Wealth inequalities have moved to the centre of global societal debates over the past years, complementing more established debates on income inequalities (Chancel et al., 2022). While income remains an important dimension of inequality, wealth raises deeper economic and political issues, as it can produce income (e.g., rent); it materialises as a concrete asset whose ownership rests on the exclusion of others; and, over time, allows for the transfer of economic and often political power, via inheritance mechanisms. While many African economies have experienced strong growth patterns since the 2000s, they have likewise seen rising inequalities related to ownership of, and access to the means that constitute wealth e.g. natural resources, land, housing, financial assets, etc. (Obeng-Odoom, 2015). Countries in Africa are not alone in having become highly unequal. However, their historical experiences of extractivist models of accumulation that serve only a few, be they colonial or postcolonial elites; the globally significant dependence, in much of Africa, on land as a source of livelihood; and the sheer size of the populations that have not benefited from economic dynamics of the recent past make the more equitable distribution of wealth, power and life chances on the continent an issue of high political and scholarly importance. Our RS intends to scrutinise the accumulation–inequality nexus from a transdisciplinary perspective, applying intersectional methodologies drawn from the disciplines of History, Geography, Urban Planning, Political Science, Economics, Anthropology, Religious Studies, Linguistics and Literary Studies. Looking beyond the more established focus on income inequalities, we will focus on the acquisition and gathering of wealth by organisations and individuals in Africa and its diasporas: at the local, national and global scale, and in given interplays with different forms of power and authority. Processes of accumulation are aided and constrained by political structures, markets, values, ideologies and religions, and their respective forms of power. Each of these shapes who can access opportunities for accumulation and who is excluded. Inequalities in Africa have deep colonial roots (Arndt, 2021; Koddenbrock et al., 2022) which are overwritten by novel redistributive dynamics. As in most parts of the world, the recalibration of wealth inequalities in Africa since the 2000s has been the result of historically shifting relations between states, businesses, civil societies and households. Diverse processes have played into this, such as politically mediated forms of enclosure and commodification, the deregulation of markets, taxation regimes that benefit the wealthy or planning models that serve elite interests. While scholars have called for the study of material inequalities from a Global South perspective (Francis et al., 2020), there is an urgent need in African Studies to deepen our as-yet-sparse engagements with the accumulation–inequality nexus in African economies, its entanglement with wider global processes, and the diverse forms of political resistance levelled at highly socially skewed accumulation processes. We posit that the ways value is produced, distributed and transformed into wealth rest on concrete practices of world-making ontological practices that are central to accumulation processes. Thus-conceiving of these practices allows us to connect pasts, presents and futures of accumulation, helping us to situate the articulations of contemporary capitalism in Africa within a larger historical frame (Breckenridge, 2021; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2023a; Ouma, 2017) and to acknowledge other forms of imagining and enliving the world (Enns & Bersaglio, 2024; Getachew, 2019) that are often crowded out by particular forms of accumulation. We focus in four research fields: 1. Accumulation and power: This line of inquiry explores the roles of governance, law and institutions in accumulation dynamics. 2. Landscapes of accumulation: This line of inquiry will explore the relations between accumulation, spatiality and geopolitics. 3. The everyday life of accumulation: This line of inquiry will explore the experiences, subjectivities and everyday life-worlds of accumulation and inequalities, including gendered and intersectional aspects. 4. Resisting and reversing accumulation: Research in this thread will unravel the intricate web of influences shaping the socio-economic landscape of pre- and postcolonial African nations, offering insights into the intricate interplay between power struggles, development trajectories, and the consequential patterns of wealth accumulation, and how these might be contested.

Today's African nation states maintain multiple, often overlapping, competing political, economic and social affiliations that change over time and redefine societal issues. In this thematic field we propose to analyse the tensions, obstacles and temporal evolution as well as the benefits and challenges connected with such affiliations, especially as they play out in regional economic communities (RECs). Consider the recent Agreement on a Tripartite Free Trade Area (TFTA) in Africa as an example for an emerging affiliation between the East African Community (EAC), the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), and the Southern African Development Community (SADC). Regional economic exchange, legal harmonization and political cooperation within and between the three participating RECs has been limited and it has been caught between the multiplicity of modes of collaboration and policies aimed at different degrees of homogenisation, such that internal potentials have not fully been realized. These multiple affiliations and references to regional integration mechanisms reshape economic relationships and question existing borders, concepts of nation states, and legal understandings of diverse sets of affected African societies. Beyond holding regional affiliations through RECs, African states are affiliated with global organizations. African relations are shaped by historical trajectories such as former colonial ties and migration networks. Simultaneously, a number of existing states in present borders struggle with their own sovereignty, concepts of national identity and ethnic diversity. In theory, affiliations in Africa are supposed to facilitate and redefine modes of exchange, and cooperation, and they even extend to understandings of rights which affect existing, fluid individual and group identities. Although regional integration is en vogue in Africa and affected by development optimism, actual results of integration on the ground often fall short of theoretically expected outcomes, pointing to the need of academic reflection on existing theories. Evidently affiliations in Africa are not limited to trade, legal harmonization and political integration but they have the potential to affect capital movements and migration issues, which in turn reshape existing trade relationship and require the evaluation and evolution of existing economic, legal and political settings. Objectives: We propose to explore the complexity and interplay of different affiliations and integration efforts by analysing (a) Interacting Markets, (b) Decision Making, and (c) Human Rights. A typical research question raised in the field of interacting markets relates to necessary prerequisites for regional integration to enhance social and economic welfare and to foster cohesion on the African continent. Economic co-operation of states within RECs and beyond implies cross-border movement of persons, capital, goods and ideas. Challenges arise because of sometimes confusing affiliations to overlapping RECs, but also due to the economic, legal, political and societal feedback mechanisms of policy changes in an integrating Africa, where national borders become fluent and where integration and interests of decision-makers multiple in nature. Since interacting markets require and favour mobilities, this invites cooperation with the RS "Mobilities". Any process of integration connects and affects actors such as international, national and regional political decision makers, public administrators, courts, developmental agencies, and diverse interest groups, among others. When analysing decision making, we explore state-time dependent interests, incentives and intentions of decision makers in Africa to understand, evaluate and design potential policies that influence, extend, shape and promote mutually beneficial affiliations between actors with diverse interests. A typical research question here relates to the incentives of politicians, business leaders, bureaucrats, judges or NGOs