Call for abstract submissions:

Africa, the journal of the IAI, invites submissions to the thematic panels, listed below, assembled under the rubric of the journal. We typically publish work drawing from long-term fieldwork and/or archival research; and 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 humanities and social science fields.

Proposals and participants from the African continent are particularly encouraged. 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.

PLENARY SESSION

Writing Africa: Who Is Scholarship for?

Hosted by Africa (IAI) this roundtable continues discussions initiated during ECAS 2023, focusing on the role of academic scholarship alongside and in engagement with other forms of intellectual work, creativity and knowledge production in/about Africa. Here the question shifts from what to who is scholarship is for, in order to consider the different interests – political, economic, social, cultural and historical, and more – that inevitably entangle and co-exist with,  and sometimes contest, the production, reproduction, circulation and presentation of diverse ways of knowing across the continent. Six discussants with diverse perspectives will offer brief statements to initiate a critical discussion about changing structures/relations of knowing across the continent.

Convenors:

Joost Fontein

Asonzeh Ukah

Chair:

Julie Archambault

Discussants:

Wangui Kimari

Fred Ikanda

Akin Iwilade

Birgit Meyer

Gerald Mazarire

Divine Fuh

PANELS

Colonial Collections: New Research Collaborations as Generators of Critical Insights

Since the publication of the Sarr-Savoy report “The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage. Towards a New Relational Ethics” in 2018, activists, museum curators and scholars in African studies have scrutinized collections of items taken from Africa under the ambit of British and European imperial outreach, conducting research into their provenance, advocating and implementing restitution (especially of “looted art”), and seeking to reconfigure the ethnological museum. The starting point of this panel is the idea that the artefacts assembled and kept in museum depots and exhibitions are material traces and witnesses of complex colonial entanglements that urgently must be unpacked through an archaeology of knowledge production. Echoing the central theme of this conference, which advocates the development of new modes of knowledge production about and from Africa, this panel proposes to approach these items as nodes of indigenous, colonial and postcolonial assemblages that condense clashing meanings, values and uses. Calling attention to the rise of new research collaborations involving activists, scholars and members of communities across Africa from which the items in colonial collections were derived, the panel wishes to take stock of the potential of such relational research to engage in new, critical ways of knowledge production. Which divergent epistemologies or ontologies underpin these meanings, values and uses of items in colonial collections? Which layered power-knowledge systems do these items enshrine? To what extent is it at all possible to translate between these different knowledges? Which cleavages and incompatibilities appear, for instance between “secular” and “religious/spiritual” understandings? How does such research prompt a thorough and grounded epistemological critique of lingering colonial molds and generate new critical insights? What are the political implications and consequences arising from such collaborative work for academia and museums in Africa and Europe?

Convener:

Birgit Meyer (IAI, Utrecht University)

Post-Conflict Heritage in Africa: Debates Challenges and Opportunities

Since the 1950s, various regions in Africa have grappled with international and civil wars and continue to face ongoing conflicts as part of the processes of decolonial- and post-colonial state-making. In their wake, conflict-heritage projects have emerged, attempting to understand the complex relationship between cultural heritage and violent conflicts. This panel proposes to bring together scholars from across the African continent to explore the ways these heritage projects have attempted to make sense of violent pasts, their legacies and  explore the potentials for healing and justice in post-conflict communities. At the same time, ongoing conflicts pose continued threats to existing cultural heritage. Taking an expansive view of heritage, this panel will explore current debates on (post-)conflict heritage in Africa, with papers addressing several themes ranging from identity (re)formation, transitional justice, post-conflict heritage reconstruction, ‘liberation heritage’, trauma and ‘healing’, to (in)tangible forms of memorialisation and commemoration, dissident memories, and inter-generational memory. By bringing together contributions on past conflicts in conversation with recent and ongoing conflicts from across the African continent, the panel will shed light on the complexities and commonalities of post-conflict heritage across Africa, and explore how this can happen most effectively. Taking a holistic, interdisciplinary approach to the study of African cultural heritage, the panel seeks papers that combine a range of theoretical and empirical perspectives on the conflict-heritage nexus, and welcomes contributions from a plurality of methodological approaches.

