International Fellow Award Symposium
Inaugurating the SRA International Fellows Program: A Focus on Africa with Professor Bame Nsamenang

Chair: Brian K. Barber, University of Tennessee

Abstract
In 2007, SRA established the International Fellows Program, a new initiative designed to foster international and cultural diversity in SRA. International Fellows are to be to senior scholars/professionals who have established reputations and networks in regions of the world less familiar to the general SRA membership. This expertise will allow the Fellows to expose SRA members to potentially unique and indigenous ways of understanding adolescence across the world. This symposium features the Inaugural International Fellow: Professor Bame Nsamenang of Cameroon. Professor Nsamenang is one of the most visible leaders in evolving an indigenous African psychology of human development in a lifespan perspective that is anchored on interactive contextualism and biological embedding. In particular, he has written extensively on the application of this indigenous perspective to the understanding of adolescence in Sub-Saharan Africa and their transition to adulthood.

Biography
Brian K. Barber is Professor, Child and Family Studies, and Director, Center for the Study of Youth and Political Violence at the University of Tennessee. He is also Technical Advisor to the World Health Organization and UNICEF. Dr. Barber researches adolescent development in social context in a variety of nations and ethnic groups in Africa, Asia, the Balkans, Europe, the Middle East, and North and South America. He specializes in the study of adolescent development in contexts of political violence, with a particular focus on youth from the Gaza Strip and Bosnia. His work on parenting of adolescents is summarized in part in an edited volume Intrusive Parenting: How Psychological Control Affects Children and Adolescents (American Psychological Association Press, 2002) and (with H. Stolz and J. Olsen) in Parental Support, Psychological Control, and Behavioral Control: Assessing Relevance across Time, Culture, and Method (SRCD Monograph Series, 70, 4, 2005). His work on adolescents and political violence appears in numerous articles and book chapters, and in two forthcoming books: Adolescents and War: How Youth Deal with Political Violence (Oxford University Press, 2008) and One Heart, So Many Stones: The Saga of Palestinian Youth (Palgrave MacMillan Press, 2008).

Presentation 1
Adolescent Research from a Global Perspective: Prospects for an African Input

International Fellow: A. Bame Nsamenang, University of Yaounde

Abstract
From the backdrop of “different adolescences” (Brown and Larson, 2002), this paper sketches the “cultural braid” of adolescence within an African theory of the universe. It highlights how Euro-western narratives and positivist research tools trivialize and foreclose significant “funds of knowledge” (Moll and Greenberg, 1990) in Africa’s cultural circumstances. It peeps at “competent” transitions into adulthood within Africa’s ontogenetic path, a developmental trajectory that differs from the homogenizing Euro-western imageries and positioning that frame contemporary adolescent research. It identifies African developmental precepts and praxes as “novel theoretical caveats and fresh methodological” insights that could extend the discipline’s frontiers (Nsamenang, 2007).

Biography
A recent addition to the roster of scientists for the SRA 2008 Meet the Scientist Lunch is A. Bame Nsamenang, the SRA inaugural International Fellow. He is associate professor of psychology and learning science at Yaoundé University’s Advanced School of Education [ENS Bambili campus], Cameroon. He is the CEO of the Human Development Resource Centre (HDRC), a research and service facility in Bamenda, Cameroon. Prof. Nsamenang has taken up the challenge that sub-Saharan African scholars face to connect their academic and professional knowledge and their skills and values to the apologetic state of their communities and Afrique Noire Interactive contextualism and biological embedding - the foundational determinants of human thriving, health, and social competence - constitute his theoretical foundation.. He is one of Africa’s most visible scholars in developmental science, extensively publishing and guiding influential works on adolescence and early childhood development in Africa. Prof. Nsamenang’s lifetime commitment is to contribute to an Africentric developmental science to enrich adolescent research and global psychology. For more information and a list of selected publications, see: http://www.unige.ch/fapse/SSE/teachers/dasen/Nsamenang.htm

Comentary 1
Reed Larson, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Commentary 2
Deborah J. Johnson, Michigan State University