The Producing Knowledge In and Of Africa and the African Diaspora Series
Overview
Knowledge Production in Africa is a highly contested topic. Recent calls have been made – both within the academy and outside it – to “decolonize” the production and circulation of knowledge about Africa. This controversy has involved new attention to institutional power dynamics in both Africa and the US academy, as well as efforts to reconceptualize key epistemological categories in Afrocentric terms. This workshop invites scholars within the humanities, social sciences and the sciences to investigate and discuss these pressing contemporary concerns.
The workshop focuses on five key themes:
- How does knowledge production about Africa manifest both in different and in convergent ways across disciplines?
- What are the ethical implications and responsibilities of scholars researching Africa in the global North?
- In what ways have scholarly infrastructure – including publishing platforms, institutions, conferences and research networks – emerged in both Africa and the US academy?
- Given the racial injustices embedded in the US and around the world, how might the fields of Black Studies and African Studies collaborate to make sense of the historical and present conjuncture?
- How have the racial and gendered politics surrounding the study of Africa and its diaspora shaped the institutional histories of African Studies and Black Studies at Stanford.
Sponsors: Center for Africa Studies, Stanford Humanities Center, African and African American Studies
Past Events
From the mid-nineteenth century into the twentieth, African for the Africans was the banner under which a range of pan-Africanists imaginaries and…
Architect Sumayya Vally and sociologist Denise Lim both utilize multi-sensory and transdisciplinary methodologies to highlight and amplify the stories of people and things—everyday, extraordinary…
In late-seventeenth-century Morocco, Sultan Mawlay Isma‘il (reigned 1672–1727) commanded his officials to enslave all black Moroccans: that is, to buy coercively or freely those…
Zar, a constellation of belief and therapeutic response to spirit winds, has long been considered a ritual trace attesting to the movement of African slavery in the Indian Ocean world.…
Join us for a conversation with Dr. Cajetan Iheka on his new book, African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics.
Join CAS, AAAS, and the Stanford Humanities Center for a talk by Dr. Sophia Azeb, Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago.
In histories of African diaspora, marriage and migration go hand in hand.
Post-apartheid heritage practice, like the rest of its kind, is a complex system characterized by conflicting and contested meanings, knowledges, policies and…
For centuries, African women have drawn on the ritual power of their genitals to perform spectacular political protests across the continent.…