2026 ASA Annual Meeting CFP

69th ASA Annual Meeting Call for Proposals

Rupture and Remake: African Possibilities in a Shifting World | New Orleans, LA December 3-6, 2026

Program Chairs: Trevor Getz (San Francisco State University) and Sandra Manuel (Universidade Eduardo Mondlane)
Submission Deadline: via Online Portal Sunday, March 15, 2026.

We are living through a period of historic disruption and reconfiguration. Global narratives, political alliances, and economic certainties that once dominated are giving way to a more dynamic and contested landscape. Rupture is everywhere: longstanding centers of geopolitical influence are shifting, new technologies are reshaping human interaction, climate change is altering where and how we live, and the rules for producing knowledge are being redefined in both subtle and overt ways. 

For Africa, these disruptions are neither entirely new nor wholly external. African societies have long navigated—and in many cases shaped—the intersections of disruption, adaptation, and renewal. However, the current moment is unique in its intensity and simultaneity: the decline of old hegemonies alongside the rise of new centers of influence; the acceleration of digitization alongside efforts to reclaim intellectual sovereignty; ecological crises alongside the resurgence of ecological wisdom; and democratic disillusionment amid the creation of new forms of citizenship and belonging. 

Yet rupture does not only signify crisis—it also opens pathways for remake. Indeed, Africans meet these crises not only with their own histories of rupture, but also their own blueprints for renewal. Across the continent, Africans are asserting diplomatic and cultural agency in global forums; pioneering strategies for food, energy, and knowledge independence; repurposing digital tools for resistance and preservation; and envisioning futures through Afrofuturist, feminist, ecological, and other creative lenses. African universities and intellectual collectives are reclaiming conceptual territory, challenging the limitations of donor-driven agendas, and broadening the archive of what is possible. African languages and epistemologies have become sites where remaking efforts are germinated. Transcontinental and intergenerational alliances—whether political, scholarly, or grassroots—are emerging as influential sites of solidarity and innovation as youth and diasporic communities assume key roles in intellectual and aesthetic reimaginings. 

The theme of this conference asserts that Africa is not just a backdrop to global change but also a dynamic and creative site of world-making. It encourages researchers to explore, record, and theorize how African experiences, knowledge, and practices respond to, shape, and anticipate the evolving landscape of our era. Under the title “Rupture and Remake: African Possibilities in a Shifting World”, we welcome contributions that not only analyze the present but also engage thoughtfully with the imaginative, intellectual, and practical efforts to create new futures. 

We welcome empirical studies, theoretical interventions, comparative analyses, and creative approaches that illuminate the various ways Africans interpret and reshape the social, cultural, political, economic, ecological, and intellectual landscapes they inhabit. Here are some of the key threads running through our inquiry:  

• African Agency in Action: What forms of sovereignty, solidarity, or self-reliance are emerging in African contexts – from food systems to diplomacy, from digital spaces, energy independence to social dynamics? Where are moments of breakdown—of systems, certainties, and hegemonies—being leveraged to rethink dependence, development, or democracy. How are researchers, artists and activists co-creating alternative futures through Afrofuturism, feminist imaginaries, ecological knowledge, or technological innovation? How are African actors—state and non-state—reclaiming archives, narratives and institutional spaces for more accountable and plural memory-making?  

• Epistemological reflections on what we are studying and why: What assumptions underpin the frameworks we use to study Africa today? How African studies variably reproduce or rupture colonial ways of knowing? Whose voices and archives are legitimate or erased in African Studies? What and how are epistemologies rooted in African histories, languages, cosmologies or social practices generating new theories for understanding the social? 

• Creative analysis on the ruptures and the African intellectual imagination: How do such transformations as unraveling of the development industry, the climate crisis, geopolitical realignments and extractivism—both physical and digital—reshape the continent? How are they resonant, or challenged, in thought and knowledge production in and about Africa?  

• Digital shifts: how is the digitalization of life reconfiguring African civic engagement, economies, social and cultural liaisons and knowledge production? What new vulnerabilities, dependencies and inequalities are introduced by digital infrastructure and AI, as well as models of digital sovereignty? How are Africans employing creative and critical uses of digital tools to act as agents of change, decolonial scholarship, resistance or community building? Through what strategies are individuals and communities confronting the extractive and surveillant logics embedded in digital infrastructures? 

• Reshaping global relations: How do South-South alliances offer opportunities for epistemic, economic or technological realignments? As new global powers emerge, how are African states and institutions asserting diplomatic, economic and cultural agency? What does African-led multilateralism look like in practice, and how is it reconfiguring Africa’s role on the global stage? 

• Reclaiming the political: citizenship, belonging and public life: How are communities reimagining democracy, participation and accountability outside elite-driven electoral frameworks? In what ways are youth, women, queer people and diasporic Africans shaping new forms of politics, belonging and social imagination? How is public trust being rebuilt – or contested – through media, art, protest or education? 

• From crisis to creativity: What lessons can we draw from African environmental, spiritual, or communal systems in confronting global crises of inequality, climate, among others? How are African thinkers and practitioners offering regenerative and restorative models for living that resist or subvert capitalist logics of growth and extraction? How might local practices and philosophies (Ubuntu, Harambee, etc.) inform global transitions towards just and sustainable futures? 

• Radical imaginations and conceptual tools: what is the role of imagination and storytelling in remaking Africa’s future? How does African speculative fiction, visual arts, performance or oral traditions expand the archive of what is thinkable and doable? Can we trace emerging conceptual vocabularies that resist colonial grammars and offer liberatory logics for thought and action? 

In a world unsettled and in motion, African histories, visions, and voices offer pathways not only through crisis, but toward regeneration. This theme invites us to boldly confront the ruptures and to listen, to learn, and imagine the worlds yet to come. 

2026 Subthemes & Subtheme Chairs: