Short Abstract

This panel reframes Africa from a site of climate vulnerability to one generating alternative ecological perspectives. We foreground Indigenous knowledges and challenge mono-disciplinary climate narratives. We advance an Africa-centered vocabulary for climate justice and just transitions.

Long Abstract

Climate discourse on Africa has long been mediated through viewpoints of vulnerability, crisis, and external intervention. This panel re-centres that narrative by focusing on African ecological thought, practice, and contestation as generative sites of theory. We invite submissions that examine how communities across the continent negotiate climate variability through Indigenous knowledge systems, agrarian politics, and youth activism, while contending with extractivism, conservation regimes, and global climate finance. Rather than treating Africa as a passive recipient of climate policy, we accommodate interventions which to rethink sustainability, justice, and conservation. Panelists will engage questions such as: How do indigenous cosmologies challenge dominant Western climate science? In what ways do farmer-herder dynamics, urban waste ecologies, and resource extraction reveal state power and local resilience? How are Africans producing new vocabularies/epistemologies for ‘proper’ transitional realities that are grounded in local ethics but speak to global debates? This interdisciplinary panel seeks to advance an Africa-centered ecology that is plural, political, and future-oriented.

We invite papers discussing:

1. Indigenous and Local Knowledges: Epistemologies of land, water, forests, and weather; intergenerational transmission and challenges to scientific hegemony

2. Climate Justice and Political Ecology: Extractivism, energy transitions, loss-and-damage, and the politics of climate finance in African states

3. Urban and Agrarian Ecologies: Waste, flooding, food systems, and climate adaptation in African cities and rural areas

4. Conflict and Mobility: Resource scarcity, farmer-herder relations, climate migration, and security narratives

5. Cultural Imaginaries of Nature: Literature, film, religion, and art as resources for rethinking human-nonhuman relations and futurity

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