Save the Date: ECAS 2021, ‘African Futures’ (02-05 June, 2021)

By Africa in Words on 5 February , 2020 • ( 0 )

9^th European Conference on African Studies
‘African Futures’
University of Cologne, Germany
2-5 June, 2021

‘African Futures’ aims to explore the continent’s critical engagements with the past, present, and future of Africa’s global entanglements. The continent has been characterized as a laboratory of the future, as the last frontier of capitalism, with living realities based on concepts and practices of multiplicity, circulation, and flexibility. While the West appears to be self-provincializing, Africa is expanding. Africa is on the move – it always has been.

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Courtesy of UofCologne

Grand narratives about Africa have always been characterized by controversial visions of its future. The current optimistic outlook that celebrates “Africa rising,” and the emergence of new African middle-classes, is countered by warnings of a new scramble for Africa. Local modernist visions are presented as expressions of renewed African self-confidence, but also denounced as utopian dreamscapes that tend to ignore complex contemporary realities. Increasingly, the continent is perceived as an experimental field for global tomorrows.

Future-making projects impact contemporary Africa’s ecologies, economies, and societies, capturing the imaginations across multiple social positionalities. A key conceptual question in need of empirically grounded answers is: What constitutes the future? While Africa is intimately bound up with central narratives about the future, critical new questions have arisen about whose future is being referred to and how these visions are to be put into practice.

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The conference theme thus invites reflections on the role of contingency in the world, including current and past notions of imagination, emergence, projection, vision, and speculation. The topic bears a paradox: The future is ambiguous because it is uncertain, unknown, and open; but the future is not completely contingent, as it emerges out of specific pathways, past and present. While some futures appear to be more likely than others, alternative futures compete to shape the present.

Questions about how futures are made, imagined, and negotiated variously refer to materialities, discourses, and social practices that link the present to both past and future. What the future should look like is subject to fierce negotiation and contestation, within academia and beyond. Whereas the hard sciences primarily study how a “future of probabilities” is anticipated through different forms of calculation, measurement, and modelling, the humanities and social sciences also take into account how a “future of possibilities” takes shape through visions and imaginaries. These futures are produced through an interplay of numerous actors, interests, and institutional settings across manifold scales.

‘African Futures’ invites contributions from a broad range of disciplines that conceptualize the future in various ways, resembling the ambiguity of the future itself. Contributions explore practices and processes, discourses and imaginings, policies and speculations about future-making in and about Africa, by Africans and others beyond, working across different time frames and spatial dimensions. Contributions may explore expressions of agency as well as consequences of structural forces shaping future trajectories, aspirations, visions, and dreams in historical and contemporary perspective.

Important dates
Call for Panels opens 31 August 2020
Call for Papers opens 09 November 2020
Early-bird registration opens 15 February 2021

Keep up to date on social media via the Global South Studies Center, University of Cologne’s page on Facebook and the University of Cologne on Twitter @UniCologne
Watch out for more handles in future! #ECAS2021