AEGIS Summer School: African, Afropolitan and Afropean Belongings

The 2024 AEGIS Summer School will address the theme of African, Afropolitan and Afropean Belongings.

Pursuing a critical understanding of African, Afropolitan and Afropean belongings calls for thorough interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary cooperation, which, besides scholars, also includes planners and policy makers. The following are indicative preferential sub-themes for the summer school, but should not be considered as definitive or exhaustive:

1. Borders, migration and belonging – transporting, transforming and maintaining identities
2. Education, knowledge systems and decolonisation – knowledge of Africa and African knowledge
3. States and belonging – policies, practices and inclusion/exclusion
4. Race, intersectionality and African belonging
5. Spaces of belonging – cities, rural areas, land, environment and the role of space in belonging
6. Labour, capitalism and identity – hustlers, dreamers and the identities of economic imaginaries
7. Globalisation, Afropolitanism and geopolitical belonging – material, cultural and political connections and engagements with the ‘multipolar world’
8. Religion, language, culture and community – institutions, practices and histories of collective identity
9. Conflict, crisis, security and belonging – uncertainty, precarity and identity
10. Making spaces in which to belong – activism, resistance and belonging
11. Memory work: the local, the national and the trans-national
12. Performance and identity: literature, music and film
13. Sexualities

The 2024 Summer School is organized by the Centro di Studi Africani in Sardegna – CSAS in collaboration with the AEGIS Centres of Roskilde (Denmark), Edinburgh (UK), Lisbon (Portugal), London (UK), CESSMA (France), Leiden (Netherlands). The aim of the Summer School is: a) to bring together advanced Ph.D. students and teaching staff from AEGIS Centres in order to exchange field and research experience; b) to improve the students’ ability to prepare and present their research in an international context and more specifically to serve as a ‘feeder’ for ECAS 10 in Prague; c) to promote graduate training within AEGIS and stimulate African-European inter-university cooperation.

The workshop is open to some 20 PhD students and young researchers coming from AEGIS Centres and their affiliates in Europe and Africa. Applicants are invited to submit proposals (a 500-word abstract as well as a one-page outline of their Ph.D. status and current research – PHD SUPERVISOR(S) MUST BE IN CC WHEN APPLYING) that address the overall theme. Papers that apply and/or refine conceptual and theoretical approaches to the subject matter, as well as presenting fresh empirical information, will be especially welcome. Applicants will be selected on the basis of their research outline and their ability to engage with wider issues in African Studies today. Priority will be given to students and researchers with recent field experience and fresh research results. Application by African students based in African Universities is encouraged; subsidies for the participation of a limited number of successful African applicants will be available on the basis of merit. The deadline for submitting proposals is 29 October 2023. Participants will be informed of acceptance by 10 January 2024.

More information

Application form