by Kaian LAM (Assistant Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences (FSS), University of Macau)

Organised in collaboration with Africa@ULB

Kaian LAM (Assistant Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences (FSS), University of Macau) will give a talk titled: “Safari Revisited: Ordinariness, Situational Ordering, and the International—An Alternative Reading of China-Kenya Relations.”
Her talk will be followed by a discussion by Solange CHATELARD, Executive Director, Chinese in Africa/Africans in China (CA/AC) Research Network, and Research Associate, EASt/LAMC, ULB.

How do bounded interactions of travel enact international politics? How do we turn travel into a method for pragmatic critique of the same bounded interactions? To tackle the two questions, we conceptualize ecological and cultural tourism including safari in Kenya as a ‘trouble zone’ visited by Chinese nationals, among others, and we apply visual techniques to investigate micro‑hierarchies, affective ambiguity, and uneven access that characterize South-South ordering. The ‘ordinary’ becomes ‘international’ in bounded moments of a leisure tour – both on-site and in post-event analysis. The discussion explains how international travel manifests as (1) an outcome of ordering, (2) a condition of authority; and (3) a situational accomplishment. The article advances ‘visual travel’ for qualitative inquiry that treats images not only as objects of interpretation but as sites for making relational possibilities thinkable. ARAF – access, recreating, appropriating, folding – are the four active operators of ‘visual travel’. These are specified in terms of the mechanisms through which they open ambiguity, redistribute attention, enable shifts in positionality, and reorganize socio-temporal relations across a photographic archive of 12,337 original images. Our study provides a framework for studying long-distance leisure travel and recalibrating mundane mobility as an international affair.

Kaian Lam is an assistant professor of International Relations at the University of Macau. She earned her PhD in African Studies, ISCTE – University Institute of Lisbon, Portugal. Her current research is aligned with International Political Sociology. She employs aesthetic strategies to study storytelling and self-styled narration in world politics.

Friday 26th June 2026, from 12pm to 2pm

Salle de réception of the MSH
Building DE1 – 3rd Floor – Room R.3.105
Avenue Antoine Depage 1
1000 Brussels

➡️ Registration form: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/e/14PBiRmPAB
Registration is required by 25 June (12 pm) for those who would like a free sandwich (vegetarian option available).

Contact : east@ulb.be