to push or frustrate affiliations that tie countries to integrated decision making at various levels. Different cultures and traditions of dispute settlement, their indigenous and colonial past and their future role in modern Africa shape existing affiliations and engender new ones, thereby providing feedback mechanisms. Consequently, we consider decision making in the resulting multilevel set-up to depend at least as much on the kind of relations at play as on the individual characteristics of the many actors and organisations involved. This can be achieved by means of analysing the institutional structures as well as the incentives of decision actors. Existing institutions shape affiliations and affiliations transform institutions, thereby reconfiguring understandings of peoples and existing states. Such transformation processes link to fundamental Human Rights. According to the classical, Western understanding, such rights are tied to the individual who are to be protected from the state. The alternative protection of various collective entities—African legal texts tend to speak of "peoples" or "national communities"—is not conflict-free as individuals may have to give up rights in the interest of the group or entity they belong to. Combining the tools of social science and legal studies with cultural analysis, we will ask whether the multiplicity in African legal provisions is relaxing the observance of clear but static rules in favour of mediation and consensus-building among different actors. The focus on Human Rights connects to debates in the RS "Moralities" and can also inform research about decision-making processes in general. On a higher level of abstraction and even broader interdisciplinary collaboration, this RS contributes practical observations to approach reflexivity as a key concept of the cluster. The Tanzanian-German Centre for Eastern African Legal Studies (TGCL) in Dar es Salaam has built strong relations between the research topic "regional integration" and the legal practice of regional integration by training, among others, lawyers beyond the legal framework of the East African Community (EAC). The ambition of this RS in "applied reflexivity" draws on the careers of researchers and former TGCL students from all six Partner States of the EAC and beyond to find the effects of research and teaching interventions on the outcome of interest itself. Reflexivity here invites the analysis of the ways in which TGCL has co-shaped debates on regional integration. This includes self-reflection and empirical evaluation of its activities and results so far, and continuous reflection and monitoring accompanying research on affiliations, such as those of regional economic communities and international and regional human rights regimes, and the translation of education into national and local discourses.

This research Section addresses the multiplicity of artworks. Hence, instead of taking given unities in aesthetics for granted as our starting point, we will focus on ongoing processes of creation, mediation and interpretation as well as how artworks shape and are shaped by material and social conditions. Objectives: The central objective of this RS is to provide a better understanding of the actual processes of making art(s) and their ways of relating to the world, by conceiving of artworks as multi-layered, and as having their own ways of reflecting upon being in the world. The RS will approach (the) making art(s) and aesthetics through three interrelated lines of investigation: a) artists' practices and audience perceptions; b) circulation and configuration; c) the materiality of artworks. Subprojects on artists' practices and audience perceptions within this RS will not focus on artworks as clearly defined objects, but will turn towards the actual multimedial and multilingual practices and repertoires of artists, including writers, musicians, filmmakers, DJs, performance artists, and dancers. How do artists relate to other artists and artworks, for instance through appropriating or rejecting ideas, repertoires of imagery, sounds or texts? Subprojects on circulation and configuration will consider artworks as constantly drawing on and feeding into ever-changing flows of sounds, texts, images, which (re)configure in specific artworks and contexts. Going beyond concepts of unilineal distribution from the global North to the South or within one linguistic domain, we will consider multidirectional flows at various scales, across and beyond the African continent, for instance to Asia or Latin America, as well as the West. Subprojects on the materiality of artworks will analyse the aesthetic characteristics and specific material gestalt that actually make up artworks. The mediums of artworks are not only vehicles of expression, but decisively shape their production, distribution and reception. Furthermore, depending on their materiality, artworks also relate to the world in specific ways: there are interactions between social experience and the forms of artworks, which make alternative existences sensorially perceptible. New materialist and speculative realist perspectives that highlight the agency of artworks themselves and relegate problematic idealist assumptions such as artists' intentions to the background will be important points of reference in this line of research. Work Programme: Our aim is to critically revisit established research practices that consider aesthetic practices separately, according to categorical, linguistic and disciplinary boundaries. Research within this RS will thus include a wide range of aesthetic practices and artworks (including film, literature, music and other visual arts/media). Our focus on artists' practices and audiences' perceptions entails that we will make case studies of the actual production of artworks by particular artists, as well as of how audiences relate to them. More specifically, we will concentrate attention upon multimedial and multilingual practices and also address questions about the tacit experiential ways in which artists and audiences relate to artworks. Our work on circulation and configuration will entail studying flows of texts, films, sound and imagery, while taking a critical view on the politics of circulation, as well as on definition, in keeping with the cluster's key concept of reflexivity. Here we will critically interrogate the politics of the categorisation of aesthetic practices and problematise the global vs. local dichotomy. We will seek to further develop perspectives on the far-reaching connections of artworks across linguistic and methodological boundaries. It is our aim to go beyond centre-periphery models by considering various aesthetic practices in various languages and media from transregional and transcontinental perspectives. We will study the musical, literary and art "landscapes" of specific contexts, focusing, for instance, on the entanglements and co-constitution of French, Portuguese, English and Swahili literary productions in the Indian Ocean archipelagos. Here, our intention is to work out how actual aesthetic practices in various media and languages relate to each other, as well as charting the migratory flows of sounds, images and texts, studying them in different contexts and changing constellations. Foregrounding material and form, we will focus on the media of particular artworks and ask how they come to take shape in form. Here, we will also ask how processes of transfer across media impact on the effects of artworks, such as, for instance, from theatre to film and television. Following the migration of texts, images, and sounds and their reconfiguration in specific artworks will allow for comparative analysis of the specifics of media and materials. The RS will delve into explorations of the artwork's agency, as well as the tension between the artist's subjectivity and the autonomy of artworks. This line of investigation will take inspiration from new materialist and speculative realist conceptions underlining the autonomous force of artworks. Here the RS greatly benefits from the discussions that arise between its more empirically oriented researchers in the social sciences, and those of a more hermeneutic-philosophical background in humanities. Central to all subprojects in this RS will be the building of a dynamic archive, both to store audio, visual, and textual media and also to provide tools for discerning affiliations between texts, imagery and sounds. Exhibitions, both site-based and in virtual formats, offer both a means to present the findings of this RS, as well as a laboratory for transmedial research that will bring invited international artists together with resident researchers.

