AFRICA: journal of the International African Institute proposes a stream of thematic panels, assembled under the rubric of the journal, to be held at ASAUK 2026.
The journal’s focus is on ethnographic research in the qualitative social sciences and humanities, drawing from long-term fieldwork and/or archival research. Interdisciplinary approaches are encouraged on and from all regions of the continent, and papers typically flow from research done in anthropology, sociology, human geography, critical development studies and social history. The journal is among the oldest and most prestigious in African social science fields.
Subject or thematic panels will be organised and chaired by members of the journal’s Editorial Advisory Board (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/africa/information/about-this-journal/editorial-board) drawing on their wide networks in specific areas of research. Participants from the African continent will be particularly encouraged, and the International African Institute will provide some limited sponsorship for such scholars, with priority given to those unable to find funding to attend from other sources.
Convenor: Stephanie Kitchen
Contact: africa@internationalafricaninstitute.org
Wealth in Africa I – Property
(sponsored by AFRICA: Journal of the International African Institute)
Claire Mercer (LSE) and Maxim Bolt (University of Oxford) maxim.bolt@qeh.ox.ac.uk
The aim of these three linked panels is to generate debate and offer new perspectives on ‘wealth’ in Africa through lenses of property, inheritance, and redistribution. In this first panel we invite papers on property: its dynamics, relationships, and effects. Property emerged as a key ‘bundle of rights’ and field of social practice in the twentieth century in disparate areas of academic enquiry. That built on earlier political economic and legal preoccupations, but with vastly expanded scope challenging basic assumptions. Historically and locally grounded studies of African settings have been central in illuminating how people acquire, hold on to, contest, and inherit property. Close research continues to examine intersections of money, wealth, and property, attending to ideas, practices and institutions constituting value. It investigates histories and legacies of who can own what, and how, including under highly inequitable conditions. Large-scale comparison recently augmented property’s profile: economist Thomas Piketty showed life chances under capitalism determined by investments (notably in property) over wages. His focus was particularly ‘rich’ countries. But narratives of property accumulation, entitlement, and dispute shape imaginations and debates the world over. Focusing on African settings, we invite papers that develop such insights. This may include the following:
– What kinds of property are invested in, by whom, and how?
– What social relations, financial practices, and legal strategies enable property acquisition, security, and/or accumulation?
– How is real-estate property accessed and/or developed without mortgage finance?
– How is long-term property accumulation achieved? How is accumulation undone?
– How do property narratives appear in and influence popular culture?
– How do moral understandings of property shape its acquisition, accumulation, and transaction? How far do people agree on such understandings?
– What are the wider implications of property investment? How are social relations reshaped? How are rural and urban spaces changing?
Wealth in Africa II – Inheritance
(sponsored by AFRICA: Journal of the International African Institute)
Kate Skinner (University of Bristol) and Maxim Bolt (University of Oxford)maxim.bolt@qeh.ox.ac.uk
The aim of these three linked panels is to generate debate and offer new perspectives on ‘wealth’ in Africa through lenses of property, inheritance, and redistribution. In this second panel we invite papers on property inheritance, which has long been of interest not only to lawyers, but also to economists, anthropologists, historians, and literary scholars. What people inherit, from whom, and through which legal rules and bureaucratic processes is morally freighted, yet far from static. Given the connection between property inheritance and inequalities (e.g. class, generation, and gender), there is an increasingly urgent need to explore the nuances, complexities, and contingencies in these shifts, as well as discerning common patterns. Inheritance is often contentious and emotive – on the interpersonal level and in national debates around legislative interventions. Binary distinctions between the ‘personal’ and the ‘political’ cannot capture all that is at stake in struggles over inheritance. Nor can the discourse of ‘rights’ versus ‘culture’. This stream therefore invites papers which explore interdisciplinary questions including:
– Why do debates and disputes over inheritance frequently revolve around the categorisation of property? What logics underwrite these categories? How far are they ‘legitimating devices’ rather than neutral descriptors? What forms of labour and investment do they privilege or obscure?
