As African societies confront profound political, economic, and technological transformations, democratic life is increasingly experienced through moments of rupture, contested elections, declining trust in institutions, authoritarian resurgence, and socio-economic precarity. In these conditions, citizens across the continent are not withdrawing from politics but remaking democratic participation through collective, relational, and digitally mediated practices. This panel invites abstracts that examine distributed citizenship in Africa: forms of political participation in which civic tasks, responsibilities, and affective labor are shared across networks of people, platforms, and practices. Rather than focusing solely on voting or institutional engagement, the panel foregrounds the everyday work that sustains democracy, monitoring information, narrating events, fact-checking, fundraising, organizing, maintaining morale, and caring for others, often under conditions of uncertainty and constraint.
This panel welcomes contributions that move beyond platform-centric or pathology-driven accounts of African digital politics to explore how citizens creatively and collectively negotiate political agency across diverse media ecologies, including social media platforms, messaging apps, livestreams, community radio, and hybrid online–offline networks. The panel also encourages engagement with African epistemologies of communal responsibility, relationality, and care, and how these shape contemporary practices of citizenship.
Consequently, possible themes Include (but are not limited to):
Distributed and collective forms of citizenship in African contexts
Digital political labor, care work, and emotional maintenance
Youth-led movements, elections, and platformed activism
Memory, citizenship and personhood on and offline
Platform infrastructures, visibility, silence, and exclusion
Affective dimensions of political participation and burnout
Diaspora, transnational publics, and digital democracy
African philosophies and non-Western theories of citizenship
Informal, vernacular, and everyday practices of democratic engagement
This panel encourages submissions from scholars across disciplines, including anthropology, media and communication studies, political science, sociology, history, and memory studies. Both empirical and theoretical contributions are welcome, as are papers based on ethnographic, qualitative, and mixed-methods research.
Submission Guidelines:
Please send a 250–300 word abstract, along with your name, institutional affiliation, and a brief bio (100 words), to: Dr Silas Udenze, University of Toronto, Canada.
Email: silas.udenze@utoronto.ca
Submission deadline: Thursday, March 12, 2026
By foregrounding how Africa and Africans are reimagining democracy through distributed, affective, and platformed forms of citizenship, this panel aims to contribute to broader debates on how ruptures makes, remakes, and shapes distributed citizenship, democratic and non-democratic processes in Africa.
For questions and any doubts, please feel free to send a message to the email address above!
