Research Strategy at Centre of African Studies
The research vision of the Centre of African Studies is to contribute to broader social science and humanities knowledge by bringing in interdisciplinary African Studies perspectives and thereby expand and challenge existing paradigms. Our ambition is to broaden the conventional and traditional parameters and theories that have long-framed the dominant boundaries of the social sciences and humanities. Drawing on our research we aim at contributing to key global challenges and concerns such as climate, sustainability, citizenship, democracy, and the role of religion, and at deepening our knowledge of the diverse histories, complex realities, challenges and possibilities of a simultaneously localized and globalized Africa. Our research provides nuanced understandings of the continent’s multi-layered dimensions and its relationships to the world more broadly and brings attention to the differentiated conditions for and processes of knowledge production itself, and dissemination, within Africa and in the rest of the world. Our ambition is to expand networks with key researchers in as well as on Africa and to develop an Africa @ KU strategy and network.
We work according to the following principles:
- Interdisciplinarity and cross-fertilisation across research themes, which guide our research design and practices.
- Inclusion of and engagement with a wide range of African perspectives, scholars and knowledge arenas (broadly defined) within our research areas.
- Through consciously combining theoretical and empirical work, research at Centre of African Studies contributes to deepening or rethinking key concepts and theories relevant within our research fields.
- To ‘think’ the world and its intellectual foundations and borders through Africanist and African eyes.
While interdisciplinary overall, and open to a range of topics within both social sciences and humanities, our research is organized in three primary thematic research platforms:
Environment, Climate and Sustainability
The research platform focuses on the discursive and material practices through which ‘nature’ is conceptualised and used, and on the multiple effects of and responses to the climate crisis and other environmental and sustainability concerns. It considers a range of diverse actors engaged with, affected by and/or struggling with policies and practices related to resource control and utilisation, ecotourism, biodiversity crises and conservation, among others. New research asks how ideas, knowledge and projects associated with nature-based solutions, the green transition and green governance are constructed and materialised and with what effects for whom. Research also focuses on the history and knowledge of nature conservation in relation to development planning and governance as well public-private partnerships and local governance of access to water.
Sovereignities and Citizenships
The research platform Sovereignties and Citizenships takes a relational approach to the ever-evolving relationship between state making and citizen making in Africa. Within multiple and overlapping spaces, people struggle over power, protection and rights; territory, movement and borders; property and natural resources; identity, belonging and personhood. This platform explores these arenas in relation to differently positioned actors and the interplay between larger-scale structural dimensions and everyday intimate worlds. Key research includes the changing, increasingly digitised certification and identification regimes across Africa, and how these are reshaping both states and citizens; and processes of personhood and homemaking in flood-risk areas in Mozambique.
Religion and Social Change
The research platform Religion and Social Change approaches the study of religion in Africa in its wide historical and social contexts. It builds on the premise that broad questions of religion shed light on key dimensions of social and cultural life, and as such moves away from a doctrinal and textual approach to research on religion in Africa. New research focuses on religious authority, identity and mobility; religion and African popular culture; religious institutions, religious infrastructure and social diversity in urban Africa; religion and health; as well as questions around privacy, spirituality, cultural heritage and memory making.
Several research projects cut across the thematic research platforms.
To enhance coherence and collaboration between research areas, we will continue to strengthen our internal research seminars, further develop broader interdisciplinary approaches to African Studies, invite external guests and further develop our guest research program. At the same time, within the Faculty, we explore new opportunities within areas of common scholarly interest, and to enhance research collaboration with society more broadly we will identify relevant research partners and stakeholders in Danish society and continue our already strong international networks within and beyond our fields of research.
Finally, we work to actively make more visible the range of our already existing engagements, activities, and contributions to various knowledge domains at the University of Copenhagen, within Danish society and internationally, and these activities in themselves contribute to the visibility of the Faculty and the University.