This essay introduces the concepts of astropoetics and cosmopoetics to describe literary manifestations of astroculture in the twentieth-century novel. It suggests that astropoetic texts are media of astroculture, bringing their formal conventions and traditions to bear on the particular questions raised by attempts to instil outer space with human meaning. For the student of literary history, astropoetics thus offers a specific window onto the history of poetics and criticism. Drawing on the history of metaphors and Hans Blumenberg’s metaphorology, the essay explores how these concepts illuminate the novel genre’s epistemology, ontology, and anthropology. By tracing the interplay between cosmic order and literary meaning, it argues that astropoetics and cosmopoetics offer a framework for understanding the novel’s potential for producing knowledge, its nature as ‘real’ or ‘imagined’, and its function as a medium of expression. The essay concludes by examining the ‘Ithaca’ chapter from James Joyce’s Ulysses as a key modernist text that exemplifies the self-reflexive potential of cosmopoetics in the novel.

In Egypt, many women have created various private Facebook groups for women only to support women. As exclusive spaces for women, these Facebook groups enabled women in Egypt to share their experiences and quickly became a source of awareness. Concurrently, their proliferation and popularity as spaces exclusively encompassing thousands of women have attracted extensive mass media coverage in Egypt, particularly from talk show programs. Accordingly, this article uses critical discourse analysis to explore the discourses on popular women-only Facebook groups in mainstream talk show programs in Egypt. Ten talk show program videos were analyzed to identify the discourses on these Facebook groups. The article displays conversations from four talk show program segments to showcase two prevalent and simultaneous discourses. The first discourse conveys a moral panic over these Facebook groups for enabling women to discuss problems on matters of the private sphere. Conversely, the second discourse conveys an embracement of Facebook group creators’ entrepreneurial practices manifested from their Facebook group. Subsequently, these two discourses are critically analyzed by drawing on literature on gendered dynamics of the private and public spheres in Egypt and postfeminism in connection with commercial media logic.

The challenges of researching “up” are widely acknowledged. Moreover, these hurdles are intensified for law and courts field investigators where the profession’s cherished virtues – protocol, hierarchy and decorum – hamper access to interviewees and could potentially be detrimental to rapport building for the researcher unfamiliar with courtroom formality. This paper draws on the author’s field experience to highlight the potential of the informal dimension of fieldwork – “hanging out” – in traversing some of the limits of researching legal and judicial elites. It teases out the complexities of studying judges as political actors and the peculiar circumstances of studying legal elites in close-knit circles. Through “hanging out” at relevant court events, strategically positioning oneself in social events and informally building rapport, the author gained access to spaces usually closed off to outsiders. By “hanging out” with judges, the author challenged her perceptions of absolute judicial fidelity to the law, interrogated their professed devotion to apoliticism and the experience humanised judges and helped her deal with her own discomfort with interviewing judges. The paper concludes by weighing the promises and limits of the informal approach to researching legal and judicial elites, pondering ethical considerations, the researcher’s positionality and the boundaries of continuous residence.

In both Bolivia and Benin, the state presumes that citizens can navigate its bureaucracy even if it does not provide them with the requisite literacy skills. However, bureaucratic procedures are highly characterised by literacy and digital literacy and people with little or no literacy require alternative strategies to manage them. This article contributes to debates on (il)literacy and bureaucracy studies by looking at the learning practices of persons with little or no literacy competence in La Paz and El Alto, Bolivia, and Parakou, Benin. It investigates their ways of coping with such bureaucratic requirements and especially how they manage to acquire specific literacy abilities in order to complete procedures. Our conclusions are based on empirical data obtained through various kinds of interviews and participant observation that we carried out during more than 12 months of fieldwork.

Nos últimos anos, a história africana tem sido objeto de celebração e discussão, mas também disputas, em diferentes âmbitos – acadêmico, político, cultural. Particularmente, por meio do resgate e valorização do passado africano, tem-se buscado entender criticamente as contradições de seu presente e, a partir disso, formar alicerces que ajudem na edificação de um novo futuro para o continente. Um dos pilares desse processo de re-visão tem sido, reconhecidamente, as suas produções artísticas, e, em especial, a sua produção cinematográfica – considerada ao mesmo tempo como produto e produtora de Histórias. Dito isto, o artigo busca lançar luz sobre as continuidades e descontinuidades da produção audiovisual africana nas últimas décadas, a fim de entender como o continente africano e sua população têm sido imaginados e re-imaginados em diferentes momentos da história recente.

