Call for Papers
New Directions in African Humanities: Graduate and Early Career Researcher Conference
Tuesday 20 June and Wednesday 21 June 2023
In person at the University of Oxford (UK)
Convenors:
Dr Dorothée Boulanger -Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Modern Languages, Jesus College
Dr Rachel Taylor - Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Junior Research Fellow, Jesus College
Dr Tinashe Mushakavanhu - Junior Research Fellow in African and Comparative Literature, St Anne's College
Keynote: Dr Terri Ochiagha, University of Edinburgh, “The Bhabhian Flex: African Self-Fashioning and the Production of Colonial Knowledge.”
The African Languages, Literatures and Cultures Network (@AfCultures) and the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) are delighted to announce a call for papers for a two-day multidisciplinary workshop in African humanities. We seek to bring together early-career scholars based in the UK to question and explore how to research African humanities within a UK context, as well as to encourage the development of discussions and collaborations across institutions, languages and disciplines in the African humanities.
In the last decade, African writers, filmmakers, performers, artists, and designers have received unprecedented global attention and praise, making a lasting impact on the artistic and cultural global scene. In parallel, continued processes of racialisation, exclusion and erasure of African histories, epistemologies and experiences, including within higher education institutions in the Global North, have come under heavy scrutiny, leading to calls to decolonize universities, research and curricula. How do the African humanities, from literature, performance and film studies to history and beyond, work through these contradictory processes? How do academics, and early-career researchers especially, think critically about how their disciplines, methodologies and conceptual apparatuses represent, analyse and imagine Africa? What does it mean, when working within British institutions, to centre and foreground African thinking and creative perspectives? How does considering aesthetics and the imagination change our stories of Africa past and present? How do philosophies and theories drawn from African experiences and intellectual traditions adjust our understanding of topics as varied as gender and the body, memory and identity, humanism and post-humanism?
The aims of this workshop are two-fold: first, we see it as a major opportunity to gather graduate students and ECRs working in the African humanities across the UK to showcase exciting research from a new generation of scholars, in a supportive and friendly atmosphere. Secondly, this workshop will be an opportunity for ECRs to receive feedback and advice on academic writing and publishing. We therefore encourage participants to present on a piece of writing that they intend to submit for publication (either to an academic journal or for an
edited collection). In that spirit, we encourage the pre-circulation of drafts, although that is not mandatory. Presentations will be 15-20 minutes, with time for questions.
We particularly welcome papers related to the following themes exploring different media such as literature, history film, and visual arts:
· Alternative Archives
· Imaginative Histories
· African Artistic and Literary Expression
· African Epistemologies
· African languages and translations
· African Ecologies
· African Feminisms and Queer Studies
· Decolonising Methodologies
To apply, please send to a word document to afculturesox@torch.ox.ac.uk by Wednesday 15 March 2023 containing:
i) a 250-300 word abstract
ii) a 100 word biography
iii) the name of the outlets they will be targeting for the paper’s publication.
Acceptance will be notified no later than Saturday 1 April 2023.
Although we encourage participants to seek funding from their institutions where possible, there is some funding to support researcher travel from within the UK.
Find out more about the African Languages, Literatures and Cultures Network here.
