Short Abstract

This panel invites practical and theoretical conversations and insights on current attempts in African Studies to establish digital, multimodal publishing formats, offering non-linear, multivocal and multilingual ways of re-presenting and entangling various forms of knowledge expression.

Long Abstract

This panel centers current attempts in African Studies to establish alternative publishing formats. Digital, multimodal publishing formats in particular hold the potential to respond to calls for meaningfully integrating Africa’s diverse realities into academic publications. These formats offer non-linear, multivocal, and multilingual ways of re-presenting and entangling various forms of knowledge expression. How can we critically engage with new publishing practices as forms of (post-)colonial world-making that can either shift or perpetuate established power structures in publishing practices? Simultaneously, an interrogation of the potentials and pitfalls emerging from current technological shifts is essential.

This panel pursues two partially distinct agendas: While we want to enable exchange on the various ongoing related projects in the field, we also intend to treat digital, multimodal publication formats as prisms through which the variety of knowledges and world-making practices examined in African Studies can become visible and accessible in new ways.

Based on experiences from the ongoing digital publication project “African Language Work”, we are looking for interlocutors who are either practically engaged in or who theoretically think about such publishing formats from both academic and non-academic perspectives. We invite contributions that speak to one or more of the following questions:

How can new forms of publishing account for multivocality and more inclusive concepts of authorship?

In which ways can multilingualism become a fundamental part of such publications?

How do we account for ownership and copyright within multimedia-based formats?

Which new ways of interaction with and receiving feedback from readers become possible?

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