Short Abstract:

Responding to the theme of the conference “Africa and Europe: Reciprocal Perspectives”, this panel meditates on the question of what Europe might learn from Africa. It is long overdue that this question be raised and applied to the ways in which knowledge is produced in the first place.

Long Abstract:

Responding to the theme of the conference “Africa and Europe: Reciprocal Perspectives”, this panel meditates on the question of what Europe might learn from Africa. It is long overdue that this question be raised and applied to the ways in which knowledge is produced in the first place. In the social sciences that originated in Europe in the wake of “modernization”, knowledge production is a surprisingly asocial and individualized practice, typically contingent on a relative withdrawal of the researcher from the respective social realities under study. What can we learn from less individualized contexts, in Africa and elsewhere, where knowledge production is a more immediate and collective practice, where the sources of knowledge are not necessarily written, stable and privatized, where thinking and doing are not considered as separate, and where multilingual environments carry an inevitable multiplicity of meanings? What potentials lie in mundane theory-building, and how are we to deal with these potentials in African Studies? Following Achille Mbembe, we ask these questions to explore “thinking the world from Africa,” where Africa is no longer an object of European epistemic curiosity but the provider of tools to engage with the world. We invite contributions that deal with what we call an epistemic otherwise that might allow us to analyse the habits and conventions in the humanities and the social sciences.