Short Abstract

This panel examines how Interventionist Humanities can move beyond interpreting African mobility to engaging the conditions through which movement and immobility are narrated, governed and experienced; foregrounding power, participation, knowledge, representation and the ethics of intervention.

Long Abstract

Mobility in Africa is shaped not only by movement across space, but also by language, narrative, memory, institutions, representation and unequal relations of power. Humanities scholarship has produced rich interpretations of migration, displacement, diaspora, return, belonging and immobility, yet less attention has been paid to what happens when such knowledge moves beyond interpretation toward deliberate social engagement. This panel examines Interventionist Humanities as an approach to the politics of mobility in Africa. It asks how humanities knowledge can move through translation into participatory, communicative, cultural and institutional forms of engagement while remaining critically attentive to the power relations embedded in intervention. Rather than treating intervention as the straightforward application of academic expertise, the panel understands it as reflexive and ethically situated engagement involving migrants, communities, scholars, practitioners and institutions. We, therefore, invite contributions examining how discourse, pragmatics, literature, history, memory, storytelling, cultural production and related humanities approaches can illuminate and intervene in migrant–host relations, border imaginaries, institutional communication, displacement, return, diaspora, social cohesion, climate-related mobility, waiting and immobility. We are equally interested in co-produced knowledge, contested or failed interventions, and questions of who defines mobility problems, whose knowledge becomes actionable, who participates in designing responses, and what forms of power are reproduced or challenged. The panel treats mobility as a prism through which power, belonging, knowledge and social transformation can be examined, aligning directly with the conference’s emphasis on “African Prisms,” while asking how humanities scholarship can move beyond interpretation toward critical and socially situated engagement.

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