With their promises of development and technoscientific modernity, digital technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) offer new ways of self-expression, political organising and social relations that, in turn, inflect protest movements, revive cultural heritage and catalyse industrial and economic innovation. In this RS we will build on critical analytical frameworks in African Studies to closely investigate material aspects and practices of digitalisation, including their implications for society at large. These material aspects include the labour required to mine minerals and maintain algorithmic systems, the extraction of data from people and environments, and the dumping of electronic waste. A focus on digital materialities also necessitates critical attention to digital practices: How do people use, repurpose, subvert and relate to the social media, biometrics, digital platforms and web-based applications which, in turn, come to matter as part of state projects and cultural expressions on the African continent? Indeed, the digital has the potential to contribute to ongoing decolonisation processes, opening up opportunities for the creation of new publics, new social movements, and new imaginaries for future world-making (Getachew, 2019). Some African scholars have argued that, through social organisation, digital tools and platforms have enabled the formation of new worlds where people of marginalised identities e.g. queer Africans, women and civil society movement activists find community and empowerment. These have political and social effects in the physical world, as in the 2024 protests in Nairobi, where digital tools enabled the quick organisation of protests but also the surveillance of activists by the government. Therefore, rather than opting for oversimplified notions of digital utopia or dystopia, the Digitalities RS treats both the matter and the meaning(s) of the digital -critically considering the cultural, social and historical world(s) it constructs and upholds and focusing on the politics and practices accompanying the spread, domestication and deployment of the digital in Africa. Treating the digital as matter means being attentive to infrastructures: networks of cables, the waste and impact of data servers, the mining of minerals for electronics, the availability of electricity. Treating the meaning(s) of the digital, we will examine how the digital intersects with and inspires African creative expressions (orature, art), and how African knowledges inform contested concepts such as virtual, digital, and intelligent with new meanings, as well as new forms of cross-border interaction such as digital restitution and collaborations in university, museum and governmental contexts. Bringing to bear insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS), Anthropology, History, Sociology, Informatics, Data Science, and Religious Studies, we will examine the promises and dreams of technoscientific modernity as well as the perils that come with anonymity, disinformation and surveillance, contending with the social and political contexts of the digital in Africa through three lines of inquiry, namely (1) Archiving, (2) (Self)-Identification and (3) Knowledge Innovation. Our methods will include (digital) ethnography, archival research, literary analysis, computational analysis, digital archiving and data-driven ecological monitoring. The aim of our methodological transdisciplinarity is to foster new forms of collaboration that raise crucial questions about inclusion, ethics and equity, as African states and communities innovate digitally and adopt more digital technologies into their everyday lives. Altogether, digital materialities and practices reflect attempts at world-making in Africa, in the context of both online worlds (e.g. virtual reality, gaming or diasporic WhatsApp chat groups) and offline ones (e.g. where digital tools and technologies are used to document violence, circumvent surveillance and censorship, or critique hegemonic narratives about Africa). As articulated by Achille Mbembe, life itself has become a computable object (Mbembe, 2019a). While attending to the ways that people are bridging geographical divides to collaborate and communicate, researchers in this RS will at once reflexively attend to the political economies of knowledge creation that shape how scholars in Europe, Africa and elsewhere research, publish, and engage with communities. Likewise, we will examine the emergence of new publics (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015; Nyabola, 2018) and the extractive risks that come with digital colonialism (Kwet, 2019). Research in this field could also yield possible practical applications, including the ethical and strategic use of ChatGPT and other open science infrastructures that could extract and circulate African knowledges globally.

While RS Ecologies is to be anchored in Ecology, our inter- and transdisciplinary work will expand beyond this disciplinary boundary to include more pluralistic research, towards the theoretical, methodological and practical reconfiguration of Environmental Studies in Africa. Thus, given their centrality to the histories, identities, livelihoods and futures of people on the African continent, this RS will address not only the contemporary Africa-specific dynamics of global environmental crises, but also their histories of embeddedness in colonial and postcolonial structures. By now, the Anthropocene critique highlighting colonial modernity's extractivism based on separation of the natural and social worlds (i.e. separation of nature and culture) is well known – but so is its underrepresentation of the realities, knowledges and experiences of Indigenous peoples (Akomolafe, n.d.; Densu, 2018; Mbembe, 2021). To date, studies in Ecology have been largely dominated by nature–culture dualism and fact–value dichotomies characteristic of imperial sciences, Global North development paradigms, and contemporary conservation and wilderness narratives. By and large, African ontologies, epistemologies and human-environment relations have been subjugated or ignored. There is an emerging body of research that is not only critiquing the above, but also seeking ways to address the limitations of predominantly natural-scientific approaches to ecologies in Africa, precisely through grounding African Environmental Studies in African ontologies and epistemologies by which we mean the (grounded, plural) realities and ways of knowing of African peoples. In alignment with this research agenda, this RS proposes new, emic, relational, situated, creative and critically generative approaches to investigating African environmental–social relations and their complex cultural, political and social-ecological dynamics. The aim of this RS is to address situated, spatial, eco-cultural and temporal heterogeneous aspects of world-making, from the continuous shaping over time of both urban and rural natural-cultural landscapes (Usher, 2023) to forms of eco-cultural relations expounded in eco-critical cultural texts (Adeniyi & Onanuga, 2023), for example. A diversity of methods will be applied, bringing together the biophysical and (human) social sciences and providing spaces for collaborative knowledge production to yield intersectional and transdisciplinary insights based in African lived realities. In order to address historical injustices and impacts, our lines of inquiry will foreground critical diversities, especially the contributions of women and youth in co-creating Africa's futures.