The re-emergence of competitive elections in Africa has sparked new interest in political mobilization on the continent. Much of this literature focusses on political actors and the strategies they use to mobilize. If the campaign activists are reviewed at all, they are often categorized by their ethnic or religious affiliation. Thereby, abilities and potentials for political participation, which are important within conceptual literature on political mobilization, are side-lined. This article uses an activist-centered perspective to review the political mobilization of motorcycle taxi drivers, eastern Congo. Based on empirical research in 2020 and 2021, it evaluates the mobilization potentials of the so-called motards and their deployment during political action. The article finds that motards possess unique potentials for participating in political campaigns due to their mobility and large social networks but only partially deploy them. While their mobility potential is widely utilized, the mobilization of their social networks is hampered by a lack of allegiances and infrequent contacts with politicians. Based on the research findings, the article advocates expanding the perception of political mobilization in Africa by reflecting on the preconditions of mobilizability such as enabling potentials, interactions with activists and aligned political strategies.

This study investigated perceptions of climate change among residents of 12 villages in Bushbuckridge, Mpumalanga, South Africa, through household surveys and focus group discussions. These perceptions were compared with climatic trends derived from Skukuza meteorological station data (1981–2023), focusing on summer seasonal temperature and rainfall patterns. The analysis of meteorological station data revealed significant increases in seasonal maximum temperatures, a marked decline in the number of wet days, and high interannual variability in total seasonal rainfall. While local perceptions aligned with recorded trends of rising temperatures, delayed onset of the rainy season, and more erratic rainfall patterns, discrepancies emerged regarding total rainfall amounts; participants perceived an overall decline, whereas meteorological data showed no statistically significant long-term trend in seasonal rainfall totals. These findings highlight the value of integrating local knowledge into climate change research. Local perceptions provide critical insights into micro-level climate impacts, such as changes in rainfall frequency and intensity, that may not be evident in observational data. Combining these perspectives with scientific measurements can enhance the design of culturally relevant and effective climate adaptation strategies. This approach fosters stronger community engagement and ensures that policies address both the observed and perceived impacts of climate change, thereby supporting more sustainable and inclusive responses at local and national scales.

We are keenly interested in understanding how the “glocal” scene intervened in the ways of doing politics, and how strategies of political reproduction of longestablished oligarchies and autocracies could present themselves as absolutely new and antipolitical, claiming for radical reforms in the realms of economy, society, culture and education. India, the Philippines, Kenya, Burkina Faso, Mozambique, Germany, Italy, Colombia, Suriname and Brazil were chosen as empirical cases.

Africanisation, decolonisation and transformation are different conceptual ideas and principles that have emerged at different moments of South Africa’s (SA) history as a way of engaging with colonial-apartheid oppression and its legacies. These three discourses tend to be engaged in isolation from each other and continue to be polarised by many. This non-combined approach, however, has limitations, as it risks limiting our (re)imagination of the future of South African higher education (SAHE) from multiple perspectives. Since the dawn of South Africa’s democracy, transformation has been a favoured discourse and conceptual framework. However, the 2015 Fallist protests revealed that the transformation approach, when applied alone, cannot adequately redress South Africa’s colonial-apartheid legacies in higher education; there is a need to include and be inherently guided by the anti-oppression ideologies that informed resistance against colonialism and apartheid because they articulate(d) a particular vision for what a liberated South Africa should look like. Inspired by Es’kia Mphahlele – who believed that after independence new ideas will demand expression and create organs of public opinion, and a hybridity of ideas will rid formerly oppressed societies of their oppressive practices – this article explores and analyses the discourses of transformation, decolonisation and Africanisation relative to the South African higher education system. Having considered South Africa’s history of colonialism and apartheid, and how it has impacted the present day higher education system, I ultimately propose a hybrid-pluriversal approach that combines insights from all three frameworks. Potentially, this approach can positively impact the ongoing process of redressing colonial-apartheid legacies in the South African education system.

