The Africa Seminar at Northwestern University’s Program of African Studies invites papers that engage with critical African, African-American, Africana, and Diaspora Studies to participate in our annual conference. This year the two-day conference will be held virtually from Evanston, IL Thursday June 10 to Saturday June 12, 2021. The theme of this year’s conference builds on past conferences on decolonization, africanisms, and Africa’s place in a globalizing world and calls for africist knowledge that agitates. We welcome contributions regardless of their engagement with the theme, that investigate the most pressing research questions in Africanist inquiry broadly defined. Submissions may engage with but are not limited to the following:

Dis/connections between academic and activist knowledge
Scholar activisms, organizing, collaboration, and engagement
Decolonization, unsettling of African Studies, science, and government
Interrogations of epistemological approaches, theories, methods of disciplinary research
Inquiry into the economic, social, historical, linguistic, genetic, geopolitical, ecological, and biomedical factors that shape and have shaped African societies
Disciplinary and transdisciplinary research that informs questions that relate broadly to Africanist knowledge
Art, poetry, performance which interrogates expertise on Africanist knowledge, Africanisms, critical inquiry, and our futures

Please submit a sample of what you plan to present along with a brief biography including your name, contact information, current working location, timezone, affiliations, and research to afrisem@u.northwestern.edu. In most cases a sample will be a 100 word abstract, or a portfolio of work with an artist’s statement but please use your own discretion. Contribution formats may include: paper presentation, reading, visual media (artwork, photography, fashion), film, audio, performance (live or recorded).

The conference will also include:
Presentation on the resources available at the Northwestern Herskovits Library of African Studies
A collaboration hour with other conference attendees and keynote speakers
A recording of your presentation preserved on the Northwestern Program of African Studies Vimeo and Northwestern archival repository, Arch
Invitation to publish in the relaunch of the annual student journal The Africanist (formerly The Pan-Africanist)