External research projects from partner institutions.

In an emerging new world (dis)order, Africa is a key site of global contests. Multiple networks of African political actors, multinational businesses, transcontinental religious communities, security agencies, vigilante groups and social movements concurrently claim access to, and control over, land, resources, political systems, cultural orientations and recognition. New configurations of actors and technologies are coming to the fore in processes that challenge existing knowledge, hierarchies, and relations of domination. Via digital connections, these resonate with reconfigurations elsewhere, entangling African everyday life-worlds and histories with assemblages of global struggles that make it increasingly difficult to decipher what is going on, let alone what it may lead up to. Across this panoply of actors, events and processes, a recurrent (if not overarching) concern is the quest for security and the concomitant fight against alleged sources of insecurity. Especially in contexts where democratic formulas have lost their credibility, discourses of unpredictability and insecurity are leveraged to legitimise political power and violent tactics that frequently feed back into experiences of uncertainties, vulnerabilities and threats. If 'worlds' can be understood to provide a sense of security to those who make, nurture and inhabit them, we also witness a growing insecurity of life-worlds. As a title, In/securities bespeaks the political and conflictual aspects of world-making, as well as the strong links between discursive and material realities. Politics and societies across the globe, as Mbembe argues, are increasingly driven by their focus on an enemy: by a 'vision of the world that is threatening and anxiogenic, one that grants primacy to logics of suspicion' (Mbembe, 2019b, p. 48). On a political level, these logics feed into militarised responses to real and perceived threats; this 'securitization' of politics is a form of world-making that thrives on a sense of insecurity (Abrahamsen, 2018), and African politics are no exception. The ongoing wars and conflicts in the Sahel and Sudan, for example, are among the more visible instances of how in/security affects world-making and how the concept of world-making can reconfigure the study of in/securities. African cases sensitise us to the potentials of a decentring of politics and a multiscalar reading, allowing for a reconceptualisation of in/securities beyond prevailing Eurocentric approaches that too often lead to an impasse of political imagination (Mamdani, 2020). Grounding our theory-building in reflexive empirical and ethnographic observations, we insist on the relationality of multiple and competing actors and how they are making worlds with varying senses of in/security. In turn, this requires our critically assessing the micro-politics, moralities, and mediations within collectives and groups, notably along lines of gender, class, generation, kinship and social identity (Soré et al., 2021). With its cryptic orthography, In/securities emphasises the ways that security and insecurity are, and are understood to be, co-constitutive: how some people's security becomes prioritised over that of others, or how 'our' security is considered to be contingent on the insecurity of 'the other', for example. In/securities thus captures several key foci of our research, including: a) the presence or absence of physical harms and/or fears of destruction; b) power-infused competitions to define who is deserving of protection from particular threats; and c) political discourses about realms of belonging and realms of existential threat that fundamentally impact how people and political institutions relate to the world around them. Building on work done in AM 1.0 (especially in the Mobilities and Moralities RSs), we will analyse spatial, temporal and moral dimensions of in/securities, mediations and practices of peacemaking across divides, considering their inherently economic and gendered characteristics in ways complementary to other proposed strands of AM 2.0 research (e.g. in RS Accumulation). In approaching world-making through the lens of in/securities, we will address both empirical and methodological questions. Empirically, we will be asking how contests over discourses and practices of in/security shape and constitute the emergence of 'worlds' in Africa. Too, we will reflexively address methodological questions of knowledge production on in/securities in Africa, and specifically on violent conflict, in terms of how data is collected and analysed. This critical reflexive posture remains a crucial axiomatic backbone for the reconfiguration of African Studies in general, and the study of African in/securities in particular. Through this combination of empirical and theoretical work on the continent, our aim is to enrich urgent globally emerging debates on how in/securities are (re)making our world(s) at every scale, emphasising the African scholarly perspectives which, too often, they are currently lacking.

The RS Knowledges will investigate knowledges and their global and local impacts. It will study the trajectories and politics of processes of knowledge, with respect to a) the un/doing of knowledges, b) the scopes and scales of knowledges, and c) the politics of knowledges. By contributing to the methodological framing and theoretical sharpening of the concepts of reflexivity and relationality, this RS challenges us to reflect on the situatedness of our own knowledge production in the cluster. Objectives: The main objective in this RS is to study the production, enactment, dissemination, and effects of knowledges. We draw attention to the relational ways in which knowledges are constantly formed and transformed, shape-shifting social and political configurations. Thus framed, this RS will investigate the multiplicity of knowledges along three interconnected lines: First, in the (un)doing of knowledges, we will be interested in the ways various knowledges in and about Africa are generated, understood, classified, and (re)ordered. Emphasis will be on contingent practices: How are knowledges performed, stabilised and validated in concrete material relations and discourses? How are they unlearned, silenced or ignored, how are they made (ir)relevant? How do different forms of evidence-making, interpretation and knowing relate to each other? Which agencies do matter, and how? Second, in analysing the trajectories, scopes and scales of knowledges, we will consider knowledges as ongoing projects brought forth in transregional and transtemporal encounters: What happens when knowledges migrate and relocate or are displaced? What is added, truncated or substituted to fit a new setting? How are knowledges translated, adapted, contested, unlearned and re-known in the processes of circulation? Why and under what circumstances are knowledges (not) mobilised or silenced? Third, with respect to the politics of knowledge we will focus on forms of domination and contestation linked to the nexus of colonial and postcolonial perspectives, as intersected with, gender, queer and posthuman studies. The two main foci here are: to examine the co-production of epistemic and governmental orders in historical and contemporary settings, and to engage with nativist agendas of knowledges, such as the notion of indigenous/endogenous knowledge. How do such movements perform alternative epistemic strategies? What kinds of postcolonial ontological politics emerge in their wake? Work Programme: The research projects to be pursued in this RS will take up the lines of investigation as follows: First, they will explicitly address the (un)doing of knowledges. We will study how entangled historical and contemporary knowledges are produced, authorised and challenged through practices of collecting, classifying, mapping, and storage. Here, our interest is on the ways in which classificatory principles and categories of difference(s) (e.g. race, ethnicity, age, sex, gender, culture, species etc.) are established; how they materialise in scientific, literary and linguistic narrations, practices and models; how they are entwined with historical genealogies and political orders; how they connect these multiple elements, and how they are potentially dismantled and resituated. Second, projects will engage with the trajectories, scopes and scales of knowledges that account for relational processes of translation, transformation and hybridisation. We will focus on discursive and material practices in and by which knowledges are articulated and circulated through time and space. With respect to the relationship between language and knowledges we will take into account how languages coexist, travel and change in processes of translation. We will trace knowledge trajectories in colonial and postcolonial texts and discourses. We will investigate how these knowledge