme, it was characterized by large industrial machines and was meant to turn the region into a cotton cash crop center, but also a colonial bread basket. I'm going to share another image with some slides to give you a sense of those technologies. The project itself and its large irrigation infrastructure have been much studied because this scheme was one of the most significant development interventions by the French in West Africa. Not surprisingly, this top-down colonial project brought about dramatic and unpredictable changes to rural life, much like other modernization schemes of the same period. This particular scheme was called the Orphe du Niger after the Niger River that powered the irrigation. And for the first decades of its existence, farmers suffered waterborne illnesses, food shortages, and chronic malnutrition. Women were strikingly absent during these years and was when they did stay in their food production labor that they brought that made the space of the project livable. Essentially, they re-engineered their work so that they could do it at this particular project. I'm going to share one more set of images from the project to give you a sense of women at the project and what they were doing. Women's daily work with technologies that were modest, like pots, was perhaps much less dramatic than the entry of digging machines, tractors, threshing machines that you saw on the previous slide. But their work significantly impacted the material experiences of daily life. And I'll just add that women's work was attuned to the taste of food rather than the focus of the Orphe du Niger planners who were thinking more about production for export and perhaps mere subsistence. So over the course of the book, I tell the story of these rural women engineers who transformed the Orphe du Niger by engineering and then re-engineering their food production systems and preparation techniques over several decades. And in so doing, they created delicious and meaningful food that people wanted to eat and they helped to create an animated world in the face of real challenges, right? And some of the animation you see in the picture with the drummers on the slide here, it was an event at the Orphe du Niger where there was also food that had been produced by women and was being shared. And so this was a moment of sort of lively animation that women helped to produce. One other thing that I'll just say before I turn it over to Arba is that the visual and sensorial aspects of their labor, like the sound of the mortar and pestle, made playing the value of their labor to the people that they lived with, even if it wasn't always recognized by planners of this project. The labor, sure it was mundane and its everyday necessity, but it was also spectacular in its significance for assuring food security and the very nature of rural life. So I'll leave it there. I'll unshare my screen and I'm looking forward to hearing from Arba. Thank you Laura. I really enjoyed reading the book, even though I've been from West Africa, I'm familiar with a lot of what you were talking about the pestle and the pot and all that. I still learned a lot from the contributions of African women to the both the economic and the technological aspects of African life. My first question is, you state in the introduction that women's mundane yet extraordinary daily food production and preparation labors over the course of the 20th century at the subject of this book. How did you develop an interest in this topic and why women in Mali? Thanks for that question. So the idea for the book I really was developing as a graduate student as a doctoral student at Rutgers University where I studied African history and women's and gender history from a global perspective. But I was really drawing on early experiences that I had when I was placed as a Peace Corps volunteer in Mali. That was really my first experience to meet women and actually learn from them. So while I was there, I had the experience of seeing firsthand and learning how women produced food, how they worked with different technologies, how sometimes they collectively work together. So it sparked a lot of questions for me that I wanted to learn a little bit more about that the way that they were able to conserve specific resources was certainly impressive to me as a young American student who had just finished undergraduate and was going into the Peace Corps. I was also impressed by their sort of collectively organizing. So it sparked a lot of questions and for me and I realized, wow, there's a lot to learn here. And then when I was back in Mali doing my fieldwork, talking more with women, many of whom have become my friends that I realized, wow, this is a history of technology and I hadn't realized it. So it developed over a long period of time but was really important for me to listen to women, observe them and really kind of learn without any kind of preconception and to see actually what is the history performing. And I think that's how I was able to figure out, wow, this is a history that spreads so widely in terms of economic, political, social and technological history that I was really only able to get because of my, you know, the conversations that I had with them. So that's sort of the origin of the project. Why do you describe the woman in your study as engineers? That's another fantastic question and it was one that I kind of wasn't sure if I wanted to use. But in the history of technology, engineers are often referred to as like the men, like the ones who developed the technologies and the infrastructure of this project, the Orpiz du Niger, and not often used to talk about women. But when I was thinking about the way that they put together an infrastructure, manage different kinds of technologies and adapted it over time, I realized what they're doing is engineering work. We're not calling them engineers. We're not recognizing the intellectual labor that goes into producing a food production system and the skills that are necessary for understanding these technologies and using them. So it's only by really sort of recognizing that we can see the creativity and innovation of women's