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Paper short abstract

Our paper asks how academic knowledge production on youth and political mobilization is structured in terms of geographical location. How do “African studies” and “Middle Eastern studies” make sense of contemporary youth protests? How do they compare and relate to the so-called "core disciplines"?

Paper long abstract

Our paper discusses the social sciences literature on youth and political mobilization in terms of differences and overlaps between North African and sub-Saharan African contexts. The goal is to consider how academic knowledge production is structured within and across “African studies” and “Middle Eastern studies” (which often include North African contexts), and how area studies literatures compare to those of the “core disciplines” (sociology, political science, and youth studies, for instance). We discuss different authors’ attempts at conceptualizing explicitly continental approaches (e.g., Branch and Mampilly’s ‘Africa Uprising’, 2015), how language barriers shape sub-fields within the academic literature, and how migration and contestation constitute different prisms on the concept of “transgressive movements.”