trajectories compete with other knowledges, how they are challenged, co-constructed and/or hybridised. The temporal and spatial circulations of archival objects appropriated and conserved during colonialism (including ethnographica, human remains, material specimens, catalogues and indexes) will be studied in relation to their impact on contemporary productions of knowledges. Finally, projects will look at the politics of knowledge in Africa and African diasporas. We will pay attention to knowledges as products of nativisation, nationalisation, indigenisation and hybridisation in relation to complex processes of migration and globalisation. Western epistemologies have never encountered a discursive vacuum, but, rather, existing ideoscapes and knowledges. The translation of foreign texts and knowledge models into African (and other) settings often involves the amalgamation and change of both "foreign" and "local" knowledges, as well as new configurations of power; processes which have often had global impacts. Here, we will study literary and audio-visual narrations as reflexive sites for negotiating migrations and global knowledge encounters. Empirically, we will engage with the co-production of epistemic and political orders, employing "the future" as a category of analysis e.g. with respect to Afrofuturism and Afrofeminism. In accordance with the cluster's aim of reconfiguring African studies, the projects in this RS will reflexively engage with current debates about the decolonisation of knowledges and will develop new methodologies with respect to the epistemological and political challenges raised by these discussions in institutional settings in Africa and beyond. We will take the lines of investigation as lenses through which we explore the multiplicity of knowledges both diachronically and synchronically. The approaches and frameworks are designed to both support and benefit from the transdisciplinarity of the RS, thus strengthening our joint contribution to the methodological framing, theoretical sharpening and empirical specification of the three core investigative concepts of the cluster—multiplicity, relationality and reflexivity.

This RS seeks to realise an understanding of multiple and interrelated processes of learning in Africa and their connectedness beyond the continent, with particular reference to—and relevance for—the cluster's key concepts of multiplicity and relationality. Our different but nonetheless related disciplinary perspectives will contribute to a joint understanding of the many roles that learning plays in the making of subjectivities, life-stages and gendered bodies, and the ways that these are framed through the unequal distribution of educational opportunities. We will also seek to analyse how learning itself is relationally constituted by — and at least partly co-constitutes — institutions, worldviews, communications, infrastructures, and transnational and transcontinental connections. Our understanding of learning goes beyond research approaches that limit their focus to formal educational settings such as schools or universities. Rather, we will address learning in a wider sense, encompassing all of the ways and processes in which knowledge and skills are transmitted, acquired and (re-)produced, regardless of institutional borders. We include private homes, schools, markets, media, streets, farms and international organisations in our considerations. We are interested in multiple learning processes and their inherent temporalities: in learning by doing; as a bodily practice; as a form of appropriation or mimesis, and as a mode of communication. Blurring the boundaries between artificial dichotomies such as formal / informal, institutional / non-institutional, modern / traditional, literate / illiterate, we will direct our interest to the interplay between various learning spaces and media. This relational perspective on learning processes in Africa and elsewhere will allow us to highlight their multiplicity and to analyse their entanglements, mutual coexistence, conditions of emergence, and the multiple ways in which learning processes combine in peoples' lives. In order to get a sense of the manifold interrelations within the highly heterogeneous African educational landscape, we see a particular need for studying learners as embedded in their specific environments, and at the same time as producers of these environments through their networks of relations. Objectives: Research will be organised along three lines of investigation: (a) communication, (b) biographies of learning, and (c) travelling concepts and practices. Africa's linguistic multiplicity constitutes both a challenge and a resource for the creation of learning spaces, whose concepts of education and knowledge acquisition are either those intrinsic to global networks stretching from Europe, the Americas and the Middle East, to South and Southeast Asia, or embedded in processes of adaptation and transformation within specific African contexts. This situation invites research into the conditions and challenges of communication as a constituent part of learning processes in multilingual settings, where the gap between the mostly European languages of formal instruction and the multiple African languages of socialisation requires acts of translation, adaptation and appropriation. In our second line of investigation, biographies of learning, we will trace the multiplicities of learning processes via a focus on the learning trajectories of individuals. This is based on the understanding that individual life trajectories are always shaped by combinations of different modalities of learning (for instance apprenticeships, Qur'an schools, informal learning in the household), whether sequentially or simultaneously. Until now, less attention has been paid to the ways in which individuals move between different paths and modes of learning, and thus different epistemic orders, for example by simultaneously attending "secular" and religious schools. Here we will take inspiration from approaches that lay stress on processes of "timing", particularly in relation to education. In our third line of investigation, we will relate processes of learning and educational experiences in Africa to globally travelling concepts and practices that shape and produce varied formations and reformations of learning settings. The global "trading zones of knowledge" and the worldwide flows of educational concepts, ideas, and knowledge invite us to study the specific ways in which learning processes and settings emerge and change, and how travelling educational concepts and practices are negotiated in, and adapted to the African context. Work Programme: With regard to our first focus, processes of communication in multilingual African learning spaces will provide challenges with regard to language choice, elaboration and corpus planning in institutional learning contexts. We will seek to investigate language choice in environments where the relationship between one or several ex-colonial as well as African languages are in competition or in parallel use for learning purposes. Another question relates to appropriations and adaptations of communicative practices in informal learning situations, such as advice-giving in both private and media contexts, which is based on the attribution of expert vs. learner/user roles in communicative interaction where norms and conventions are negotiated. Methodologically inspired by the principle of "following the people" and by relational ethnography, we propose to explore individual biographies of learning. We will follow the directions and temporalities of the life paths of young individuals towards adulthood, and their multiple connectivities with learning processes. Here, instead of following conventional approaches to the study of life courses, we will view them as being constantly made and re-made in relational ways. Taking a processual and praxeological perspective, we aim to combine theoretical debates on learning in Africa with those concerning the life course, gender, kinship and work. Those of our subprojects that are to explore travelling concepts and practices of learning will take a particular interest in global relationalities, and the ways in which the tension between the implementation of Euro-North-American models of schooling and more recent projects of "decolonising" education plays out in different national contexts, taking into account comparable processes in Asia and Latin America. Another key line of research pursued by this RS will be that of the rapidly changing landscape of higher Islamic education south of the Sahara. Over the past two decades, Muslim educationists and entrepreneurs have entered the booming private educational sector in all African countries with a sizable Muslim presence, producing new and highly gendered trajectories of learning that frequently merge "secular" and "religious" subjects.

