Rationale

A range of global processes deserve urgent attention, from climate crisis, to war and pandemics, to the challenges democracies are facing. The upcoming VAD conference seeks to understand such processes by thinking through and with African perspectives. Thus, we – African and European academics, activists, politicians, artists etc., coming together for this conference – will address issues of reflexivity, relationality and multiplicity, taking into account the situatedness of knowledge and knowledge production.

Given this global constellation, Africa-related institutions outside Africa, including museums, universities and associations, have recently come under pressure to reconfigure their structures, ideologies and representations. African studies, for example, have worked to find new ways of collaborating across disciplines and places. However, there is a need to review what has been achieved or overlooked.

To address such omissions and decentring the European perspective, this conference will focus on recent changes in African universities and other institutions, including their challenges, contestations, and reforms. From a perspective that focuses African experiences in dealing with pandemics, climate crises, and wars, we hope to newly understand and to critically analyse these current global processes.

The streams of this conference foreground recent and historical changes on the African continent and their global academic reverberations. African Studies have the capacity to account for the situatedness of knowledge production and dissemination. With that in mind, the VAD conference continues this critical and multi-disciplinary discussion to foster collaboration and intellectual exchange.

Therefore, we suggest the following streams:

1. Location-based African Studies: Discrepancies and Debates
What do African Studies look like from different location-based perspectives? Given the historical anchoring of African Studies disciplines in the Global North, this stream provides a platform to discuss interlinked perspectives on African Studies with a focus on their African situatedness. Do African Studies provide “distinct perspectives” in different local contexts, for example in German speaking countries?

2. Perspectives on current crises
This stream invites contributions on global processes defined as crises such as migration; health and pandemics; climate change; war; terrorism; land-rights; debt; disinformation campaigns and their effects on social cohesion; race-, class-, gender- and sexuality-based persecution; budget cuts in education; attacks on constitutional integrity and the ways they are relevant for African Studies. Who are the experts defining crises and how does their expertise influence how crises are dealt with?

3. Imagining “Africanness”
2024 marks the final year of the UN International Decade for People of African Descent. The conveners invite research dealing with the self-understanding of different individuals and groups in Africa and its diaspora and their (historical and recent) interrelations and mutual perceptions. This includes what it means and has meant to be ‘other’ in African contexts, as informed by (but not limited to) queer and intersectional studies.

4. Political Economy of Extractivism
Recurrent increases of debt, the post-colonial scramble for Africa’s rare earths and green hydrogen (also in the quest for energy transition) render the analysis of African economies and their relation to global capitalism ever more urgent. This stream invites empirical and conceptual panels that explore lingering and new dependencies, as well as African responses to these.

5. Social media, archiving and “the digital”
The digital sphere provides new avenues for communicating in and about Africa. Scholars, artists, and activists are increasingly taking advantage of the digital to collaborate, collect information, and to combine, visualise and archive different forms of content. This stream seeks to provide a forum for discussing case studies, future opportunities, and constraints as they relate to digitization processes.

6. New forms of collaboration in African arts
Recent cultural productions from Africa are enjoying an unprecedented level of attention across the globe. Literature, music, dance, and the fine arts in physical and digital forms are appreciated everywhere from Seoul to Bayreuth. This stream invites studies on art worlds reflecting these new developments.

7. Ecology and planetary consciousness
Planetary consciousness is considered a relevant continuation and enhancement of globalisation studies that surpasses narrow national frameworks. This stream invites proposals on the more-than-human and relationships between organisms and their environment. What social, political, spiritual, and economic implications do these wider perspectives have for questions such as food scarcity, pollution, population growth, and related technological interventions?

Procedure

All panels must be proposed via the online form, entering:

- Format of your proposal (see details below)
- Thematic stream (if none fit, please use the “Sui Generis” stream)
- Panel title
- Names and email addresses of the panel convenors (yourself and your co-convenor/s)
- Short abstract of <300 characters
- Long abstract (description) of less than 250 words
- Optional: you may add chairs/discussants, although these can be added later on the panel edit page

Rules

- All panels should have (at least) two convenors
- Delegates may only convene one panel, as well as make one presentation or be a discussant/chair in another panel. No panel may run for more than two sessions of 90 minutes
- VAD requires all accepted panels to be open to paper proposals through the website: panels should not be organised as 'closed' sessions
- While adherence to the conference theme is not the main criteria for panel selection, VAD encourages conveners (those proposing/organising a panel) to make an effort to address the questions and ideas outlined in the theme description

The Call for Panels will close at 23:59 CEST (German time) on 30 October 2023. All proposals will then be reviewed by the Scientific Committee, with selected panels announced and the Call for Papers published in November.