Convenors:
Stanley Jachiye Onyemechalu
Rose Miyonga (Warwick)

Governing Cross-generational Economic Lives: Debt, Distribution, Dispossession

An exciting and expanding field of ethnographic research examines how state institutions attempt to govern popular economies in Africa. Everyday government ranges from wealth accumulation to deepening debt, from employment and entrepreneurship to public (or informal) welfare. It is positively glossed as citizen entitlement and inclusion, or decried as deepening extraction and exploitation. This panel opens up a novel dimension: we invite paper proposals exploring the key place of relations over time, including between generations, in the government of economic lives. Everyday economic government can concern things like property inheritance. It can be about how debts and/or destitution may be carried over to sons and daughters or, alternatively, evaded and transcended. The panel addresses the interwoven life chances of the young, the working age (including those without wages), and the retired. Formal processes create or sharpen generational divisions through the distinct possibilities (or vulnerabilities) that people face. State institutions are themselves moulded by different age-cohorts staffing them. Especially in contexts of transition, these may embody contrasting professional ethics, aspirations and commitments. Taken together, such vantage points recast the temporal and relational dynamics of formal incorporation.

Convenors:

Maxim Bolt (Oxford) and Deborah James (LSE)

Africa’s Changing Health Landscapes: Challenges and Possibilities

Africa, a continent stereotypically known for famines and chronic malnutrition, is now facing a growing obesity epidemic, and undergoing what global health observers describe as an “epidemiological transition”, as “non-communicable diseases” that were once mainly found in industrialized nations increasingly also afflict communities across the global South. International media have been keen to emphasise the irony of the situation, mobilizing powerful tropes that perpetuate representations of Africa as a doomed and hopelessly diseased continent. Anthropologists, for their part, have critiqued global health frameworks and categories, while also denouncing how little attention the changing health landscape has attracted.

This panel invites new thinking about health and wellbeing in Africa to complicate understandings of this changing health landscape. We seek papers that follow trajectories of embodied generation and regeneration across diverse locations on the continent, while taking seriously generational divides and continuities. Building on the rich tradition of health-focused research in African studies—critical studies of colonial medicine as control, historical and ethnographic work showing the centrality of health idioms and practices for the political and moral imagina­tion, and more recent critical studies of biomedical institutions, especially in precarious or humanitarian contexts—the panel proposes to examine the challenges and possibilities that come with changing health landscapes through the lens of “wellness”, rather than illness, thus heeding a call to provide “other stories” about health and health-seeking in Africa. We are interested in examining the articulation between empirical changes occurring on the ground like the rise in (diagnoses of) obesity and depression; the construction/production/representation of these changes through processes of medicalization, pathologization, and intervention; health imaginaries; and health-seeking practices. We invite papers that address these dynamics ethnographically and that attend to how health and wellbeing practices figure in shifting expectations about the good life and desirable futures.

We ask how globally circulating ideas and ideals about health and wellness are received, performed, and contested in different African contexts. What new ways of working on and imagining the body do they inspire? How do these new forms converge with other forms of therapeutic navigation and health-seeking? What happens to the meaning and experience of suffering and flourishing when people start buying into normative conceptions of health and illness promoted through neoliberal agendas?  In doing so, we attend to what “new” health conditions produce in terms of challenges but also possibilities, while bringing into focus pressing health realities that tend to be overshadowed by other health agendas.

Convenors:

Julie Soleil Archambault (Concordia University)

Tyler Zoanni (University of Bremen)

Social Cohesion in Protracted Displacement Contexts

In recent years, the international community has increasingly promoted the idea of social cohesion as a mechanism for maintaining harmonious relations between refugees and hosting communities in protracted refugee situations in line with the Leave No One Behind transformative promise of the 2030 Agenda. According to the UNHCR around 16 million refugees live in protracted situations alongside host populations who already experience difficult conditions of scarcity (UNHCR 2022). This is bound to either improve or worsen existing social bonds. Livelihood issues, for example, determine the local-refugee relationship in many protracted refugee contexts in Africa and elsewhere where refugees have to share meagre resources with their hosts. In such conditions, humanitarian aid may make the refugee camps appear as islands of privilege. This calls for analytical tools that can help to generate more academically rigorous and policy-relevant literature. Despite its growing appeal, the concept of social cohesion is often applied too broadly – not only weakening its analytical power, but also resulting in generalized policies and practices that are not context-specific. In this panel we seek to broaden discussions around the idea of social cohesion within protracted displacement contexts. We invite studies that highlight the successes and challenges of promoting social cohesion in displacement contexts as well as those that explore positive and negative dimensions of local-refugee relations. We also invite papers that offer insights into local-refugee relations over time, the historical and political factors that influence these relationships, the role of kinship, identity, and livelihood resources in fostering or undermining social cohesion, as well as other practical considerations that promote or jeopardize social cohesion in protracted displacement contexts.

