This panel invites submissions that seek to highlight Northern Nigeria’s intellectual traditions—rooted in indigenous systems of knowledge, oral traditions, and religious scholarship—and their contributions to contemporary global debates on politics, climate justice, and social transformation. Through a diverse range of discussions, the panel will explore the resilience and relevance of these knowledge systems in the modern world.
Building on the conference themes, this panel will explore how precolonial intellectual traditions and local historiography resisted colonial epistemic erasure and adapted to contemporary global challenges, examine the intersections of indigenous and modern pedagogies in navigating the pressures of neoliberal education policies and late capitalism, and highlight the contributions of Northern Nigerian environmental movements e.g. indigenous methods of soil conservation and resource management—to the global discourse on ecological sustainability; it will also recover the overlooked intellectual contributions of Northern Nigerian women, including poets, writers, and community leaders, whose works challenge dominant narratives and offer alternative visions of liberation and justice, draw on traditions of community-based governance to question the one-size-fits-all approach of Western liberal democracy, and engage with contemporary media and literature, such as Northern Nigeria’s Kannywood films, to trace the evolution and reinterpretation of canonical ideas in popular culture.
We invite scholars, writers, and researchers from various disciplines to submit a 250-word abstract and a brief biography to tpam@umich.edu by March 10, 2025.
