Sponsored by: ASA Emerging Scholars Network
In a shifting world, the innovative research of emerging Africanist scholars is disrupting and remaking archives in new and creative ways. Their dissertations and expanding research frontiers are at the center of conversations that unsettle established boundaries and actively generate new ones in African studies. Positioned at the forefront of methodological experimentation, they are often the first to deploy approaches that have yet to be fully canonized and are particularly attuned to moments of rupture, which shape and continue to reshape the understanding of African histories, social formations, and intellectual traditions as central to global processes of transformation and world-making.
We invite submissions from scholars identifying as emerging (graduate students and early career scholars – up to 5 years post-PhD), whose research foregrounds Africa, Africans, and their ideas, histories, discourses, textualities, and debates. Some research questions to guide panelists’ development of ideas include, but are not limited to, the following: How do new, fragile, or contested archives, digital materials, oral histories, artistic practices, or community-based records reshape what counts as evidence, authority, and expertise in Africanist research? In what ways does emerging scholars’ research reposition Africa within global circulations of people, ideas, technologies, and goods as a site of historical and conceptual production? How are emerging scholars identifying and theorizing moments of rupture in African histories and societies, and what do these moments reveal about processes of transformation rather than crisis alone? What forms of agency, creativity, or world-making become visible when African political, economic, social, and cultural histories are approached through old and new interdisciplinary methods?
This call is sponsored by the ASA Emerging Scholars Network.
To Submit: kindly send your abstract and short bio to this email by March 12th: emergingscholars@africanstudies.org
Emerging Scholars, World-Making, and New Directions in African Studies
