Paper short abstract

This paper examines how African feminist scholars negotiate academic identity and activism in neoliberal, surveilled universities, arguing that feminist scholarly-activism is an ethical response to academic unfreedom, gendered precarity, and epistemic injustice.

Paper long abstract

This paper critically examines how African feminist scholars negotiate academic identity and activist commitments within universities shaped by neoliberal reforms, state surveillance, and enduring colonial epistemic legacies. Drawing on African feminist philosophy, Ekaterina Chertkovskaya’s theorisation of academic resistance, and Achille Mbembe’s analysis of the postcolonial university, the paper conceptualises feminist scholarly-activism as an ethical response to academic unfreedom, gendered precarity, and epistemic injustice. It argues that conventional ideals of detached or ‘neutral’ scholarship are incompatible with African contexts in which intellectual labour is deeply entangled with struggles for social justice, decolonisation, and institutional transformation. African feminist scholars are frequently positioned at the intersection of institutional discipline and activist responsibility, where neutrality is neither possible nor desirable. Within this terrain, feminist praxis, understood in dialogue with the liberatory principles of critical pedagogy, emerges as a vital framework for reimagining academic identity. Methodologically, the paper employs feminist critical institutional analysis and auto-theoretical reflection to address the following questions: How do African feminist scholars conceptualise and practise activism within constrained university spaces? What ethical frameworks guide feminist scholarly-activism under conditions of repression and precarity? How does feminist praxis reshape pedagogy, research, and institutional politics in African universities? In so doing, the paper avers that feminist scholarly-activism helps to reclaim the university as a space of ethical responsibility and collective agency, therefore reimagining development knowledge as politically engaged and socially accountable within decolonial feminist futures.

Paper short abstract

This paper analyses the outcomes of the African Cities Research Consortium's efforts to overcome structural barriers to knowledge co-production. Through an operationalisation of power for expanded agency in urban knowledge production, it focuses on creating the conditions for epistemic justice.

Paper long abstract

Considerable efforts have been expended on exploring how researchers and institutes can forge more equitable approaches to knowledge production that transcend historically constructed hierarchies. While there is much current emphasis on decolonization, and a considerable legacy in participatory research and co-production, substantive gaps remain to overcome the cleavage between academic and community-based forms of knowledge. We argue that meaningful integration of community knowledge in academic research is both an ethical and methodological imperative. Drawing on the case of the African Cities Research Consortium, where research in seven African cities sought to understand drivers and barriers of more just urban contexts with a focus on informal settlements, we examine the possibilities and persistent challenges of epistemic justice work. Through a qualitative approach, working closely with organisations of informal settlement residents, this work’s contribution is threefold. We a) operationalise power for expanded agency in urban knowledge production; b) develop the concept of agentic space to better understand how to create the conditions to overcome structural barriers, and c) utilise our operationalisation of power and conceptualisation of agentic space to analyse the outcomes of the Consortium’s attempts at overcoming structural barriers of ontological, epistemological, and methodological nature. We seek to This work reveals that even well-intentioned efforts at epistemic inclusion can reproduce asymmetries, while also highlighting the importance of agentic space in creating the conditions for deeper epistemic transformations within the urban.

Paper short abstract

This is an examination of the Caribbean reparatory justice movement as a case study of how social movements and decolonial thoughts, buttressed by scholar activism, challenge hegemonic epistemologies related to colonialism and colonial legacies impacting the Caribbean and Caribbean development.

Paper long abstract

The Caribbean reparatory justice movement represents a long genealogy of activism that began with the resistance of Indigenous and enslaved African people, deepened with the calls for repatriation by the Rastafari community and has, in the contemporary, been strengthened by Caribbean academic scholars and activists. Caribbean academics such as Sir Arthur Lewis, Sir Eric Williams, Dr Walter Rodney, Professor Sir Hilary Beckles and Professor Verene Shepherd, have all contributed to this social movement by challenging colonial narratives in history, economics and development, arguing that contemporary development realities of post-colonial societies are as a direct consequence of European colonialism.

The University of the West Indies (UWI), whose three main campuses are housed on former plantations in the Caribbean, represents a site of resistance, solidarity, and transformative learning. This is perhaps most evidenced through its historical anti-colonial teachings, its contemporary housing of the world's first Centre for Reparation Research and its ongoing collaborative teaching of the world's first Masters in Reparatory Justice.

This paper, seeks to examine two fundamental questions: How do academic identities intersect and diverge with activism to nurture a sense of self? How are social movements and decolonial thoughts shaped to challenge hegemonic epistemologies? To do so, the reflections of a Caribbean academic activist, UWI graduate, and PhD student researching the roles of British universities in chattel enslavement and colonialism and their consequent reparatory justice initiatives in the Caribbean will be examined. Ultimately, this paper will ultimately examine the ways in which Caribbean Activist-scholars have historically challenged colonial legacies.