While mobility has increased dramatically around the globe over the last decades, a focus on the Global South and Africa in particular reveals selective and ambiguous mobilities. This RS empirically and conceptually interrogates these complex patterns of (im)mobility: the movements and blockages of people, things and ideas, within, towards and outwards from Africa. (Im)mobilities in Africa and its diasporas are closely tied to multiplicity: (im)mobilities can occur simultaneously at various locations, and in complex ways; they may affect, clash with, or contradict each other beyond the standard perspectives of South-North movements of raw resources and refugees out of Africa, and developmental ideas arriving onto the continent. This RS offers a grasp on multiplicity by focusing on various forms of (im)mobilities. It foregrounds the contingent relations established by and between multiple movements of people, things, and ideas on the African continent and beyond. The angles of temporalities and spatialities take centre stage in the analytical approach. The empirical focus is on who and what moves where, when, how and why, namely on the reasons for movement or stasis, and on their attendant socio-political, socio-economic and socioecological formations. Three lines of investigation provide a broad empirical perspective on current and past mobilities, towards, from and within Africa: 1) the (im)mobility of people; 2) the (im)mobility of things; 3) the (im)mobility of ideas. Of great relevance for this RS are the theoretical advances of "Mobilities Studies" that show how the interconnections of a variety of mobility practices constitute relations, and how mobilities in turn are constituted by these relations. The bulk of the empirical research that has taken such a relational approach has happened in the Global North. As a result, such studies have rarely considered, for example, the colonial and neoliberal forms of power with which many forms of mobility are imbued, perpetuating global inequalities. Work in this RS focuses on multidirectional movement to destabilise universalised notions of mobility and stasis built on Western understandings of mobilities and to bring the conceptual innovations of "Mobilities Studies" thus far into closer conversation with African scholarship. Objectives: Research in this section develops new transdisciplinary research questions and conceptual and methodological approaches to mobilities. This RS questions the drivers of differential mobilities, dwelling and place-making practices; the environmental impacts associated with, for example, physical transport; multiple concepts of resource and environmental management and perceptions of climate and ecological events. We investigate how mobilities are tracked, ordered and governed in the context of, e.g., migration control, or biometric citizenship. We understand mobilities as molded to fit the different historical contexts in and with which they emerge, and organised through specific constellations of uneven movements. Work Programme: This RS focuses on three lines of investigation to carve out the relationship between mobilities and immobilities, in Africa and beyond: (a) the (im)mobility of people; (b) the (im)mobility of things; and (c) the (im)mobility of ideas. These lines of investigation enable a broad empirical perspective on current and past mobilities, towards, from and within Africa. We propose to explore a specific dimension of multiplicity: namely, the spatial and temporal aspects of (im)mobilities on various scales. (Im)mobility of people: the RS addresses various modes, practices and experiences of (im)mobility, within, from and towards Africa. Our studies of mobile and immobile subjects, embodied experiences of movement and stasis are aimed to reveal the politics of multiple and uneven practices and spaces of mobility by analysing movements, places, policies, programmes, effects, myths, and discourses of migration, as well as obstacles and coercive measures relative to it. We invite studies on how social practices are embedded in changing mobility patterns in the North are reshaping land use in Africa (e.g. copper and lithium mining for e-mobility); on internal and international migration from, within and to Africa; on representations of migration, flight, refugee camps and other spaces and places of (im)mobility and migration control; and on the technologisation of border management. (Im)mobility of things and technologies: subprojects on mobile (bio)materials, technical devices, and goods are invited to analyse the material-semiotic changes mobile objects undergo, and the socio-economic and infrastructural conditions they engender, whether deliberately so, or as a side-effect of globalised markets: the conditions of labour, health hazards for bodies, soils and souls, and their attendant social formations. We welcome interdisciplinary studies on the materialities of mobilities, their socio-material, economic and environmental costs and benefits. Topics may include: resource extraction and flows; the translation of new energy technologies; human / nonhuman entanglements, and invasive species; the expansion of virtual financial and informatic flows; biometric citizenship; the trade in biomaterials such as timber, ivory or organs; and changes in environmental or climatic conditions, their consequences and mitigation technologies. (Im)mobility of ideas: This line is explicitly focused on the power of concepts, models and narrations of and in mobilities. We study how travelling concepts and narrations change the contexts in which they are introduced, as well as how concepts and narrations themselves change as they move from one context to another. We investigate the interactions and co-constitution of concepts and contexts. This includes travelling ideas or concepts of nature conservation and climate change adaptation. Topics of interest include the mobility of indicators such as the United Nations' "Sustainable Development Goals"; the mobilities of tropes and narrations in the arts; and the mobilities of statistics, data and algorithms, such as in international finance or insurance practices, or in relation to population control.

