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Rethinking academia as a site of resistance, this paper explores activist scholarship and decolonial praxis in the Global South, examining contemporary frameworks, highlighting intersections of academic identities and activism, and academia's role in promoting 'degrowth' and sustainable futures

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Academia in the Global South is undergoing a transformative shift, driven by activist-scholars challenging colonial legacies, Western paradigms, and dominant knowledge systems. This paper explores how frameworks by Achille Mbembe, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni, and Ekaterina Chertkovskaya inform activist scholarship in feminist, environmental, and decolonial studies. We interrogate how academic identities intersect with activism, shaping pedagogy, research, and institutional politics. The paper examines how social movements and decolonial thoughts challenge hegemonic epistemologies, and how academia can function as an institution for 'degrowth' and sustainable futures. We argue that intellectual and activist practices are complex and multifaceted, requiring critical reflexivity and collective agency. Drawing on multidisciplinary modes of inquiry, we highlight the importance of local inquiries and the coexistence of multiple epistemologies, or the "ecology of knowledges". This paper seeks to contribute to the ongoing conversation on decolonizing knowledge systems, power imbalances, and methodologies. It aims to nurture a sense of self that is grounded in the complexities of our contexts and committed to transformative learning and social change. We explore the tensions and synergies between academic identities and activism, and how they shape our understanding of knowledge, power, and social justice. Ultimately, we aim to reshape academia as a site of resistance, solidarity, and transformative learning

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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.

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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.

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I am proposing Sufism, a Maghrebi mystical philosophy, to grasp the existential question that marked modernist texts and the conceptualization of the New Man across cultural and literary boundaries.

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This paper explores Sufism as a potential epistemological framework for analyzing literary text. Within the broader context of strengthening African and Maghrebi knowledge systems, it presents a comparative reading of a selection of modernist Maghrebi texts, where I investigate the reactivation of Sufi archetypes, such as the Perfect man, the child, the rebirth, and the journey, in Abdallah Laroui’s El Ghorba and Mohamed El Khaldi’s Awtad. Though written in different settings, these narratives share an articulation of disillusionment and estrangement, experienced essentially by the male characters who struggle in modernist times with a sense of the self. I am proposing Sufism, a mystical philosophy, to grasp the existential question that marked modernist texts and the conceptualization of the New Man across cultural and literary boundaries. Ultimately, by situating Sufism with African and Maghrebi intellectual and ancestral tradition, this project proposes spiritual revitalization as a reading for literary texts that not only fosters intercultural and interdisciplinary knowledge production but also enriches alternative knowledge systems and epistemologies, highlighting the transformative power of embodied mysticism in confronting modern alienation and reconstructing selfhood.

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This study examines gendered violence in Nigerian institutions, showing its normalization and victims’ silence driven by fear and weak support. Surveys and interviews reveal inadequate institutional responses and the use of repression, denial, and displacement as coping mechanisms.

Paper long abstract

Gendered violence has become a persistent and normalized phenomenon within Nigerian academic institutions. As a result, “enduring in silence” has become the unspoken coping strategy for many victims, largely due to fear of victimization, academic penalties, and sociocultural pressures that discourage disclosure to maintain institutional loyalty. This study investigates the prevalence and forms of gendered violence across Nigerian universities, the extent to which students and staff require stronger protection mechanisms, and the need for comprehensive institutional and legal frameworks to support survivors in reporting such violations confidently. Empirical and descriptive research methods were adopted, data were collected through structured questionnaires administered to 473 students and staff across selected tertiary institutions, as well as private interviews conducted with survivors and key informants to capture lived experiences and contextual insights. The data were analyzed using frequencies, chi-square of independence and charts. Findings reveal that existing institutional structures are grossly inadequate in addressing gendered violence, and prolonged exposure has obscured the severity of its physical, emotional, and academic consequences, often compelling victims to resort to Sigmund Freud’s Psychoanalytical concepts of repression, denial, and displacement as coping mechanisms. The study concludes that urgent institutional reforms and stronger regulatory policies are essential to effectively confront and reduce gendered violence within Nigerian academic environments.

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The paper tries to explore the shifting conceptualisation and reconstruction of the idea of solidarity and the new identity based agentive capacity among Muslim political consciousness in the aftermath of Anti CAA_NRC movement

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In the aftermath of the decline of Mandal politics and the emergence of a third democratic upsurge, Muslim communities in India have experienced an acute sense of betrayal and marginalization at the hands of the so-called “secular forces.” The political transition from intersectional frameworks of representation to the consolidation of populist majoritarianism has resulted in systemic discrimination, particularly against Muslims, without meaningful safeguards from political actors who once promised protection and inclusion. This climate of exclusion has generated a growing sense of angst and political disillusionment, especially among Muslim youth, who have responded with sustained counter-mobilizations. The Anti-CAA-NRC protests marked a turning point in this trajectory, reviving fundamental questions of Muslim belonging, political agency, and the language of resistance in contemporary India.

The intensification of identity politics among Muslim youth and their resistance to cultural and political appropriation has also generated new questions regarding political solidarity. This paper examines these evolving discourses of solidarity through a qualitative study employing open-ended interviews and surveys. Focusing on a case study of Muslim students of Jawaharlal Nehru University and Aligarh Muslim University, the paper foregrounds the ideological and mobilizational practices that inform contemporary Muslim student politics.

By situating the post Anti CAA-NRC development, within broader debates on minority rights, nationalism, and political solidarity, this research contributes to ongoing efforts to understand how marginalized communities negotiate belonging, articulate agency, and reimagine resistance in a rapidly transforming political landscape.

Keywords: Muslim Youth, Student Organizations, Citizenship, Secularism, Identity, Solidarity

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To what extent can the idea of the common good enhance or strengthen existing notions of public and private goods? How is the common good constructed and measured? What are the policy implications of using the idea of the common good in higher education systems? This paper addresses these questions.

Paper long abstract

Goods can be public, private, or common. The differences among them relate to how they are created, distributed, regulated, and governed. Public goods, for instance, must be accessible to all groups in society, while private goods are only for those who can afford them. In the former, the state plays a key role; in the latter, the market regulates supply and demand.

It is appealing to claim that education in general—and higher education in particular—can be considered a common good. The notion of the common good helps, on one hand, enrich utilitarian ways of valuing education and, on the other, highlight contributions that go beyond individual impacts. The term “common” is thus contrasted with “individual.” However, these assumptions deserve further discussion.

Once we analyze how the common good within a university is constructed, normative guidelines can follow. Because the common good focuses on processes rather than outcomes, a critical review of the internal processes of any university is needed. To address long-standing problems and emerging challenges, autonomy and independence are crucial for identifying real opportunities for institutional change. When universities exercise genuine academic freedom, the common good can emerge. At the same time, performance indicators may improve. This points to an “order problem” that must be tested empirically.

Promoting the idea of the common good in universities also requires open deliberation and a factor often uncommon in some higher education institutions: responsibility. As the writer George Bernard Shaw observed, “Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.”

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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.

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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.