As Africa Multiple enters its second funding phase, researchers across the Cluster are launching a new generation of collaborative projects. Organised within the Research Sections, these initiatives address contemporary challenges and emerging debates through interdisciplinary and African-centred perspectives, while building on the partnerships established during the Cluster’s first phase.

With the start of its second funding phase in January 2026, the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence (AM 2.0) has launched a call for collaborative research projects. Developed within the  Cluster’s Research Sections, the projects bring together researchers from across the Africa Multiple network to address questions of accumulation, digital transformation, in/securities, re:membering, and translating. The Cluster’s research is always interdisciplinary, prioritises Africa-centred perspectives and address the multiple processes of making and unmaking of world/s. The projects presented below are the first to be approved in AM 2.0 – more will follow as the new Research Sections continue to develop their research agendas and collaborations.  Reflecting the breadth of research undertaken across Africa Multiple, they speak to topics ranging from financial technologies and environmental justice to conflict, mobility, memory practices, multilingual education, and the circulation of knowledge across cultures and regions. The projects address and analyze the current global challenges, concomitant power dynamics, and agencies as they pertain to Africa and the multiple world(s) Africa co-constitutes.

Together, these projects build on the foundations established during the Cluster’s first funding phase while opening up new avenues for research and collaboration across the Africa Multiple network.

Research Section Accumulation

FinTech, Debt, and Inequalities in Africa
Digital financial services have transformed the way millions of people across Africa access payments, savings and credit. Focusing on Ghana, Burkina Faso and Senegal, this project investigates the links between digital finance, private and sovereign debt, and inequalities in access and outcomes. It also analyses the legal and institutional frameworks that shape the growth of FinTech in different political and economic contexts. Through a comparative perspective, the project explores how digital finance contributes to new forms of accumulation and inequality. The project speaks to the Cluster’s broader research agenda on how Africa is entangled in the global processes of world (un)making in terms of the rise of global finance capitalism (‘financial world-making’). Remarkably, Africa’s Fintech evolution has significantly shaped the techno-finance world, demonstrating that innovations can emerge from Africa and form global finance as it has for nearly three decades.
(Persons of Contact: Ousseini Illy. Isaac Abotebuno Akolgo, Abena Oduro)

Transformative Arts and the City: Storying Accumulation and Inequalities Online/Offline in Nairobi and Lagos 
In rapidly growing cities, experiences of inequality often remain hidden behind dominant narratives of development and progress. Focusing on Nairobi and Lagos, this project explores how artistic and visual practices can make processes of dispossession, displacement, devaluation and uneven accumulation visible. Working with artists and local communities, it examines how creative forms of storytelling can offer alternative perspectives on urban life and social change. The concept of transformative arts/arts for change enables the project to challenge and intervene in processes of world-destruction through counter-hegemonic “reworlding” and (re)storying practices. Preconceived notions about accumulation and world-making in African cities will be challenged, fostering diversity and countering the tendency towards “authoritarian theorising”.
(Persons of Contact: Stefan Ouma, Taibat Lawanson)

Research Section Digitalities

Rivers, Reporting, and Justice: Citizen Science Environmental Monitoring and Reporting in African River Communities
Across many African river communities, pollution and environmental degradation have direct consequences for livelihoods, health and ecosystems. Working in Kenya and South Africa, this project explores how digital tools and citizen science can support environmental monitoring and advocacy. Combining the development of a multilingual reporting platform with research on local knowledge, environmental stewardship and storytelling, it examines both the possibilities and the limitations of digital technologies in community-led responses to environmental change.  The RIVER-JUST project bridges the material and conceptual levels of world-making by examining how people may digitally intervene into the environmental harms of past industrial mining; how they experience the environmental afterlives of mining and how they may theorise community intervention. Furthermore, it investigates how digital technologies assist or complicate these long-standing efforts at world-making, and whether the digital monitoring of environmental harms is a useful practice for making cleaner worlds.
(Persons of Contact: Jia Hui Lee, Chika Felicitas Nnadozie, Marcellin Atemkeng, Elizabeth Murey)

