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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.