work. So it's not just recognizing their technological work, but also elevating them so that we understand in the history of technology that women are also engineers and that we can study them to the same same level that we might study. Some engineers at the office in a year and in many ways they actually made it work better. So they were perhaps the better engineers at the office in a year. Of course, if I'm in Mali, there are conversations to be had about different folks who are in charge of some of those roles now. But really thinking about women as engineers for me sort of shifted everything. That's really how we can see that they are agents of technological history and are really sort of driving things and are intellectually and creatively thinking about how to use different technologies, how to shift them. So over time, not only were they using pots and mortars and pestles technologies that they already had, you know, experience using, but when they came to this particular project there are big canals cut out for irrigation for the fields and women decided Oh, these are like rivers where to start using them like a water resource so they started using the technologies of the project in a way that benefited their own work. They also did this by working alongside threshing machines so that the sort of large scale and modest technologies in their world they brought together in a very productive way that the planners hadn't thought of. So to my mind they're really the engineers. You describe the skills of the woman residents of the office in detail, their participation in economic activities such as the food and cotton production system and adopting labor saving technologies. However, the economic contributions of African women are often overlooked by policymakers to what extent the colonial policies contribute to this marginalization. Right. That's another really excellent question. Colonial officials, not just those at the office do you share tended to think about what they were doing what they called development as targeting men. And they were really the ones that they sort of had in mind thinking about developing colonial markets, for example, and didn't think that women really were participating in those markets or that they should be. At the same time, the markets around the office do you share we're buzzing with the activity of women who were selling different food stuffs, some of which they had manufactured, and we're really helping that local economy to run for people to have access to different products that they needed that's this was sort of run by women. So they really were important economic actors but you're right it's not always necessarily recognized. So the same with women is technological actors they need to be recognized for the work that they are actually doing in the economy. Some of the women that interviewed when you're talking about this kind of work when they were doing when they were selling or buying or doing things they call it farming for for cash or farming for money. Because this was also something that they understood was work that they sort of produced right that they were able to sort of produce cash in the economy but it was also essential for them to have the money that they needed to buy food stuffs that maybe they weren't able to produce themselves. Because the specific layout of the office meant that the trees or other food stuffs that they might ordinarily have access to changed when the landscape changed. So they had to figure out where they could get it from other women who were producing it so they figured out how to create an economic infrastructure essentially to get the things that they needed and sold things that other women needed. So in this way women were really doing a lot of economic work but the colonial officials didn't necessarily recognize that and that was a pattern that's continued that I think still sorts of continues that what women are actually doing doesn't always show up in reports related to national economy numbers and statistics but if we actually look at what women are doing it helps us to shift how we might think about economics and policies and recognize the work that women are actually doing. I hope that answers the question. I'm not going to put up a tangent but I think I brought it back to where you were going. Yeah and the next question is some of the practices at the office such as rewarding women's work with rice and then men's work with paid wages will be described as discrimination against women. How did this practice impact gender relations in Mali? Yeah that's another fantastic question for thinking about women in the economy. So women prior to the arrival of the office in the French in this region would sometimes help a neighbor get in the harvest right that often required collective women's labor and it was customary for women to be rewarded with some of the harvest rice or something else. And this was one way that colonial officials thought okay we're going to encourage local customs we're respecting custom but at the same time they weren't doing that for men. They were giving them wage jobs, wage jobs, wage jobs. They were expecting men to participate in the cash economy in part because colonial officials wanted men to pay taxes and cash for the colonial government. So they really wanted men in the cash economy and at the same time they weren't thinking about women in the cash economy and they thought okay so we're just going to replicate the practices before we'll give them remuneration and rice. Well certainly that created divisions between men and women in the economy right men had more opportunities to get cash. And this goes back to the previous question when I was talking about women who said we were going to farm money. Because they weren't able to get cash in many other ways they figured out how to do it one of the things that they often did was to make beer they grew beer sometimes even selling it to their husbands, but also workers at the office who had wages and married men who were single. There were a lot of parties this is part of the sort of rural animation that women helped to produce at the