The production of academic knowledge about Africa operates within complex networks of obligations; institutional metrics, donor priorities, ethical review systems, research relationships, and imagined publics. Yet these obligations are rarely examined as explicit objects of inquiry. As African studies confront shifting funding landscapes, mobility restrictions, digital infrastructures, contested archives, and debates over Africa’s past and futures, this panel asks: to whom- and to what- do scholars owe fidelity?
We conceptualize fidelity not as a neutral norm but as a relational and ethical orientation that configures both method and audience. Fidelity may involve accountability to interlocutors whose lives exceed analytic categories, to epistemologies that resist translation, to digital publics vulnerable to extractive data regimes, and to ecological and speculative worlds that challenge crisis-centred narratives.
Rather than organizing around disciplinary subfields, this panel treats knowledge production as a contested social practice structured by unequal institutional power and historical asymmetries in circulation. We invite contributions that examine the tensions between university metrics and community accountability, donor-driven agendas and epistemic autonomy; extractive research traditions and African-Centred vocabularies, languages, and aesthetic practices; and digital infrastructures, mobility regimes, and competing visions of African futures.
Guiding questions include: How do collaborations generate obligations beyond formal ethics protocols? When might fidelity requires refusal of particular methods, categories, or venues? How do visa regimes, precarious employment shape scholarly value? What might intellectually sovereign, reciprocal, or co-created knowledge look like in practice?
We welcome interdisciplinary contributions from scholars and practitioners exploring alternative models of authorship, collaboration and circulation.
Who do we write Africa for? In a moment of rupture marked by funding constraints, mobility restrictions, and digital extraction. This panel interrogates scholarship fidelity. We examine when accountability conflicts with institutional reward systems and explore how African knowledge production might be ethically remade through refusal, reciprocity, and epistemic sovereignty.
Please submit your paper abstract (250 words) by March 12, 2026. Abstracts should be sent via email to Aboabea Akuffo at gertrudeakuffo@gmail.com, or Dr. Edwin Ameso at edwin.ameso@uni-leipzig.de. Kindly include your institutional affiliation, email, and a brief bio. Thank you.
