Short Abstract

African Studies journals based on the continent face funding, peer-review, indexing, and visibility barriers. This panel brings together editors, publishers and researchers to discuss these obstacles and the resources and publishing models that could address them.

Long Abstract

How is knowledge about Africa constructed and circulated, and through what infrastructures? This panel turns the "African Prisms" theme toward the often-invisible machinery of academic publishing. The structural barriers facing continent-based journals and authors — funding gaps, uneven peer-review capacity, exclusion from major indexes, marginalization by commercial publishers, language politics, limited visibility — are well documented, and the broader critique of who controls knowledge production has been made forcefully elsewhere. Rather than revisit that ground, this panel is oriented toward what comes next: the concrete resources, partnerships, and models that are already reshaping the field, and what it will take to scale them.

Bringing together voices from across the career spectrum — from early-career scholars to editors-in-chief — the panel asks: what do continent-based journals and authors actually need, and which resources already exist but remain underused or hard to access? What can funders and international publishers learn from initiatives that are working? How can they participate in this publishing economy on a more equitable, less extractive, basis? The publishing infrastructure can be a prism through which to direct attention to questions of voice, access, and epistemic justice. The panel offers a practical, forward-looking lens — asking how African studies can model the kind of transformative publishing collaboration it wants to see. This panel is sponsored by the International African Institute.

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