Convenors:

Fred Ikanda and Mike Owiso (Maseno University, Kenya)

Managing Herders and Farmers Conflicts in Africa: Policies Legislations, Conventions and Protocols

One of the challenges posed to the realization of fair and equitable use of natural resources, increased food and livestock production and sustainable rural transformation in much of Africa is the perennial and seemingly intractable conflicts between transhumance pastoralists and sedentary farmers. From the Sahel to the West and Horn stretching to Eastern and Southern Africa, pastoralists and farmers are locked in bloody battle over resources. Extant studies of the conflicts appear fixated on establishing causalities. Scholarly engagement with policies and legislations enacted to tackle the conflicts and build peace among the belligerent parties grow thinner. While not depreciating the importance of unmasking causalities, a robust intellectual engagement with the instruments for managing the conflicts is, after all, not out of place. There is yet one more compelling reason to focus on the phenomenon. Laws and policies deployed to manage the conflicts are not only numerous but have, over the years, witnessed transformations. Whereas some have tackled the conflicts, many more have not. It is therefore important that we account for the successes and failures as the search for lasting solution continues. What are these policies, legislations, conventions and protocols? How and why have they failed or succeeded to achieve the desired results? What forms of legislation and policy measures can yield the desired outcome in affected countries? This panel seeks to discuss policies and legislations deployed to mitigate the conflicts, explain successes and failures and recommend measures capable of mitigating the conflict in affected countries.

ASAUK24 reflects on the changes in knowledge production about Africa. This panel not only demonstrates knowledge of the policies and laws but the transformations, successes and failures they have recorded over time.

Convenor:

Ifeanyi Onwuzuruigbo (University of Ibadan, Nigeria)

Money, Value & the State: Author-meets-Readers

Money, Value & the State: Sovereignty & Citizenship in East Africa (Cambridge University Press, June 2024) is an historical ethnography that puts money, credit, and smuggling at the center of East Africa’s decolonization. Moving beyond political and cultural histories, it shows how postcolonial states tried to create a “government of value” in which personal interest and collective advance were aligned through instruments that were simultaneously ethical and economic. I foreground a series of financial initiatives that promised to consolidate value within state auspices, including central banks, national currencies, and credit instruments. Based on more than two years of archival and ethnographic research across the region this book reframes 20^th century statecraft and what it meant to become “credible citizens”—especially those who produced reliable export value. Self-determination was, at most, partially fulfilled, and often the state monetary infrastructures did as much to produce divisions and inequality as they did to produce nations. As a result, a range of dissident practices – including smuggling, counterfeiting, and hoarding – arose as people produced value on their own terms. Weaving together detailed discussions of currency controls, bank nationalizations, and coffee smuggling with conceptual frameworks of wider relevance, Money, Value & the State traces the struggles between bankers and bureaucrats, farmers and smugglers that shaped postcolonial political economy.

Convenor:

Kevin P. Donovan (University of Edinburgh)

Participants:

Deborah James, LSE

Tinashe Nyamunda, University of Pretoria / University of Glasgow

Wangui Kimari

Regenerating Africa’s research and publishing infrastructures:  histories, economies, futures

This is a stream of three linked panels – one on the political economy of West African research universities, one on rebuilding Africa’s research infrastructures, and one on the future of African academic publishing. At a time when UNESCO’s vision for Open Science calls for research infrastructures that are ‘organised and financed upon an essentially not-for-profit and long-term vision’, African governments struggle to adequately finance their research universities, let alone develop publicly funded Open Science infrastructures. This panel seeks papers that offer insights into the histories and political economies of these developments, that critically assess the influence of key policy actors and infrastructures, and highlight efforts to reshape African research publishing.

