Conversations about health and healing in Africa and the African diaspora are often organized within inherited colonial frameworks: traditional versus modern, Indigenous versus biomedical, Africa versus diaspora. In the context of childbirth and reproductive wellness, these binaries obscure a deeper historical reality: African Indigenous healing and birthing epistemologies were not simply supplemented by colonial medicine; they were systematically disrupted, marginalized, and delegitimized under slavery and European colonial rule. Similarly, across the continent and throughout the diaspora, Indigenous midwives and healers were displaced, criminalized, or reclassified as unscientific, while Western biomedical authority was institutionalized over Black bodies (Bonaparte, 2015; Ajayi-Lowo, 2024). Yet these histories of disruption are not confined to the past. Contemporary disparities in maternal death across Africa and the African diaspora reveal the enduring afterlives of colonial intervention in birthing healing systems. For example, the African region has the highest maternal mortality rate compared to other regions (WHO, 2025), and Black birthing people globally, regardless of borders, bear the highest burden of maternal mortality (Small et al., 2017).
This panel invites papers that examine how African and African diasporic communities are confronting these legacies through the remembering, reclaiming, repurposing, and multidirectional sharing of African Indigenous healing knowledges. We are particularly interested in scholarship that bridges Africa and its diaspora rather than treating them as analytically separate spaces. What becomes visible when we approach African and diasporic healing traditions as historically interconnected, mutually constitutive, and transnationally entangled?
At a moment when scholars and activists have called for deeper forms of diasporic healing in the wake of slavery and colonial trauma (Browdy and Milu, 2022) and ongoing racial and global disparities in maternal mortality, examining disrupted and reclaimed African knowledge systems becomes urgent. Exploring African Indigenous birthing, reproductive justice, and broader healing practices can illuminate how African and African diasporic communities imagine healing, continuity, and justice across time and space.
We welcome papers that engage questions such as: How did slavery and colonialism reshape, suppress, or reconfigure African healing and birthing epistemologies across Africa and the diaspora? In what ways are contemporary practitioners, scholars, or activists reclaiming Indigenous knowledge systems as part of broader projects of reproductive justice or decolonial healing? How does knowledge circulate transnationally between Africa and its diaspora in the domains of health, disability, embodiment, and wellness? What methodological approaches, including oral histories, material culture, ethnography, performance, and archival work, help us recover healing practices that colonial archives rendered invisible?
We invite submissions from scholars working across time periods, regions, and disciplines that engage with themes related to, but not limited to:
Reproductive justice
Decolonial and anti-colonial healing frameworks
African Indigenous healing systems
Black feminist and womanist approaches to health
Midwifery, birthwork, and maternal health
Disability, embodiment, and reproductive justice
Spiritual and ritual dimensions of healing
Memory, trauma, and Afro-diasporic wellness
References:
Ajayi-Lowo, E. O. (2024). Safe motherhood initiative: Whither African Indigenous birthing knowledge?. Meridians, 23(1), 263-294.
Bonaparte, A. D. (2023). Regulating childbirth: Physicians and granny midwives in South Carolina. In Birthing Justice (pp. 30-42). Routledge.
Browdy, R., & Milu, E. (2022). Global Black rhetorics: A new framework for engaging African and Afro-Diasporic rhetorical traditions. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 52(3), 219-241.
Small, M. J., Allen, T. K., & Brown, H. L. (2017, August). Global disparities in maternal morbidity and mortality. In Seminars in Perinatology (Vol. 41, No. 5, pp. 318-322). WB Saunders.
World Health Organization et al. (2025) Trends in Maternal Mortality, 2000 to 2023: Estimates.
To participate in this panel, please email a 250-word abstract to Esther O. Ajayi-Lowo, e.ajayi-lowo@tcu.edu, and Mohammed S. Iddrisu, m.s.iddrisu@tcu.edu by March 12, 2026.
This panel is co-organized by:
Esther O. Ajayi-Lowo, PhD
Assistant Professor, Women and Gender Studies, Texas Christian University
and
Mohammed S. Iddrisu, PhD
Assistant Professor, English, Texas Christian University
Africa and its Diasporas: Advancing Connected Conversations on Birthing, Reproductive Justice, Wellness, and Decolonial Healing
