AFRICAN, AFROPOLITAN, AND AFROPEAN BELONGINGS

As a global gathering between scholars researching Africa, ECAS 2025 aims to engage with multiple African realities and entanglements. In particular, the conference in Prague aims to engage with complex trajectories, constructions, expressions, and performances of African, Afropolitan and Afropean forms of belonging and positioning. The past decades have seen a resurgence of identity politics all over the world and much of it has involved diverse African forms of belonging in a world where global North paradigms continue to be socio-economically, culturally and politically dominant. Considering the countless dimensions of human diversity constructed on the continent itself and within diverse diasporas, in physical and digital spaces, this conference aims to examine regionally specific struggles and how they impact on broader societies, cultures, multispecies ecologies, politics, and economies.

Considering important critiques of dominant knowledge orthodoxies, ECAS 2025 urges scholars to further interrogate how far personal backgrounds, identities, privileges, and positioning impact on our knowledge constructions on and about Africa. Embracing the complexities and ambiguities of our interconnected world means to interrogate how positionality is far more multi-faceted than binary categories such as white/black, African/non-African, European/non-European, Global North/South seem to suggest. This conference constitutes an opportunity to explore in-between spaces, hybridities, and multiple parallel realities in relation to broader questions and issues concerning the African continent and its global significance. There will be close attention paid to the particularities of African-European relations and entanglements in their various dimensions throughout time, space, and context.

Some of the questions evoked in relation to this broad field of inquiry include the following:  What conditions generate expressions and claims of African, Afropolitan and Afropean modes of being and belonging in particular contexts? How do the particularities of history, culture, politics, economy, social formation and the environment affect the terms and concrete expressions of identity, belonging and exclusion in given national, continental and transnational contexts, and with what consequences for whom? How do analytical categories such as class, ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, language, religion, age and so on co-constitute and co-complicate each other in the making of diverse African, Afropolitan and Afropean life-worlds?  How are entanglements shaped by unequal transnational regimes of location, mobility and belonging? Partly related to this is the question of how the political and cultural economy of late capitalism, alongside radical environmental changes and dangers, differently affect the frontiers of contestation over identity and belonging respectively in African contexts?

ECAS 2025 welcomes specific case studies of local particularities but also macro-regional, comparative and trans-national studies. It invites scholars to take methodologically innovative, pluriversal and critically reflective perspectives that can help challenge and advance our ways of thinking of and about Africa, encouraging the transcendence of disciplinary boundaries. It calls for studies that question, disturb or advance established global North paradigms by theorizing from Africa and the global South, more generally. ECAS 2025 invites Africa-related contributions from all academic disciplines and particularly welcomes multi-, trans- and interdisciplinary, as well as transnational, and cross-continental collaborative scholarship. Panels and papers related to the core theme African, Afropolitan and Afropean Belongings will be prioritized, but there will also be limited space for other kinds of scholarship.