The objective of this RS is to study modes of "doing ethics" in contexts where questions of well-being and societal transformation are at stake, especially in fields characterised by transnational interactions such as development, social/religious movements or international justice. We understand morals or ethics not as given principles or rules, but rather explore the processes of how moral concerns, claims, and value judgements emerge, gain recognition or cause conflict. Here, we analyse processes of communicating, negotiating and practising moralities, and we study the different modes of relating, such as collaboration, rejection or non-recognition through which moral positions arise and take shape. Searches for transformation on the African continent are shaped by a high frequency of interventions by international experts and organisations of all kinds, as well as the many national and civil society initiatives to improve everyday life. Against this background, the RS wants to study how, in the course of such activities, different moral claims, concerns, and judgements emerge, and how they influence issues of public interest, and questions of societal transformation and future-making. We study the coexisting, sometimes overlapping and frequently conflicting moral demands, worries and evaluations as expressions of multiplicity, and thus set out to analyse the historical, contemporary, and potential, imagined and personal, national and transnational relations through which they take shape. We will focus on fields such as (inter-)national jurisdiction, (trans-)national social and religious movements, and international development, investigating for example negotiations around the cooperation with the International Criminal Court, or moral communication and religious practices seeking to transform the nation. Moralities are frequently understood as given ethical principles or socially approved codes of conduct. The RS, however, conceives of moralities as continuously constituted in and through social and socio-material, often asymmetrical relations. In this sense, we want to study historical and ongoing processes of doing ethics, i.e. the relational processes through which moralities emerge. According to this praxeological understanding, our focus is on human activities that deal with evaluations and judgements—notions of fairness, well-being, and the right or wrong ways to act and live a good or bad life—as well as their recognition and/or rejection. As such, we want to explore the role that different modes of "doing ethics" play in shaping and influencing societal transformations and future perspectives. Here the RS is especially interested in conflictual modes of doing ethics in contexts of historical, contemporary and future agencies and (power) relations. Tackling these questions, we propose to elaborate our praxeological approach in order to contribute to a better understanding of the relational processes that are of key interest in the cluster as a whole. Objectives: Our notion of moralities as "doing ethics" mirrors our focus on the processuality and emergence of ethics in social interaction. The RS pursues two central objectives: first, to describe and analyse modes of doing ethics, and second, to examine the ways these shape, and are shaped by, processes of social transformation and future-oriented perspectives. In pursuit of our first objective, we will study processes of doing ethics in fields characterised by competing, overlapping or coexisting moral claims and judgements. By focusing on how people communicate, negotiate and practice moralities we aim to study how different modes of relating, such as cooperation, appropriation, rejection or disavowal, produce different moral concerns, criteria and judgements. Here we are especially interested in situations of disagreement, including claims of moral incompatibility and incommensurability; i.e., the impossibility of translating one's moral criteria and practices into the categories of others. For example, the refusal to translate religious concerns into the bureaucratic and legal rules of the nation state or to adopt behavioural norms advocated by international NGOs. Our second objective is to scrutinise the connection between modes of doing ethics and social transformations, and to find out, for instance, how public moral claims and processes of exclusion or contestation relate to inequalities, changing power relations and emerging forms of alternative sociality. Thus, with a focus on contexts of transformation, we will be particularly attentive to the power relations from which moralities emerge, and which they might change. Altogether, we aim to develop a joint, interdisciplinary approach to relational processes of emerging moralities within public discourses, institutions, and material practices. Work Programme: The work programme of our RS is guided by the combination of three methodological takes: communicating, negotiating and practicing moralities. Moreover, it is organised according to our common focus on situations characterised by initiatives and interventions of new African and non-African actors, in which competing and overlapping moral claims and judgements emerge. In particular, we will study contexts affected by the interventions of transnational agencies (e.g. individual actors, organisations, new judicial regulations or material infrastructures). Interdisciplinary teams will focus on conflictual relations wherein moralities shape, and, at the same time, are shaped by situations of change; and in which they thus tend to become explicit as they are contested, excluded, appropriated, and sometimes imposed and prescribed. The perspective of communicating moralities starts out from the premise that morality is communicatively constituted. This approach will be of particular use in the study and conceptualisation of the role of speech (acts) in the sphere of public discourse, for example in studies on the communicative construction of health, sexuality and gendered moralities in the context of pandemic discourses, including (inter-)national sensitization campaigns. The focus on negotiating moralities offers an original access to processes of doing ethics in institutional contexts, for example, courts of justice, reconciliation commissions or charity organisations. Here we are especially interested in the questions of when and how different stakeholders bring in and bargain over moral claims and judgements in these contexts, how these are made explicit and enforced, and at what points they influence public debates on transformation. Practising moralities will provide access to the materiality and situatedness of doing ethics, and thus to actors and agencies, and the roles that bodies, objects, spaces and infrastructures play in producing and shaping tacit and more explicit moralities. Studying for example international development interventions or religious/social movements we ask how moral concerns, criteria and judgements are established and expressed in and through material practices which strive to bring about "the good life", and/or change.

