SGAS/SSEA & VAD Conference 2026

The conference theme “African Perspectives on Global Transformations” proposes a framework that responds to increasingly urgent calls for decolonization, epistemic justice, reparations, climate justice and restitution, under the conceptual header of planetary health and cosmopolitan flourishing. Based on this framework, the conference brings together approaches to examine past, present and future global transformations from a broad spectrum of disciplines and thematic areas.

The deadline for panel submissions is 31 July 2025 (23:59 CET).

Africa has been playing a central role in processes framing the globalized world. These processes take the form of the movement of people, the expansion of trade through the exploitation of human and natural resources, resistance against, and adoption of, colonial invasion and religious imposition, and the circulation of knowledges about the world, among others. A critical approach towards past, current and future global transformations, therefore, is one crucial way to define the intellectual agenda of African Studies – especially of African Studies outside Africa. Amid current challenges bearing on marginalized groups’ struggles for rights and self-determination, a shifting geopolitical landscape, the global rise of authoritarianism at the expense of democratic values, as well as the climate crisis and environmental degradation, African Studies, as the academic field that draws from the engagement with African experiences, conditions and agency, can make an indispensable contribution to making the world we live in more intelligible.

To confront critical perspectives on global transformations, the conference proposes a framework that responds to increasingly urgent calls for decolonization, epistemic justice, reparations, climate justice and restitution, under the conceptual header of planetary health and cosmopolitan flourishing. Planetary health attunes us to interdependencies between human and non-human wellbeing, by insisting on the importance of social relations, equity and justice at planetary scale, beyond the mere management of the physical world. Cosmopolitan flourishing opens up to the development of alternative futures born out of painful historical experiences of ethnocentrism, a world made safe for difference, which respects planetary boundaries, with wellbeing for all. Taken together, these two notions point to the potential of African Studies to develop conversations about the world we live in, its path-dependencies, and its possible futures.

Based on this framework, the conference will bring together approaches to examine past, present, and future global transformations from a broad spectrum of disciplines and thematic areas. We especially welcome panels that stress the interrelatedness of historical, cultural, and regional contexts as well as the intersection of social, political, economic, and ecological issues. Panels should allow for contributions engaging with global transformations from different disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives as well as non-academic approaches (artistic, activist or entrepreneurial, among others).