project, and women made money by selling beer at these festivals. And so in that way they still got access to the office de niger as a cash source but it was through the wages of men who wanted to purchase the beer that they were producing. So they had to figure out other ways to continue to participate in this changing economy that increasingly was focused on cash when it's true they were definitely disadvantaged by colonial policies the way that colonial officials understood women in the market. So it goes back to the question that you had earlier that there are these imbalances that have continued as a sort of pattern and women are continuing to try to negotiate against that. And those are some of the ways that they they tried to do that within the space of what was possible at the office. Thanks. Yeah, being a librarian I'm interested in some of the methods and sources you used in your research, including the different types of primary sources and some of the challenges you encountered. Yeah, that's another fantastic question every project requires its own sort of set of resources right as a historian. When I started working on this project it became obvious to me pretty quickly that this was not going to be one that I could only do through archival research. So of course I conducted research in the archives for this for the development project itself. Other archives in Mali related to colonial officials. There are also archives left by colonial officials in Paris, but I went to Rome to look at materials that missionaries who were based at this they had a mission station at this scheme. And I looked at some of their material they more often wrote about men and women and their social lives because they were thinking about how to connect them to the church and that was one of the ways that they they thought about doing that. But most of these documents didn't work talk about women very much. So I had to do a lot of oral history interviews. So a lot of the time when I was in Mali during research I was talking to men and women in different towns across the project about this history from over the course of the 20th century and there are different generations who spoke in particular about the 1940s or who could speak really to the period of the 1970s. So I had to collect an archive essentially about the office in Niger and in many cases researchers would come to talk to study this project. There are quite a few who have been interested. Not very many have even been thinking about talking to women. So some of the the challenge I faced is that people were already aware of researchers and a bias that the project was about men. And so it took some convincing to explain why I wanted to talk to women. But and then once you do that you still have to you know gain the trust of people. You have to get to know them. They have to get to know you because if they're going to do an interview with you they're giving up their time and talking about their own lives. And that's you know that's a big ask for people to they have to feel like they trust their story with you and that what you're going to do with it in some way is you know elaborating their story and allowing them to tell it to an audience that is going to be listening. On top of the interviews which are really big base of my my resource of my archival and of my of my research. I also looked at folk tales like the one that I talked about for thinking about the early decades for for which there aren't that many people who have direct memories of that time period. But I also wanted to come from a frame of local perspective. How do people understand their relationships that environment their relations between men and women. How they understood technology and I was surprised to discover there are a lot of stories about pots. Pleasantly surprised so that enabled me to also think about the perspective of people on the ground from that time period and how they were thinking about these things. So those were sort of you know a mix of things in addition to that purchase about observation. Learning how what does the technique look like when women are cooking or taking care of their pots was also something that I had to do. So I had to draw all of these sort of sources together so that was certainly a challenge getting to the different different archives. But it made it a really dynamic research experience and the interviews were social and extremely enjoyable to get to know people and that for a historian is really wonderful to do especially for you know coming out of the archive to get to talk to people and to have a really lively exchange for thinking about the past is wonderful. Yeah as you've illustrated there are challenges in documenting African women's history even though it's part of African history so it's important. What advice do you have for students and future researchers of women in Africa? That's fantastic. On how to successfully conduct their research. Especially for the students who are at your institution there are lots of resources to make use of them where you can study the language of the place that you're interested in and use the resources to learn about as much about it as possible before you go. But I think the language training is so important especially if you're thinking about doing oral history because that allows you to think from frameworks and how languages use and how people speak. It allows you to access folk stories. Some of the ones that I looked at. There's a French translation that I could also read the original because they had been collected by an African interpreter and he wrote down in a transcription of his writing. The way Baman is written now is a bit different but you can still read it and see the original and think about it and how it's been translated. So those language skills are really important. And then also to be able to sort of interview people. You might still work with someone who helps you access different places locally but to be able to speak and understand the place where you're working is so imperative. Then of course in addition to that reading everything in classes but learn about the place where you