Innovative research produced by Emerging African(ist) Scholars constitute significant vantage points for gauging the pulse and contours of a global Africa. Beyond reading a continent at the crossroads in an increasingly interconnected world, their novel scholarship is also redefining the stakes of old and new discourses, debates, histories, identities, textualities and praxis to locate Africa as a central epistemic actor on the global stage. This panel invites contributions from researchers who identify as Emerging Scholars (pre-doctoral, doctoral, early career scholars) that explore global connections and circulations, center Africa and its people, ideas, and goods, and articulate related themes. Among others, we prompt reflections on questions such as: to what extent can transdisciplinary dialogues by Emerging Scholars address and illuminate contemporary anxieties and debates about Africa’s place in the world? How is this body of work rethinking the materials, methods, and meanings relevant to African studies? In what ways do the critical junctures that Emerging Scholars explore foreground Africa within global dimensions of thought? What new horizons of meaning and conditions of possibility are becoming apparent within African studies and how will these critical junctures drive economic, social, environmental, political, cultural and technological discourses on/in/about the continent in the coming decades? What new pathways of knowledge production are prompting attention to questions of epistemology, cultural ecologies, historical trends, gender dynamics, medical debates, literary production and economic and social change?
Submissions must be from emerging scholars, defined as current students or 5 years post-graduation (2019 graduation date or later). Please submit your abstract to emergingscholars@africanstudies.org no later than 5:00pm eastern Monday, March 11 to be considered.