Research Section In/Securities

Living with Violence, Navigating Insecurity: (Un)making Violent Worlds Across African Conflict Settings
How do people navigate everyday life in contexts marked by violence and insecurity? Through research in Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon and Mozambique, this project focuses on the experiences of families and communities rather than state actors or armed groups. Particular attention is paid to questions of kinship, gender and social relations, revealing how people negotiate overlapping forms of violence while maintaining social and economic life. Worldmaking through navigation serves as the project’s conceptual and empirical backbone. Ordinary people living in contexts of violent in/security (re)shape social, economic, and political lifeworlds of security or insecurity, knowing that there are some things that simply remain unchangeable in the moment. Their practices of navigation serve as a deductive backdrop to theorize the making and unmaking of worlds of violence – whether individuals avoid, are complicit or participate in, or mobilize against and thereby enact subtle to more overt forms of resistance to those worlds.
(Persons of Contact: Adam Sandor, Melina Kalfelis, Zakaria Soré, Moses Yakubu)

Popular Intelligence
In northern Benin, mobile messaging services have become important tools for sharing information about insecurity, crime and violence. Popular Intelligence explores how these digital communication networks shape decisions about mobility, trade and protection, often becoming trusted sources of information where official systems are perceived as inadequate. Combining digital ethnography with participatory research methods, the project examines how everyday security knowledge is produced, circulated and contested. Conceptually, the project makes key contributions to the Cluster agenda by showing how digital media create social worlds of fear, orientation, solidarity and care. It analyses world-making as a process of digital and social communication and provides insights into the relationality of lifeworlds. Connecting local dynamics with regional developments it opens up new perspectives for theorising hybrid security orders.
(Persons of Contact: Martin Doevenspeck, Peter Oni)

Silence, Subtext, and Performativity
Silence, secrecy and indirect forms of communication are often central to how people navigate insecurity. Drawing on case studies, interdisciplinary meta analyses and reflexive accounts, this project examines how uncertainty, social constraints and structural ambiguities are negotiated through coded language, ambiguity and strategic silence. Treating silence as a meaningful social practice rather than simply an absence of speech offers new perspectives on power, communication and insecurity. On a conceptual level, silences constitute the “residual category” of world-making, while always constituting the realm of possibility for a potential otherwise. They also demonstrate the incompleteness of any world-making frame vis-à-vis a “world” that will always be more than, and different from, what people and institutions want to make of it. Interrogating silences reflexively as researchers, we ask ourselves how our positionalities and disciplines mark the “worlds” that appear naturally to us, and which ones elude us.
(Person of Contact: Billian Otundo)

Research Section Re:Membering

Out of the Depths: Recovering Maritime Counter-Narratives & Resistance from Shipwreck to Shore
Creative Research Output: A Cacophony of Voices: Sounding Afterlives
Shipwrecks are often remembered as maritime disasters, but they can also reveal stories of encounter, resistance and survival. Combining archival research, ethnography, artistic practice and collaboration with descendant communities, this project revisits Portuguese-era maritime histories from the perspectives of enslaved people, marginalised crew members and coastal communities. A large-scale sonic installation will serve as both a research method and a public-facing outcome. Out of the Depths contributes directly to the Africa Multiple Cluster’s conceptual agenda by engaging world-making as an empirical field, a site of theorisation, and an ethical project. The research demonstrates how African and African-diasporic worlds, connected into inter-continental transoceanic networks, were made, unmade, and remade through maritime catastrophe, forced mobility, and encounter, challenging linear and territorially bounded narratives of African and World history.
(Persons of Contact: Dominique Santos, Boudina McConnachie, Ute Fendler)

Africa Re:Membered – A Multimodal Platform for African World-Making
How can digital platforms represent memory, knowledge and cultural practice in ways that reflect African epistemologies? Africa Re:Membered brings together sound recordings, films, images, texts and other research materials produced within the Re:Membering Research Section. Conceived as an interactive “an-archive” rather than a conventional repository, it enables users to explore connections between memory, place, ecology and cultural practice. Africa Re:Membered contributes directly to the Africa Multiple Cluster’s conceptual agenda by operationalising world-making within a digital research environment that is itself designed as a site of knowledge production rather than a passive repository. The platform treats world-making simultaneously as an empirical field, a theoretical concern, and an epistemological and ethical project, aligning closely with the Remembering Research Section’s focus on memory as an active, relational practice.
(Persons of Contact: Boudina McConnachie, Mirco Schönfeld)

