Research Strategy 2020-2023 at Centre of African Studies
Research at the Centre of African Studies is concerned with deepening knowledge about the diverse histories, complex realities, challenges and possibilities of a simultaneously localized and globalised Africa. Such knowledge – including attention to the differentiated conditions for and processes of knowledge production itself, and dissemination, within Africa and in the rest of the world – aims at contributing to nuanced understandings of the continent’s multi-layered dimensions and its relationships to the world more broadly. Interdisciplinarity and cross-fertilisation across research themes are seen as both necessary and highly productive principles guiding our research design and implementation practices. Increasing inclusion of and engagement with a wide range of African perspectives, scholars and knowledge arenas within our research is a priority. Through consciously combining theoretical and empirical work – often in collaboration with other Africanist researchers – the research at CAS also aims to contribute to deepening or rethinking key concepts relevant within our broad, inter-related fields, such as belonging, citizenship, displacement, religion, personhood, the state, nature, sustainability, the urban, the rural and so on. Collectively, the work emerging from African Studies research globally – to which CAS actively contributes – simultaneously has ambitions to broaden the traditional parameters and theories that have long-framed the dominant boundaries of the social sciences and humanities; in other words, an ambition to ‘think’ the world and its intellectual foundations and borders through Africanist and African eyes.
While interdisciplinary overall, and necessarily open to a range of topics within both social science and humanities, research at CAS is structured by three primary research platforms.
- Sovereignties and citizenship
Across Africa’s urban and rural spaces, diverse citizens and multiple sovereign authorities (state and non-state) are engaged in formal and informal processes to compete or cooperate over power, protection and rights; over movement, borders and territory; over property and natural resources; over identity, belonging and being. Combining strong conceptual and empirical orientations, this platform is concerned with exploring such processes and their consequences for differently positioned actors at varied scales. Understanding the continent as dynamically being reshaped by the simultaneities of crisis, continuity, creativity and contestation, the platform adopts a relational approach to sovereignties and citizenships. Among other things, this focuses on connections between the formal and larger-scale structural interests, processes and effects, and the smaller, intimate and informal dimensions of social, political and economic life. Research projects explore such themes as: the relationship between property, authority, citizenship and personhood; the paradoxes of urban displacement and resettlement; contested and gendered forms of authority in processes of state-formation; linkages between securitization, governance, humanitarianism and development; and the symbolic, social, legal and material production of (diverse) citizens and non-citizens.
- Religion and change
Research in this field is based on the understanding that the role of religion is an important dimension of most aspects of social as well as political life in Africa. Religious institutions at multiple levels, in both their more traditional and newer forms, shape the ways many Africans constitute their everyday familial and social relations, as well as how they think about and experience power and politics. In some settings they also constitute some of the most stable local institutions, often functioning simultaneously as civil society bodies and/or development agencies and providers of goods and services. Some also facilitate or emerge from globalization in terms of the various transnational manifestations especially of Christian and Islamic movements. Research in this platform employs a variety of methods from the humanities and the social sciences. Research projects variously deal with different religious traditions (Christianity, Islam and African ‘traditional' religions) in their historical and contemporary forms, approaching religion as both an individual and a social phenomenon that includes spiritual, cognitive and sociological dimensions.
- Environment, climate and sustainability
This research platform focuses on analysing natural resources, climate and environmental and sustainability dimensions within Africa and in relation to its place in the world, using interdisciplinary approaches that combine insights from natural and social sciences. Particular attention is given to questions related to the discursive and material practices through which ‘nature’ is conceptualised and used, to the multiple effects of and responses to the climate crisis, to the terms of environmental governance, and to how the disciplining of environmental subjects/citizens is legitimated as well as contested. The platform is also concerned with the ways in which both global and local environment-related policies are driven by and affect diverse actors (such as states, private sector, differentiated citizens) within such arenas as resource utilization, ecotourism, climate change, land use, and biodiversity conservation. Knowledge production, power and ‘expertise’, as well as notions of ‘sustainability’ and practices of sustainable development, are consistent cross-cutting aspects informing the research within this platform.