Convenors:

Jeremiah O. Arowosegbe (Leeds), David Mills (Oxford) and Stephanie Kitchen (IAI)

Participants:

William Beinart (Oxford)

Ruth Bush (Bristol)

Beth Le Roux (Pretoria)

Tinashe Mushakavanhu (Oxford)

The Political Economy of Public Universities in West Africa: funding, strikes, students

From the 1980s, West Africa’s educational systems have been challenged and crisis ridden. Worse hit have been higher education and the public universities. Governmental neglect occasioned by the  World Bank’s Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) has led to a pattern of chronic underfunding. Declining quality of faculties, inadequate funding, crumbling infrastructure and poor renumeration are the result: illustrations of the crisis facing public higher education. These have elicited protests and resistance in the forms of industrial disputes and strikes by the academic unions in the public universities in the region. The situations across the individual states continue to worsen given the diminished priority accorded university education by successive post-colonial governments from which come the largest proportion of funding. The resultant decline has been alarming for post-colonial development. The situation is exacerbated by the expansion in the number of universities and student enrolment, without commensurate funding. Financial allocations to universities ignore the specific needs of different academic programmes, faculty specializations and staff populations as well as inflation and the impact of a depressed global economy. This exerts further pressures on strained state resources. They also explain the continued calls for the commercialization and privatization of higher education. In a context where the universities depend on government grants for more than 95% of their capital and recurrent expenditures, the gap between student enrolment and the growth of expenditure is a critical and problematic factor. This first of three panels invites contributions that speak to this political economy, or situate the region within a broader continental perspective.

Chair: Jeremiah Arowosegbe (Leeds)

Rebuilding African Research Infrastructures

Africa’s universities, journals and researchers have to survive within a global reputational economy in which citations are a key currency. Attentive to the power of rankings, research universities set their doctoral students and staff demanding publication targets for graduation and promotion, and some offer financial incentives to publish in prestigious ‘international’ journals. This changes academic practice and disciplinary cultures, feeding the growth of commercial academic publishers and their accelerated business models. Some, like Elsevier, are becoming data analytics companies, developing proprietary data infrastructures that extract and commodify user data and research metadata. The two dominant citation indexes (Scopus and Web of Science) gatekeep reputational hierarchies through their metrics-based journal selection and evaluation policies. Being delisted from these indexes undermines long-established African journals. Meanwhile Elsevier offers consultancy advice to universities seeking to get their journals listed in Scopus. The latest challenge for institutional and scholar-led journals is an evolving set of centralised and technical requirements, such as paying for CrossRef registration to generate DOIs for articles, requiring authors to register on ORCID, and complying with strict integrity guidelines and citation thresholds. A growing number of international policy actors are critical of this commodified global science system. They have begun promoting an alternative vision for an Open Science owned by the scholarly community, and funding African-centred journal platforms and portals. Building sustainable national and regional research infrastructures requires sustained funding and a long-term vision of a multipolar academic knowledge ecosystem. Papers are invited that explore these challenges and evaluate alternative possible options for regeneration and repair.

Chair: David Mills (Oxford)

African Academic Publishing: Repairing the Past, Looking to the Future

The third of these three interlinked panels on research infrastructures, policies and publishing addresses the past, present and future of African academic publishing. It seeks to map the current landscape of book and journal publishing from the African continent, and the future of publishing on Africa more generally. Whilst universities have launched a new generation of online journals, many African university presses have struggled to recover from earlier economic downturns. South African university presses are a notable exception. One legacy of apartheid-era science is an elaborate system of publication subsidies and institutional incentives that has sustained a vibrant journal publishing system. Yet knowledge production is nonetheless still skewed towards publishers based in the former colonial powers and North America. Commercial interests dominate, particularly in textbook and journal publishing, currently driven by a wave of commercial Open Access led by both older players (Elsevier, Taylor & Francis) and newer ones such as Science Open and De Gruyter. Book publishing is arguably more heterogenous, and much less profitable. Here, the challenges for African publishing (and independent presses publishing on the continent) include how to publish long-form research texts at all when funding for research is so unevenly distributed, economic survival and sustainability, meeting Open Access mandates and complying with the data standards of the Global North. For this third panel we invite paper proposals that address any of these matters in wider and historical context, beyond single case studies. Authors may be researchers, publishers, journal editors, librarians, practitioners or policy actors.

Chair: Stephanie Kitchen (IAI