think you want to go. And then on newspapers, magazines, what are people publishing now? What are people talking about? I think that's the sort of best preparation to learn about a place and then figure out what might my question be before you get out into the field. That's in my mind the best way to do that training in Ohio. They're certainly lucky to have all kinds of resources to help them get prepared to do that. So your book brings together African gender history with the field of science and technology studies. What are the emerging trends do you currently see regarding women and gender studies in Africa? I think it's an exciting moment for women's and gender scholars. As I said, Jabate just won the big book prize from the African Studies Association. It's a book that focuses on women's practices in particular in relationship to sexuality and protest. And there are other scholars working on just thinking about gender from African perspectives, thinking about sexuality. There's many lots of books coming out on that. There's new associations being formed related to those kinds of questions. There are lots of books coming out that really are thinking about creative expressions. Writers, artists that I think are really exciting focusing on women's creative expression as well as women's political factors and new ways to think about social life of women. There's a fantastic book that came out on love in Africa. These were topics that weren't necessarily discussed before, but they give sort of a fuller picture of different women's African African women's lives. So that there's multiple narratives to think about it as a dynamic and creative space and how women's lives have changed over time. There are more textbooks now like one from Wanda or Jabate that thinks about women's history from the early period to the present. They're giving us a lot more tools for writing more histories to just add more. And I think that's what's really exciting in the field right now that there's also an audience for that. More people are interested in reading from lots of different perspectives. And I think that's making for a really great place to be as a researcher right now because it's so dynamic. And there's so many great people to talk to and think about different ideas with more and there's also more resources for teachers than before, which is fantastic as well. And also it's good for us librarians as collection development for collection development gives us ideas on how to look for new materials on African studies here. So that so it was for my own interest. That's why I asked the question. Yeah, your study spans the livelihoods of rural Malian women from the early colonial administrations through the postcolonial administrations. Can you briefly describe any significant changes in the woman's livelihoods throughout those? Yeah, no, that's another really good question. Because it might seem at first that women were doing a lot of the same things in terms of food preparation and cultivation. But actually the strategies for turning that labor into a cash making sort of initiative has changed in different ways. Women's cooperatives often now are means by which women are seeking to earn cash at the office in Niger and particular through market gardening. So carving out spaces of the project to grow onions, sometimes fruit trees, other things that weren't necessarily in the purview of the scheme before. And now women are cultivating those items and selling them to markets like the big urban market in Bamako is one of the big markets that women are selling to. So the way that they're they're organizing collectively is being turned into a way for women to also think about how there might be some cash incentives for them and working together. I think that is one of the big shifts women. There's been different forms of collective work for women and it's changed over time. And that was one change that I noticed because women were talking to me about it, that this is something that they thought was a significant change for themselves in particular. So even though women might be continued, they're they're cultivating, they're preparing food. That's a major shift for them in their own minds that that's giving them access to more economic opportunity than they would have had in sort of the earlier decades that there's more opportunities now for earning cash. And it's augmented when they when they're working together. So I think that was that's a significant one. Of course, for livelihoods at the office, that also has to do with challenges that women face and owning machines. There's a major change at this project where individual threshing machines were purchased by by men in a period of market liberalization and men predominated in that purchasing. There's a few women who bought rice threshing machines and all the women know who they are and aspire to be able to do something like that. But without the capital to purchase, they've worked together. And so there are some cooperatives that now have brain brain machines, for example. So they're they're using the collective labor to access technologies that that allow you to create more cash because you're you're charging for the service to use the machine and they're seeking access to that. So they're using the collective labor to allow them to do that. The last but not the least question is your book recognizes food production, cooking and taste, as important aspects of Malian culture. Do you have a favorite Malian food? Of course, I have many favorite Malian food. Yeah, since you said that, you went on Peace Corps. Yeah, the one that I perhaps miss the most that's harder to get there are West African restaurants, if you go to New York City in Barlow, which I love very much, but it's hard to get this dish called toe. So it's made from millet. And as it's cooked, it's it's like a sort of moist cake, but it's not sweet at all. So you grab some of it and you dip it in a wonderful sauce that's made with spices, different leaves, and there's a separate sauce. It's it's it's crooked because there's one sauce that has all of the spices and vegetable ingredients. And then there's