Alice Wiemers

Alice Wiemers, associate professor of history at Davidson College and author of Village Work, explores rural development and statecraft in northern Ghana. She traces daily labor, local chiefs, and built infrastructure like roads and clinics. The conversation highlights how villages were made legible to the state, shifting labor regimes, and the long arc of twentieth-century development practice.

Alice Wiemers, associate professor of history at Davidson College and author of Village Work, explores rural development and statecraft in northern Ghana. She focuses on everyday labor, village infrastructures, and how chiefs and family networks shaped projects. The conversation highlights the local making of development, the remaking of forced labor into self-help, and the persistence of peripheral statecraft.

Alice Wiemers, Associate Professor of History at Davidson College who studies African history and development. She recounts walking a northern Ghana village and reading its school, clinic, and road. She traces how chiefs, family networks, and communal labor shaped rural statecraft. She examines shifts from midcentury agricultural optimism to projectized, neoliberal forms of local governance.