Paper long abstract:

Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD) is a public social science and humanities university instituted in 2009 to bring together academic excellence and social justice. It was natural for the university to begin with focusing on concerns generative of Indian and South Asian realities. Soon, however, it was realised that regions and localities are co-produced by intersecting processes at multiple scales. Since 2012, a few of us have collaborated to think through 'the Global' at the present conjuncture, that is, in a post-Cold War, neoliberal, multipolar, urban and ecologically-fraught world. These conversations resulted in the formation of the new School of Global Affairs, with academic programmes planned in the areas of Global Studies, Urban Studies, Public Health, Religion, and Science and Technology Studies. Of these, the first two have already begun. In designing the programmes, among other things, a pedagogical reimagination of the world has been attempted. Rather than take the continental imaginary for granted, we have pieced the world together via alternate cultural/environmental regions such as the Indian Ocean and the Himalayas. This way of imagining the world brings a historical, ecological and critical lens to the continuities and ruptures in the study of Africa and Asia-Africa, which, in the dominant thought regimes, are viewed through a narrowly state-centered and strategic lens. My intervention here will delve further into these issues, and make an argument for an engagement with Africa as part of a wider reimagination of the global in higher education and scholarship.

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