– Why have demands for reform to inheritance laws so often been spearheaded by women and resisted by men? Under what political conditions have demands for reform succeeded or failed? What counts as ‘success’ and for whom?
– How far are disputes over property inheritance enacted through ‘emotional regimes’?
– Why has property inheritance been so central to African popular cultural genres? In what ways has this changed over time?
– How might literary and cultural insights inform research by lawyers and others interested in collective demands for legal reform?
Wealth in Africa III – Redistribution
(sponsored by AFRICA: Journal of the International African Institute)
Deborah James (LSE) and Maxim Bolt (University of Oxford) maxim.bolt@qeh.ox.ac.uk
The aim of these three linked panels is to generate debate and offer new perspectives on ‘wealth’ in Africa through lenses of property, inheritance, and redistribution. In this third panel we invite papers on economic redistribution, which formally addresses inequities by redirecting wealth from beneficiaries of economic systems toward those whose livelihoods fall short. Although standard approaches measure outcomes—especially income increases for the least well off—this panel focuses on the processes of redistribution, which often produce unanticipated effects. This is especially true when redistribution takes financial form, for example by tying wages or modest cash transfers to debt. Contributions, tributes, and tithes also form redistribution channels which can reinforce or reshape social and political power. The sharing, extraction, and flow of resources not only produce economic realities but also shape relations of belonging, dependence, and exclusion, as well as social and philosophical categories regarding work and value. The panel considers concealed redistributive forms and examines unexpected outcomes, advancing a ground-up perspective on efforts to spread wealth around.
– In a taken-for-granted (and Euro-American) model of economic life, incomes are earned through wage work, or people revert to benefits. Yet welfare systems in most African countries are under-resourced. How do allocative processes operate beyond scenarios that assume the centrality of a welfare state?
– How are insufficient incomes supplemented by combining work, welfare, and debt?
– How do people use both ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ resources, payments, and economic relationships to sustain networks of redistribution?
– How are forms of redistribution represented as functional, in crisis, or requiring intervention – by public or private institutions, more or less professionalised advisers,or householders themselves?
– How has redistribution has been imagined and envisaged, both at the macro levels of planning and historical trajectory, and also in grounded understandings of ethics and obligations?
Title of the proposed panel: “Chinese Informal Economies in Africa’s Urban Centres”
Convenors: Basile Ndjio, University of Douala(Cameroon); Abdul-Gafar Tobi Oshodi (Lagos State University) basile.ndjio@ias.wiko-berlin.de; bndjio@yahoo.com
Abstract
While China’s public investments and major development projects have been instrumental in helping several African countries achieve economic recovery(see Jansson, 2009), some Chinese migrants have also contributed to the growing informalization and even criminalization of local economies in several African nations (see Carmody, 2011; Dobler 2017; Mohan et al 2014). These Chinese nationals participate in Africa’s booming informal economy by taking advantage of their country’s strategic economic ties with its African allies(Khan& Baye 2008). Their economic dynamism has instigated a significant transformation in the local informal economy across numerous African urban settings.
Nevertheless, Chinese-influenced informal economy remains inadequately examined within the growing corpus of research on China in Africa. Therefore, it is essential to provideacademics and policy-makers with pertinent references and empirical data regarding the nature, implications, and extent of this nascent form of informal economic entrepreneurship, in which Africa-based Chinese migrants are significantly involved.
This is the primary objective of this proposal which highlights the relationship between recent Chinese economic migration to Africa and the development of a transnational informal economy in certain African urban centres. It also seeks to enhance our comprehension of this unparalleled transnational informal economy, which is partially fuelled by Chinese migration.
In alignment with these objectives, the panel will convene experts from various fields of research both within and beyond Africa.