another really savory wonderful sauce with meat, and you dip it in both. And when you so when you put it all together, it's just wonderful and delicious. I talk about this in the book quite a bit because women are very intent on making good toe, sometimes had to change it to rice toe. Now it's definitely a back to making it with millet. And that's there's the flavor of that in this. Another one that I really like is made with folio, which is a wild grass that used to be much more prevalent in the diet, but has become something of a delicacy. Like a small grain that when you cook it might look a little bit like couscous. And there's a particular delicious sauce that goes with that that I that I really like. And I like buying food and markets that women are preparing. There's a really yummy sort of fried kind of salty and tangy fried that you can get that's made. You can get things that are infused with peanuts and millet and all kinds of different tasty treats in the market. And I always enjoy that as well, in addition to the full meals that you can make. And I miss breakfast dishes as well. I miss seri kind of like a porridge that is also quite delicious. So the cuisine, I hope I conveyed in the book is something that not only that I hear people talking about being tasty, but I recognize very much that it is simply delicious. That's all to me something like it's like a hardened porridge, isn't it? Yes, that's something. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that's. You know, what is the right way to describe the consistency of this wonderful starchy food that we don't necessarily have in the United States. And I haven't, you know, the only way you can get it is to get the millet and know Amalia and cook or to know how to make it yourself. But then you don't even have all the good tree ingredients and spices that you need. So maybe in Harlem when could make it. But maybe there's some other places in the US, but that's the those are the foods I miss the most. Okay, okay, thanks Laura. These are all my questions and I'll turn it back to Jen for the audience questions. Thank you both so very much and thank you for those wonderful descriptions because I know I'm hungry now. And I'm sure a few other people are too. So we're going to open it up for questions from our audience at this point. We've got a couple options. You can either type your type your question in the chat or raise your hand and I'll call on you and you're welcome to unmute yourself and ask your question. We do have a comment that says from Sherry Sains the closest thing to toe is southern spoon bread. Oh, so I'm making a note as I speak. And while our audiences is thinking of their questions, I am going to drop a link in the chat to the university press page for your book so that if anyone wants to order it. That is where they will find it and they can find more information there. Yeah, so I guess we'll we'll hang out and wait for a few minutes and see if we have any questions. While we wait, I just want to thank you for your close reading of the book and the really thoughtful questions that I appreciated thinking about as about earlier that I always I like to emphasize technology but you're right pulling out the important pieces of economic history for women and how it's connected to technology. It's important to think about beyond just even the space of the book in this particular part of West Africa but as applicable as the wider region and women in the wider region. I learnt a lot from it actually that I didn't know about. I didn't know that Mali used to be French Sudan honestly. So I made a choice that the title of the book even though a bunch of the period that I cover is from that colonial period when it was referred to as French Sudan. But I think it's important to refer to it as Mali. That's the, you know, the post-colonial period how it's referred. But it also references a colonial empire that spans part of the geography of the region. And so, you know, I thought it was important to use the term long in the book. Do you have any plans Dr. Trigir to return to Mali anytime soon either for further research or just to visit your friends? So I'm working on a trip to take some books that, you know, hopefully it will overlap with some research but there are quite a few people who I'm bringing books to including the archivist who is a woman at the Office de Niger. The woman who's the archivist when I was there the last time I want to make sure that she gets a book but also the National Archives. And there's a fantastic women's library that's named after a really important, she was an important figure for, she was an anti-colonial activist. She was a government minister and there's a women's library and research center named after her. So I'm thinking of taking a book I want to take a book there to them as well. So that's that's the hope and my new project that I'm working on I've done some archival research for but I have to do the oral the oral history so we need to do some initial steps for that so I'm hoping to go soon. Now that the book is out I want to go with books in my sleep. That's wonderful I hope I hope you get to go very very soon because it sounds like you have a great affection for the women. And the community is there. The relationship between the world to me, you know the woman who's on the cover, Asan, is someone who I really grew to know and to like very well over the time of the project. And actually so that's a picture that I took and when I took it I told her this is going to be the cover of my book and I want to show her how it is. That's wonderful. Well, I'm not seeing any questions from our audience I think I think maybe everybody your questions were so comprehensive that that we've covered everything could that be. But I want to thank you both so much for your time this afternoon. I am going to drop another link in the chat. That's to a very brief survey if everyone in the audience would take a moment to please complete that I would greatly appreciate it. Thank you all very very much I appreciate you coming. Have a great afternoon. Thanks Laura. Looking forward to seeing you at the next conference.