Meet the 2025 ASA Annual Meeting Program Chairs
Download and share the CFP Theme Statement PDF
This year’s Program Chairs Pedro Monaville (McGill University) and Anatoli Ignatov (Appalachian State University) work hard year round behind the scenes to prepare for the Annual Meeting. Read their CFP Theme Statement and thoughtfully selected subthemes here. Look for their welcome letter in the ASA Program Book and their sponsored session on the ASA Program.
Anatoli Ignatov is an Associate Professor of Sustainable Development at Appalachian State University. His research interests include African political thought, postcolonial theory, ecological political theory, legal pluralism, Indigenous political theory, critical development studies, land politics and rights in Ghana, and interpretive methodologies. He is currently completing a monograph, Indigenous Eco-politics: Earth Jurisprudence and Plural Diplomacies in Ghana. The book challenges Eurocentric traditions of political theory that ignore African ecology-based notions of sovereignty, and which reproduce the fiction that sovereignty is a singular, exclusively human authority linked to a state. The book highlights nonstatist and more-than-human forms of diplomacy, authority, and law that African earth custodians, chiefs, and soothsayers have enlisted to mediate relations with alterity, and that colonial governance and postcolonial statehood have sought to erase or domesticate. Anatoli’s scholarly work has appeared in Africa, Political Theory, GeoHumanities, Contemporary Political Theory, Theory & Event as well as numerous edited volumes.
I am looking forward to our annual meeting in Atlanta as an opportunity to discuss African contributions to contemporary debates about central themes in international life and politics such as global justice, peace, sovereignty, human and Indigenous rights, intergenerational rights and rights of Nature, and international morality. I am particularly interested in conversations that approach Africa and its diaspora as a rich and dynamic source of “universal” ideas and concepts of humanism that challenge us to think anew about what it means to be human. The contemporary multiplication of climate, economic, and humanitarian crises, as well as growing democratic deficits in national and global politics, are swiftly exposing the limits of the humanisms bound up with Western capitalism, imperialism, and liberal modernity. I invite contributions that explore the diverse intellectual traditions of African humanism that have inspired liberation movements and postcolonial imaginaries of global order, from the struggles against slavery to decolonization and anti-Apartheid to contemporary youth movements for racial, gender, and climate justice. How can African intellectual traditions provide us with resources to think productively about these crises and reimagine just and sustainable futures?
Pedro Monaville is Associate Professor of History at McGill University. His research focuses on colonial and postcolonial Congo. His first book, Students of the World: Global 1968 and Decolonization in the Congo (Duke University Press, 2022) investigates how the Congo’s first generation of university students in the 1960s introduced and mediated new ideas about culture, politics, and the world. In this book, Monaville shows how students reimagined the Congo as a decolonized polity by connecting their country to global discussions about revolution, authenticity, and equality. Monaville’s ongoing research centers on questions of knowledge production, popular culture, and the connections between visual arts and history. One of his current projects is a biography of the late Congolese scholar Tshikala Kayembe Biaya; and he is the co-editor, together with Nancy Rose Hunt, of a volume about the work of the Bandes-Dessinées artist Papa Mfumu’Eto the First.
This might not be very original, coming from a historian, but I am looking forward to our next annual meeting in Atlanta for opportunities to collectively reflect on the past to face the challenges of the present. I eagerly invite contributions that continue the critical conversations about the politics of African studies that Black scholars started several decades ago. I am also particularly interested in papers and panels that revisit Africa’s rich intellectual history and recover powerful voices that may have been marginalized, silenced, or forgotten. One last important question I am interested to center at the conference is about opening up of African studies: how do we ensure we make space for writers, we learn from artists, and we welcome intellectuals that don’t work in academia?