Crisis in the making: plural views and ontologies from the continent
Brice Molo (Catholic Institute of Paris, b.molo@icp.fr) and Calvin Minfegue (Catholic University of Central Africa, minfegue88@gmail.com)
The African continent is often considered as a testing ground for complex crises. On one side, political crises and their most extreme form, armed conflicts of political origin, seem to be strong indicators of how the continent is understood and managed. On the other side, these crisis phenomena also impact or involve the environment. For each of these perspectives, the crisis, when exaggerated, encompasses African society and tends to reduce it to a space in constant crisis. Consequently, the very idea of crisis “enters into crisis”, or loses its epistemic meaning. What would a society in perpetual crisis look like if it were different from normal situations? It is one thing to identify what a crisis signifies; it is another to see what it does not and to understand the processes shaping it. One such process is narrative. In social sciences, narrative (also) refers to actors’ ability to tell their stories and share their experiences. In this sense, we find an “unconscious” about past, present, and future crises that runs through the collective imagination and influences how events are reported. Additionally, it reflects how actors construct an image of themselves for their own well-being. Through these mechanisms, we can gain a clearer understanding of how people perceive and experience time. In such a framework, narratives enable us to observe variations in the experience of time and to see how events and routines are woven into discourses about the ordinary and extraordinary.
However, this notion of crisis needs to be temporarily set aside to demonstrate that it does not exist independently. It is closely connected to the poles of production and the nature of the narratives that generate them. The ability to produce crisis through narrative and to forge narrative through crisis is a driving force of the transformative movement that created Africa, but more importantly, it continues to shape Africa from beginning to end today. This transformative movement is often linked to what has been described as “modernity” or, at least, a particular conception of modernity, which itself intersects various dynamics and processes. The narratives surrounding crisis in Africa can therefore resemble discourses on modernity, its failures, and its alternatives.
This panel examines the role of narrative in the creation of crisis as a key force in Africa’s ongoing process of recomposition and transformation. It also explores how the continent reshapes the very concept of crisis, specifically how the construction of African imaginaries — whether involved in framing crises or analysing them — turns this region into a measure and benchmark of crisis. From this perspective, there is the idea of a geographical space whose relationship to crisis could prefigure the crisis itself as a horizon, a possibility, an already existing state, or a déjà vu.
The panel aims to explore the following questions directly: How and by whom are the discourses that describe the crises in Africa created? What impact do these discourses have on shaping frameworks for crisis analysis beyond Africa? What emancipatory or destructive possibilities do these crisis discourses open, first in Africa and then elsewhere? Can the crises of modernity be identified in Africa as a way to understand and address them? The papers comprising the panel will be based on a well-established theoretical framework but will also be firmly rooted in empirical work and epistemologies of the South. Similarly, they will be attentive to a variety of fields and topics that, when integrated, provide a complementary perspective on the major transformations across the continent. Contributions from all areas of the social sciences and humanities are welcomed.
How Unequal Is African Studies? Addressing, measuring and repairing epistemic alienation
David Mills, Stephanie Kitchen sk111@soas.ac.uk
African Studies is acutely aware of how its colonial roots continue to divide the field. From Jean Allman’s critique of the racism of the US African Studies Association to Adam Branch’s call to decolonise African Studies centres, there is a growing literature on the ramifications of academic coloniality and digital colonialism for knowledge generation and communication.
This panel invites perspectives on what Thomas Hervé Mboa Nkoudou describes as the ‘epistemic alienation’ faced by Africa-based scholars in an era of Open Access publishing. It explores ways to quantify the forms and extent of the scientific extraversion – the term coined by Paulin Hountondji – faced by African researchers. Approaches might include: analyses oflevels of African authorship in European African Studies journals, the under-representation of African journals in global databases, and the disproportionate impact of rankings and indexes on African scholars and universities. This panel invites contributions that attend to the power of metrics, and offer new approaches to identifying, measuring and addressing inequalities in African Studies, as well as efforts to create more equitable research collaborations and publishing relationships.
Papers will address these and related topics, including
1. The impact of university rankings and citation indexes on Africa-based scholars.
2. Measures and targets for addressing inequalities in institutional collaborations and research partnerships.
3. The value of equitable partnership ‘toolkits’, charters and manifestoes.
4. The role of Open Access publishing initiatives and journals in African studies.
5. The sustainability of Africa-based journals in a commercially dominated publishing system.
6. The implications of AI tools for knowledge making, including authorship, attribution and credit in African studies.
7. The rhetoric of research transformation and repair, and the limits of academic agency.
Living biographies: crafting life stories in and beyond discourse
Convenors:
Juliet Gilbert, University of Birmingham
Jessica Johnson, University of Birmingham j.johnson.5@bham.ac.uk
Abstract
This panel invites reflections on experimental approaches to crafting biographies. We are interested in how people tell life stories, whether through language or, for example, through material culture, artistic representation or performance. We will also examine how scholars of African Studies share in, study and convey biographical narratives in and beyond discourse. What can we learn conceptually and methodologically from the ways in which our living interlocutors reflect on and constitute their lives, and what happens when we work to bring those stories to wider audiences? What are the ethical implications of reciprocal or collaborative methods in the context of biographical research? What kinds of relationships underpin this work and how are they best recognised? What difference does it make when we work with non-discursive sources or aim to produce multimodal outputs, rather than, or in addition to, academic texts?
Histories of Commodities and Capitalism in East Africa
Kevin Donovan, University of Edinburgh kevin.donovan@ed.ac.uk
This panel brings together scholarship in the history of capitalism and commodity histories with a particular focus on east Africa’s largest economy, Kenya. Through studies of key export crops – including coffee, tea, and pyrethrum – the papers here explore how human labor, natural elements, logistical networks, and financial resources combine to produce certain types of goods. The participants analyse the ecological, economic, and political consequences of such markets, as well as the moral economies and cultures of labor that emerged over the course of the 20th century. Kenya is a particularly fecund site for such explorations: not only did settler colonialism foster an especially extraverted commodity market, but for an earlier generation of scholars, Kenya was also the site of vibrant debate about the nature of postcolonial capitalism. A new generation of historical studies provide an opportunity for revisiting such debates.
Interruption in progress: Narratives, materialities and politics of stalled development
Declan Murray, declan.murray@manchester.ac.uk Constance Smith, constance.smith@manchester.ac.uk Anna Wood arw83@cam.ac.uk
Imagined, never begun and half-finished projects are found all over the continent. Materially behind rusting fences, conceptually in policy documents or theoretically on billboards and PowerPoint presentations, the development of building or infrastructure projects stall at various stages in various ways, for various reasons. A government might sign a bogus contract, an individual might lose their income or an extreme weather event might initiate irrecoverable damage.
This panel explores how stalled development manifests materially and experientially, as well as how it is narrativized across media, policy, art and research. We are interested in interrupted development across scales, from continental infrastructure corridors and megaprojects to individuals’ failed business ventures. When developments stall, when plans aren’t realised, when dreams are dashed, the stories told about causes and consequences can also come to have material effects. This in turn shapes future projects, cities and communities. Stalled development also raises questions of temporality: how do projects that were never completed continue to inflect what comes next? What happens as projects, people and materials age, as climates and environments change?
We welcome diverse approaches and methods from history, anthropology, political economy, urban studies and beyond that explore promise, delay and uncertainty around projects of construction and “improvement”. We want to explore what a focus on interruption helps us to understand about development, temporality and the always incomplete (Nyamjoh, 2023). Instead of seeing stalled construction or infrastructure projects as incidents of failure, the panel looks to the interplay of the material, the human and the more-than-human that causes the stalling and the possibilities that stalling creates. In doing so, the panel puts into question what stalling actually means; is a project ever finished? And how do modes of waiting and anticipation inflect interruption, sustaining the sense that stalled projects remain imminent and underway?
