The Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence (AM) is a consortium of five research centers designed to develop new responses to the theoretical, methodological and structural challenges facing African Studies: The research centers are at the University of Bayreuth, Germany; Rhodes University, Makhanda, South Africa; Moi University Eldoret, Kenya; Joseph Ki-Zerbo University, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso; the University of Lagos, Nigeria. AM is funded by a program of the German federal and state governments, which aims to strengthen top-level research.
Since its inception in 2019 the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence has spearheaded innovative approaches and forms of collaborative research, with the objective of reconfiguring African Studies on both the conceptual and the structural level. Africa Multiple is thus pioneering changes to power imbalances in the production and transmission of knowledge in African Studies. In the first funding phase (AM 1.0: 2019-2025) we established the collaboration between the five research centers and built new structures of exchange and knowledge production. Together, we have co-created a transformative space to advance the study of African and African diasporic ways of life through the pursuit of new inter- and transdisciplinary forms of cutting-edge research and theory-building. The next seven-year funding phase of Africa Multiple (AM 2.0, 2026–2032) will strengthen the close collaboration between the five Africa Multiple Research Centers, establishing sustainable structures in research, early career support and research data management, as well as gender and diversity.
One main objective in AM 2.0 is to promote research on multiple, relational, and reflexive processes of world-making as they pertain to Africa. Cluster-funded projects will contribute to re-imagining the world from African perspectives more broadly and to re-thinking what world is, how it came to be that way, and what it could become. With this, our collaborative research aims to address and analyze the current global challenges and concomitant power dynamics, relationalities and agencies as they pertain to Africa and the multiple world(s) Africa co-constitutes.
Our research revolves around three core concepts: multiplicity, relationality and reflexivity. Predicated on the proposition that Africa is, was and always will be constituted through its ever-changing relationships, globally entangled and in flux, they build a conceptual framework to capture the simultaneousity of heterogeneous and mutually influential African and African-diasporic (life-)worlds as they emerge in relational processes. Working on and with these concepts helps us to critically reflect on the epistemological foundations of African Studies. Putting relationality and reflexivity center stage, we turn towards non-essentialising, non-dualist, process-oriented concepts and theoretical approaches. In this sense, our usage of multiplicity goes beyond concepts of diversity or plurality by shifting the focus from discrete entities that have connections towards the relationships involved in their production. As we understand ourselves, the knowledge we produce, and our fields of study as relata, ie as temporary products of relationships and thus as always multiple, we overcome single, universalizing logics and binaries. The second core concept, relationality , builds on this basic understanding while pointing to the formation of phenomena in and through current, historical, and future relationships and the multiple (life-)worlds emerging from these, but also to the worlds being unmade or silenced. Reflexivity as the third central concept enables us to grasp the reflexive character of relationships as they feed back into the contexts from which they emerge. However, and most of all, it requires us to reflect on our own positionalities as researchers, and the power relations that undergird them. We clearly see the urge to develop and deploy relational research ethics in African Studies.
In AM 2.0 we expand the scope of our joint knowledge production by orienting our research toward broader processes of the making and unmaking of world(s), approaching 'world' as an empirical field, a site of theorization, and an epistemological and ethical project. Our overall aim is to understand Africa not as a world apart but as a part of a globally entangled world, and to explore the ways in which Africa worlds – ie co-constitutes world(s) . When studying the world, as Achille Mbembe suggests, from the vantage point of Africa , we look at three dimensions of the un/making and the co-constitution of world/s which are closely connected to the three core concepts.
When we refer to the u n/making of world/s and the co-constitution of world/s as an empirical field , we invite research on the co-constitution of (material, imagined, aesthetic etc.) world/s by analyzing relationships and the processes of their (un)making; Studies may examine the processes and practices of how world(s) are made and unmade, juxtaposed, intertwined, fought for, denied, stabilized, essentialized, universalized etc. They may address, for instance, environmental challenges, material aspects and practices of the digital; economic and political inequalities; workings of (colonial) linguistic and conceptual dominance; questioning of orders, power relations and hierarchies; or public memorial expressions. We also invite studies on the legacies of imperial world-making/coloniality and 'the otherwises' that are un/made, envisioned or rejected in and through imagination, narratives, infrastructures or economic networks.
When we refer to the un/making and the co-constitution of world/s as a site for theorization , we invite conceptual and methodological work that focuses on world/s as becoming, entangled, and heterogeneous realities. Studies on theories, concepts, epistemological perspectives that capture multiplicity (and thus relationality and entanglement) without essentializing or universalizing realities may include works on the “world multiple”, the “pluriverse”, works about ontologies, a critique of one-worldism, works that consider notions of globality and/or the planetary, or works that explore what world can mean from and for Africa. Reflexivity is especially required when re-considering notions such as “world religions”, “world literature”, “world politics” etc. used in our academic disciplines.
When we refer to the un/making and the co-constitution of world/s as epistemological and ethical project , we invite broader critical reflections about what world is or could be, and reflections about epistemic worlds and ontologies beyond 'the West'. Questions of world un/making in and through African Studies may consider processes of knowledge production: How do we create or deny worlds in/with academic work? How do we (methodologically and conceptually) reconfigure academic knowledge production in African Studies? And how can we contribute to a shared world as a basis for our cooperation, for solidarity, and emancipatory politics? In this sense, our endeavour to reconfigure African Studies is also an ethical practice of relational knowledge production and collaborative world-
making with, on, and from Africa and Africans. We invite researchers to explore with us ways of establishing convivial forms of co-existence, acknowledging the many worlds within a shared world, working towards relational ethics and a common ground for cooperation without imposing new universalisms.
Our research on these three dimensions of un/making worlds is organized into six thematic Research Sections (RSs): Accumulation, Digitalities, Ecologies, In/Securities, Re-membering and Translating (see further detail on the six Research Sections here ). They address the empirical, analytical and ethical agenda of world(s) and world-making in synergetic ways with numerous interconnections and overlaps among each other. Their transcontinental and interdisciplinary projects from, in, and on
Africa and its diasporas will materially contribute to seeing and re-imagining the world from African perspectives.
Africa-focused research at the University of Bayreuth in Germany can build on fifty years of experience and fruitful cooperation with African partners. Today Bayreuth has emerged as one of the leading institutions in the field worldwide (please find further information on the Institute of African Studies ).
The Fellowship Program of the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth invites applications that revolve around the research agenda outlined above.