Important Dates

Workshop: African Studies Centers: infrastructures, networks, research, outreach

10-11th of September 2026 at the Centre of African Studies, University Eduardo Mondlane, Maputo (Mozambique)

Strategic Workshop: connecting AMRCs, CEAO, and CEA in Maputo with strategic partners of the Cluster

The critical reflection on African Studies, initiated during the preparation of the AM Cluster proposal began in 2017 with a workshop held at the University of Bayreuth. Some of the outcomes of this process were published in the volume African Studies Centres Around the World (Fendler & Löhr 2022). Building on that work, and ongoing critical reflection about reconfiguring African Studies in the Cluster, the planned workshop aims to bring together the AMRCs and some of the partner institutions to assess the experience from the first phase of the Cluster, and to create synergies and explore possibilities for future collaborative research.

Over the past 20 years, the wide field of Area Studies has been subject to sustained critical scrutiny from within and beyond of academia, and African Studies has been no exception. Most of the debates about the past, present, and future of Area Studies has been dominated by scholars based in the Global North, particularly in Europe and North America. Yet, scholars working in the field of African Studies in countries such as Brazil or Cuba, shaped by their peculiar historical relationship with Africa and therewith their own ideas and perspectives regarding the development of African Studies in the 20th/21st century, often operate within networks that intersect only partially with those of the Global North. As a result, these voices are not heard or insufficiently recognized globally and thus remain underrepresented in global academic discourse.

The knowledge about African Studies centres in Asia remains also limited, although some of these institutions were established three or four decades ago. This relative lack of visibility is due to the specific contexts in which African Studies (centres) emerged, very often entangled with the interests of the respective countries who promoted research in Africa to pursue their own political, economic, and academic agendas. Parallel to the rise of critical approaches within Area Studies in the Global North (e.g., Mielke & Hornidge 2017), long-established African Studies centres in Africa have served as important sites for critical debates on academic knowledge production in regional or continental contexts, often-times with little involvement of their colleagues from other regions of the world. The connections among other centres on the continent, thus reinforcing, expanding, and intensifying the continent-based African Studies network, appear to be a more recent phenomenon in spite of the long-standing research done by centres such as the Institute of African Studies (established 1962) in Accra, Ghana, the Center of African Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa (est. 1976, with first chairs established as early as 1921), or the Center of African Studies at the University Eduardo Mondlane (1976) in Maputo, Mozambique. This growing interconnectedness has also attracted international attention, exemplified by the establishment of the African Studies Association of Africa (ASAA) in 2012.

The awareness of the different processes and developments has only recently reached the Global North, rendering the lack of data largely a self-produced knowledge gap. Inspired by the strong commitment to expand existing international and global networks, and to foster new forms of exchange and collaboration, the main objective of the conference “African Studies – Multiple and Relational” held at the University of Bayreuth in December 2017 sought to address this gap. Its primary objective was therefore to advance knowledge about the agendas and outlines of various African Studies centres, bringing together responsible voices from all continents.  The aforementioned published volume gathered some of the presentations that contributed to close this knowledge gap, at least partially. Beyond broadening participation by convening representatives of African Studies institutions from the continent and beyond, the conference also pursued thematic objectives and questions central to the field: “How does the wide range of approaches to the study of Africa on a global level reflect the diversity of regional and multidisciplinary viewpoints? To what extent do methods and theories depend on regional or disciplinary contexts and on their particular relation to each other and to the African context? How does this affect research on and in Africa? Could the exchange support the critical revision of African Studies in each country and open up new ways of collaboration by creating synergies in joint research?” These were some of the central questions at the workshop at UBT in 2017.

In the meantime, a growing body of various publications approached key questions related to the critical reflection on African Studies, as for example the question what it means to decolonise curricula in general and in particular at African universities (Edwards, Pitre, 2026). Others again question hierarchies in collaborative structures (Pelican et al., 2025). In the German context, S. Debele and S. Lämmert highlight the imbalances and ‘blind spots’ of African Studies in Germany that exclude very often Diaspora studies – also in relation to Germany (2025). Within the context of the EXC Africa Multiple, only IADS at Unilag was already formally established as a centre of African and Diaspora Studies. Rhodes University followed this example in 2019, while Moi University and University Joseph KiZerbo in Ouagadougou are currently in the process of applying for the status of an Institute or a Centre. Seen these changes over the last couple of years, and also the expansion of initiatives such as the Association of African Studies Centres in India, the first Research Consortium of four Universities in South Korea with African Studies Centres, the question raises how this growing interest both on the African continent and in other regions of the world could contribute to diversified and genuinely collaborative research. Bringing these diverse trajectories into conversation, the workshop adopts a comparative and relational approach. It seeks to move beyond descriptive mapping toward a critical analysis of how African Studies centres across different regions:

• position themselves within global hierarchies of knowledge production
• negotiate external, but also internal (political, economic) dependencies and institutional constraints
• contribute to, or challenge, dominant epistemic frameworks

The workshop also engages with contemporary debates on the decolonisation of knowledge, examining how this agenda is understood and operationalised across different institutional and regional contexts, as well as exploring its potentiallimits within existing global academic structures. These questions are likewise central to the EXC Africa Multiple, particularly in relation to its core objective to “reconfigure African Studies”.

Participants