Transoceanic Re-membering: Memory Practices and Convergences from the Colonial and Anticolonial Worlds Across the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans
Memories of slavery, indentured labour, migration and anti-colonial struggles continue to connect communities across oceans and continents. Bringing together case studies from Africa, Asia and the Americas, this project explores how these histories shape identities, cultural practices and political imaginaries in the present. In doing so, it highlights Africa's central role in transoceanic histories and contemporary forms of remembering. All sub-projects focus on worldmaking as an empirical field that feeds into theory building. The close collaboration with a large number of regional and artistic communities’ representatives is part of an ethical making of research worlds that connect in a transdisciplinary and multidirectional way. The explicit transdisciplinary methods will help seize the complexity of world-making and give access to forgotten or oppressed memories.
(Ute Fendler, Peter Simatei, Livio Sansone)

World-making on Two Wheels: Creating an Archive of Everyday Memories of Vélomobility in Africa
Cycling is more than a means of transport. Through oral history interviews and comparative research in six African countries, this project investigates the memories, emotions and social meanings associated with bicycles and everyday mobility. The resulting research will contribute to an open digital archive and offer new perspectives on movement, memory and world-making in everyday life. In order to understand processes of world-making it is essential to engage with the memories people have and communicate. The project’s focus on vélomobility offers an empirical entry-point into an aspect of everyday worlding. The comparative and locally grounded approach of the project hints at the multiplicity of worlds made by cyclists in different places.
(Persons of Contact: Jochen Lingelbach, Yacouba Cissao)

Research Section Translating

Rethinking Universalisms: World-making through Translating
How can shared worlds be imagined beyond Eurocentric understandings of universalism? Rethinking Universalisms explores translation as a practice of world-making across languages, concepts and knowledge systems. By examining how dialogue, negotiation and relational forms of understanding shape ideas of the universal, the project develops a common conceptual framework for the Research Section Translating. This project explicitly relates the work of RS Translating to world-making. Grounded in a critique of imperial world-making, our project will advance one of the key research objectives of Africa Multiple 2.0: that of advancing collaborative research toward the (un)making of world(s), as empirical field, a site for theorisation and as an epistemological and ethical project.
(Persons of Contact: Sally Matthews, Gilbert Shang Ndi, Eva Spies, Clarissa Vierke)

Translating African Oral Arts and World-Making in Digital Spaces
From praise poetry and oral performances to digital media, African oral traditions continue to evolve across changing communicative environments. This project examines how oral genres from Kenya, Nigeria, Burkina Faso and Uganda are translated into digital formats and how these transformations affect performance, meaning and authority. In doing so, it contributes to wider debates on digital culture, translation and African oral arts. This project aligns with the Cluster’s interest in world-making by exploring how African oral traditions adapt to new digital spaces. As they shift from community settings to digital platforms and archives, these traditions have evolved across different technological platforms and developed into neo-oralities that shape forms of oral expression, bringing fresh meanings, audiences, creative possibilities and imaginations of new worlds. In this way, the project treats world-making both as an event occurring in digital environments and as a broader theoretical question about how communities envision themselves and interact with others.
(Persons of Contact: Oluwatoyin Olokodana-James, Rose Opondo, Barthélmy Kaboré; Lynda Gichanda Spencer)

Translating Brazilian Development Ideas in Africa
Development ideas do not simply travel unchanged from one context to another. Focusing on case studies in education, theatre and public policy, this project investigates how concepts and models originating in Brazil are translated, adapted and contested in African contexts. It explores how knowledge circulates within South-South cooperation and how local actors reshape development approaches in practice. The project frames translation as a key mechanism of world-making, showing how development initiatives are not passively received but actively interpreted, reshaped, and negotiated. It generates new theoretical insights into the epistemic and practical processes through which actors in the Global South collectively imagine and implement alternative futures and contest earlier world-making efforts of Northern development cooperation.
(Persons of Contact: Christopher Odhiambo Joseph, Tim Dorlach, Fábio Baqueiro Figueiredo, Priscila Henriques Lima)

Translating Education: Multilingual Pedagogies, Terminologies, and World-Making in Primary Schools in Kenya and Burkina Faso
In multilingual classrooms, translation is an everyday part of teaching and learning. Drawing on ethnographic research in Kenya and Burkina Faso, this project investigates how teachers and pupils negotiate concepts, languages and knowledge in educational practice. By approaching translation as a form of world-making, it highlights the role of language in knowledge production, participation and epistemic justice. Conceptually, the project frames translation as a form of world-making. Drawing on Africa Multiple’s emphasis on multiplicity and relationality, classrooms are understood as sites where shared educational worlds are continuously produced through interaction.
(Persons of Contact: Catherine Kiprop, Ousséni Soré, Yacouba Kourago, Mark Mosol Kandagor)