Short Abstract

How are Africa's universities responding to the challenge of making African-centred knowledge, amidst calls for epistemic justice and a more equitable research ecosystem. What can the humanities and social science contribute to this debate?

Long Abstract

The future of African academic knowledge-making will be shaped by the social, material and technological prisms through which African-centred knowledge gets nurtured, amplified and globally refracted. People are infrastructure: the future depends research talents and commitments of academics working in African universities and across the diaspora. Despite a rapidly growing university ecosystem in many countries, much of the research carried out by Africa’s scholars remains relatively invisible within the global research economy and even in Africa itself. The reasons for this are well-rehearsed – shortages of research funding, inadequate doctoral supervision capacity, the commercial publishing economy, and in many countries, low researcher salaries. Going beyond crisis diagnostics, this panel attends to the everyday work of change, development and reform.

This panel invites empirical case-studies and accounts of building alternative African research futures. Examples might include the forging of equitable research partnerships across Africa, growing links with Chinese universities, the ambiguous role of philanthropic funding, new forms of public engagement or the innovations possible in private universities. Papers may wish to address the role of South Africa and the Maghreb in helping reshape the continent’s research ecosystems, or multilingual collaborations between Anglophone and Francophone scholarship.

Papers will draw on perspectives from the humanities and the social sciences, including science and technology studies, to make sense of this personal and institutional prefigurative labour. The aim is to assess the insights these cases offers for more equitable research futures, for African epistemic agency, and for resilient African research infrastructures and ecosystems.

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