News

What does it mean to think about the world from the vantage point of Africa? For the Cluster of Excellence Africa Multiple 2.0, it means continuing to reshape how knowledge about the world is produced, structured and shared.

On 22 May 2025, the German Research Foundation (DFG) announced the decision to fund the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence for seven more years. The Cluster’s first funding phase (2019–2025) was highly successful: among other achievements, 72 research projects were realised through collaborative work across all Cluster locations. On 1 January 2026, Africa Multiple 2.0 officially entered its second funding period.

Building on over forty years of Africa-focused research at the University of Bayreuth, the Cluster continues to operate through five interconnected Africa Multiple Research Centres (AMRCs): one at the University of Bayreuth and four at partner universities in Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso), Eldoret (Kenya), and Lagos (Nigeria) and Makhanda (South Africa). While the institutional set-up remains unchanged, Africa Multiple 2.0 will take collaboration between the partners to new levels. The five AMRCs will operate within a jointly steered framework, with shared governance structures, coordinated research planning and increased financial responsibility at the African locations.

Researching Worldmaking

In its second funding phase (2026–2032), Africa Multiple 2.0 will move “world(s) and worldmaking” to the centre of its research programme. Rather than treating the world as a fixed object, the Cluster approaches it as something that is actively produced, contested, transformed and experienced in concrete, everyday processes. This entails to investigate how social, political, economic, ecological and digital realities are created and reshaped in and through human relationships and structures – and how these processes are themselves historically and globally entangled.

The research agenda reflects the three core conceptual commitments that already guided our work in African Multiple 1.0: multiplicity, relationality and reflexivity. Multiplicity draws attention to the simultaneity of heterogeneous and mutually influential lifeworlds instead of singular, universal narratives. Relationality focuses on how these worlds are produced in and through multi-layered and multi-directional processes of relating – including their power dynamics, hierarchies and contestations. Reflexivity is not only a central dimension of relational processes, but also invites researchers to consider their own positionality and the terms of their knowledge production.

From this foundation, the Cluster asks broader questions about the making and unmaking of worlds: How are economic and political inequalities reproduced or challenged? How do digital technologies shape social life and imaginaries? In what ways does environmental change reconfigure human and non-human coexistence? How do conflicts, insecurities and forms of protection emerge? What histories are remembered, forgotten or silenced? And how does translation – across languages, registers and contexts ­– enable or limit participation in shared worlds?

These questions are pursued through six interconnected Research Sections that provide the organisational framework for collaborative research in the Cluster:

• Accumulation focuses on the acquisition and gathering of wealth by organisations and individuals at the local, national and global scale and in given interplays with different forms of power and authority.
  
  
• Digitalities examines material and practical aspects of digitisation, as expressed for instance in the labour required to mine minerals and maintain algorithmic systems, the extraction of data from people and environments, and the ways in which people use and relate to the social media, biometrics, digital platforms and web-based applications.
  
  
• Ecologies addresses the contemporary dynamics of environmental crises as well as their histories of embeddedness in colonial and postcolonial structures, thus highlighting their centrality to the histories, identities, livelihoods and futures of people on the African continent.
  
  
• In/securities bespeaks the political and conflictual aspects of world-making by asking how contests over discourses and practices of in/security shape and constitute people’s security and violent conflict in Africa.
  
  
• Re:membering analyses group and individual memory practices as they corroborate, challenge or complexify narratives and the meanings of artefacts that relate to historical agency and past developments in the process of the collective re/construction of the present and future of groups, nations, continents or the world.
  
  
• Translating proposes to study not only the language-related aspects of translation, but also the production and circulation of concepts, policies and practices within and between multilingual contexts by viewing them as processes of translating, thus critically engaging with the ongoing production, emergence and contestation of socio-material worlds.
  

Other than in the first funding phase, these Research Sections were conceptualised collaboratively across all five AMRCs, bringing together scholars from different disciplines and locations to co-design research agendas that cut across geographic, conceptual and methodological boundaries. This collective approach ensures that worldmaking is not only a theoretical theme but an embodied, transcontinental research practice, attuned to the multiplicity of worlds that Africa and its diasporas co-constitute.

Research Infrastructure and Knowledge Exchange

In its second phase the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence will continue to support thematic research with shared infrastructure. Its Digital Research Environment will provide the tools need for innovative research data management and digital scholarship across locations, enabling the Cluster to foster collaborative data practices, promote open science principles and integrate digital methods into African Studies.

The Knowledge Lab remain will remain the intellectual core of the Cluster. Through lecture series, theory forums, workshops and biennial conferences, it fosters exchange across disciplines and continents. Public events and keynote lectures ensure that debates extend beyond academia. The Africa Multiple Academy coordinates fellowship programmes and researcher mobility across all five AMRCs. Early career scholars benefit from joint supervision structures, mobility grants and transcontinental research training.

Public engagement also continues to play a central role. The Cluster will develop formats for science communication that conveys research findings to wider audiences, including collaborations with cultural institutions, artists and policy actors.

Continuing and Expanding

The success of the Cluster’s renewal proposal has emphatically affirmed its impact on the field African Studies in the first phase. Between 2019 and 2025, Africa Multiple established a transcontinental research network, financed 72 projects, and practiced new models of collaborative knowledge production. From January 2026 onwards, Africa Multiple 2.0 will be able to build on this foundation – with closer institutional integration, expanded research infrastructure and a sharpened focus on worldmaking both as empirical field and as a site for theorisation. By foregrounding African perspectives and taking transcontinental cooperation to a new level, the Cluster will contribute to a broader rethinking of how global knowledge is generated and how convivial futures can emerge.