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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
This project examines how the rapid expansion of financial technologies has transformed access to financial services across Africa. Focusing on Ghana, Burkina Faso and Senegal, the 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.

Transformative Arts and the City: Storying Accumulation and Inequalities Online/Offline in Nairobi and Lagos 
This project explores how artistic and visual practices can make experiences of inequality visible in rapidly changing African cities. Focusing on Nairobi and Lagos, it investigates how people experience and respond to processes of dispossession, displacement, devaluation and uneven accumulation. Working with artists and local communities, the project examines how creative forms of storytelling can challenge dominant narratives and offer alternative perspectives on urban life and social change.

Research Section Digitalities

Rivers, Reporting, and Justice: Citizen Science Environmental Monitoring and Reporting in African River Communities
This project investigates how communities use digital tools and citizen science to monitor environmental change and advocate for environmental justice. Working in river communities in Kenya and South Africa, the project combines the development of a multilingual reporting platform with research on local knowledge, environmental stewardship and storytelling. It explores both the possibilities and the limitations of digital technologies in supporting community-led responses to pollution and ecological degradation.

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.

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.

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.

In/Security and the Politics of Silence, Subtext and Performativity
Silence, secrecy and indirect forms of communication are often central to how people navigate insecurity. Drawing on case studies from Kenya, Ethiopia, Guinea and Burkina Faso, this project examines how uncertainty, surveillance and political pressure are negotiated through coded language, ambiguity and strategic silence. By treating silence as a meaningful social practice rather than simply an absence of speech, it offers new perspectives on power, communication and insecurity.

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.

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.

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 remembrance.

Worldmaking 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.