Over the last few years, the struggle over memory and heritage – determining what to remember and celebrate or to forget and condemn – has gained new strength from both within and outside of Africa. On the continent, the 'Rhodes Must Fall' movement in South Africa (2015); the construction of huge monuments and statues dedicated to Africanness; the (re)naming of bridges, airports and highways after former or present political figures; the constant reshaping of the pantheon of national heroes in many African countries, and the impact of the digital turn on both individual and collective memory regimes have created a new momentum. Elsewhere, debates on the restitution of artefacts, such as the Benin Bronzes (2022), or the renaming of streets in Bordeaux or Berlin have brought tensions inherent in the long-shared colonial history of Africa and Europe to the attention of a wide international public. In terms of the vast field of memory studies related to the African continent and its diasporas, however, this attention is focused on just the tip of the iceberg. Group or individual memories may corroborate, challenge or complexify narratives and the meanings of artefacts that relate to historical agency and past developments in the process of the collective re/construction of the present and future of groups, nations, continents or the world. These multiplicitous memories must be understood in terms of the relations they establish within and beyond the contexts of heritage, historiography, ethnography, archival practices, musealisation, monumentalism and the arts, among others. Their different epistemological bases; their particular selection, retrieval, transmission and circulation protocols; and the structural positioning of their stakeholders in terms of power relations all speak to multiplicity, relationality, and world-making. A main objective of RS Re:membering is to scrutinise such public memorial expressions, which often co-exist in spaces and times. If this RS had a subtitle, it would be: Memory, archives and living heritage in Africa. World-making appears for us, then, as a leitmotif, describing both the inner workings and the provisional results of multiple, relational and reflexive processes of re-membering in Africa, calling (further) attention to what is at stake: how convivial or conflicting memorial setups may factor in – or indeed, may more or less lead to – the making of very different worlds and/or the destruction of others. Current practices prioritising memory – practices of recovery, reparation-seeking, reclamation and retrieval – have largely enabled and affirmed an understandable moral outrage about past connections between Africa and the Global North. However, an agenda-setting question is: How much might this strong focus deny agency to new relational modes or overlook ameliorative actions aimed at re-membering (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2015)? RS Re:membering will thus thematically foreground questions around, for example, memories that generate unacknowledged transformations within African societies – transformations involving living heritage and embodied forms of knowledge transmission that take place far from the institutional realm, such as song, dance, divination and ritual, as well as community-driven archival initiatives and collection-building made possible by the digital turn. As appropriate to this research, we aim to complement AM's 2.0 focus on world-making with reflections on memory from the Global South, the work of theorists whose concepts – such as re-existence (Albán, 2017), human incompleteness, conviviality (Nyamnjoh, 2017) and planetary thinking (Spivak, 1999) – offer support for broader reflections on the future of human relations here on Earth. Nyamnjoh defines incompleteness as being open to various 'competing and complementary processes of social cultivation through practice, performance and experience, without pre-empting or foreclosing particular units of analysis in a world in which the messiness of encounters and relationships frowns on binaries, dichotomies and dualisms' (Nyamnjoh, 2017, p. 267). Both Albán and Nyamnjoh insist on the resilient force of multiple practices of knowledge production and transfer, calling for the development of lines of thinking beyond the binary models that are unfit for the analysis of forms of practices (songs, divination, dance, etc.) that do not conform to them. We propose three areas of inquiry to offer new modes of engagement with memory: (1) Memory Repositories: Archives, museums and intangible heritage are major sites for the (un)making of memory; for identity-recognition claims in the making; of contestation by subaltern or marginalised groups; and for experiments made possible by the digital turn such as digital repatriation, digital outreach and online community projects. In this area of inquiry, we will also ask how the relevance of museums and archives may be heightened by efforts of community and outreach projects, striving for democratisation and creating equal access. (2) Memory, Power and Circulations: This area of inquiry will focus on increasing levels of discussion around the archivisation and musealisation of local practices, i.e., per UNESCO World Heritage guidelines, Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH), Living Heritage and heritage-making, promoting a critical stance. (3) Memory, Affect and African Ways of Remembering: This area of inquiry concerns memory constructions which, combined and linked to African ontologies, have methods of transmission that engage the body through forms such as dance, music, song, dream, divination and ritual.

Understood in the sense of conveying meaning across or between languages, translating fundamentally constitutes and characterises both the multilingual life-worlds that we in African Studies address, as well as the everyday work and cooperation of our Cluster itself. In RS Translating we will study not only these language-related aspects, but also the production and circulation of concepts, policies and practices within and between multilingual contexts as processes of translating. In the entangled world(s) of today, linguistic translation – now often facilitated by AI, most often in and out of English – plays an ambivalent role that has long troubled scholars in African Studies, in as much as it enables exchanges but also levels differences. With regard to Africa, we increasingly observe the emergence of a more multipolar world and, with it, the rise of new hegemonic claims reflected in new linguistic dynamics and translation processes: Nigerian Pentecostal global missionary campaigns being carried out using simultaneous translation in multiple languages; growing numbers of Confucius centres and Mandarin language classes; and massive investment by countries such as Russia, Iran and China in the production of social media content in African languages, for example. Together with diasporic and local initiatives to safeguard African languages, these emergent dynamics bypass state efforts of standardisation, monolingual ideologies and longstanding Western monopolies. In RS Translating we will study how languages and practices of translating re-establish dynamic relations between words and worlds, crossing spatial, moral, political and artistic boundaries to produce new ways of being, seeing and living together, generating different but entangled worlds. Our research will be structured according to three lines of inquiry: (1) We will empirically study translation in action, here understood in terms of the multiple negotiations, approximations and interceptions that constantly occur in everyday interactions in multilingual contexts, across a variety of languages. Going beyond notions of translating as a simple search for (e.g. linguistic) equivalence, we will study a range of relational, socio-material practices (taking place, e.g., in schools; as part of artistic production processes; or during court cases or sermons), including their bodily and technological aspects. (2) Our empirical research on translation beyond transfer will deal with translation in relation to the discursive construction of global conceptual models or knowledge regimes in specific fields, such as those of education, human rights legislation or development policy. Here, we will interrogate the construction of a so-called one-world world – a world reduced to, and by, the singular logic of universal meta-categories and the dominant monolingual systematisation of subordinated languages, religions, cultures, legal systems and ethnic identities to which Africa has been continuously subjected (see 4.1.4). Grounding our inquiries in the Cluster's three core concepts of multiplicity, reflexivity and relationality that, taken together, call into question the hierarchical relations between 'the Western universal' and 'the African particulars', we will inquire as to the status and interconnections of universalisms in today's entangled world. (3) Our third line of inquiry, rethinking universalisms is thus intended as a critical intervention, scrutinising the ethical dimensions of practices and studies of translating, which can be oppressively complicit with the universalist reduction and levelling of differences. Instead, we suggest a shift to the study and practice of translating as an incessant relational process, exploring translation 'from language to language' (Diagne et al., 2020, p. 18) as joint work in a shared world where universalising is understood as a specific, bounded ethical project. Translating in this sense refers to forms of creative dialogue across epistemes and languages, and hence to ways of negotiating our multiple common world(s). Thus, our core aim in RS Translating is to critically engage with the ongoing production, emergence and contestation of socio-material worlds in which hegemonic claims and exclusionary essentialisms continue to persist or (re)emerge, yet in which languages and epistemes also go on troubling, testing and enriching each other, and opening up new ways to make worlds.