In Ayi Kwei Armah’s texts, the figure serves as a nexus of aesthetic and ethical visions that opens the literary text to innovative and non-conventional readings, enhancing the relationship between the literary work as a mise en scene and mise en abyme of graphic signs with other art forms such as plastic arts, painting, sculpture, photography, etc. In this chapter, I set out to critically probe the nature of that figure, as represented in some of the key works of Ayi Kwei Armah. I explore the various ways in which this author employs aesthetic forms that constitute different ways of grappling with the ‘figure’ of his quest. This quest encompasses his ideological views of Africa’s past, culture and possible renaissance and the continuous re-imagination of his role as an African author in a global system in which Africa continues to occupy a marginal position. The figures of this quest take different forms in his works as he progressively perfects his creative medium and vision, depicting different facets of postcolonial realities and emergent existential challenges to the African self

This special issue “Africa*n Relations. Modalities Reflected” comes out of the first conference of the Cluster of Excellence Africa Multiple. Reconfiguring African Studies, which took place from 14th to 17th July 2021. Like the conference, the special issue is dedicated to the cluster’s annual theme and heuristic angle of modes of relating. In the overall research agenda of the Africa Multiple, the notion of relationality takes centerstage. With the focus on Africa not as a given but as a multiple constantly in the making, relations through which it is constituted and upated necessarily come to the fore. Our attention is drawn to processes, appearances and practices and hence to the variety of modes of coming into relation. Accordingly, next to medialities, spatialities, and temporalities, modalities is a heuristic angle in Africa Multiple meant to structure the study of relations we encounter in African lifeworlds, which can take a vast spectrum of forms, like e.g. exchange, acceptance, adaptation, convergence, dependence, hierarchization, conflict, struggle, resistance, and denial. Furthermore, modalities is fundamentally interlinked with the Africa Multiple Cluster’s key concept of reflexivity, which requires the researchers to reflect upon the relational modalities of their position and the very conditions of their knowledge production. This issue’s six contributions which approach modes of relations from a variety of perspectives and with a view on different African countries and their diasporic links, were written by scholars from a variety of disciplines, namely, sociology, geography, anthropology, religious and literary studies and philosophy. Furthermore, in line with critically reflecting upon the modalities of academic knowledge production, it also contains contributions by two artists, the French photographer Aurélien Gillier, who enters in a dialogue with the sociologist Joschka Philipps, and the Kenyan author Yvonne Ahdiambo Owuor, who critically reflects on creative forms of knowledge production on and in Africa.

This special issue “Africa*n Relations. Modalities Reflected” comes out of the first conference of the Cluster of Excellence Africa Multiple. Reconfiguring African Studies, which took place from 14th to 17th July 2021. Like the conference, the special issue is dedicated to the cluster’s annual theme and heuristic angle of modes of relating. In the overall research agenda of the Africa Multiple, the notion of relationality takes centerstage. With the focus on Africa not as a given but as a multiple constantly in the making, relations through which it is constituted and upated necessarily come to the fore. Our attention is drawn to processes, appearances and practices and hence to the variety of modes of coming into relation. Accordingly, next to medialities, spatialities, and temporalities, modalities is a heuristic angle in Africa Multiple meant to structure the study of relations we encounter in African lifeworlds, which can take a vast spectrum of forms, like e.g. exchange, acceptance, adaptation, convergence, dependence, hierarchization, conflict, struggle, resistance, and denial. Furthermore, modalities is fundamentally interlinked with the Africa Multiple Cluster’s key concept of reflexivity, which requires the researchers to reflect upon the relational modalities of their position and the very conditions of their knowledge production. This issue’s six contributions which approach modes of relations from a variety of perspectives and with a view on different African countries and their diasporic links, were written by scholars from a variety of disciplines, namely, sociology, geography, anthropology, religious and literary studies and philosophy. Furthermore, in line with critically reflecting upon the modalities of academic knowledge production, it also contains contributions by two artists, the French photographer Aurélien Gillier, who enters in a dialogue with the sociologist Joschka Philipps, and the Kenyan author Yvonne Ahdiambo Owuor, who critically reflects on creative forms of knowledge production on and in Africa.

Antipode has become a key platform for engaging with decolonial and anticolonial scholarship, as well as adjacent fields such as Black geographies, Indigenous studies, Latin American feminism, and work on settler-colonialism. African reference points in this literature, however, have been far less common, both in the journal and more broadly in radical geography. Recognizing that there are several loci of enunciation for decolonial and anticolonial work, we committed to curating a series of conversations with and interventions by leading scholars from Africa and its diaspora associated with these epistemic and political projects. This long-read article, a first for the journal, brings these conversations and interventions together, highlighting the power of each as well as the common threads that connect them.

The concept Diaspora applied to Africa is a misnomer of sorts, bearing in mind that Africa was the original home of the oldest human beings. Science has discussed how the earlier waves of emigrant Africans (humans originally domiciled in Africa) have adapted to their environment, becoming various shades as melanin presence dictated. Later groups are in India, Tonga, New Zealand, Australia, the Americas: black skinned, flat nose, but with various forms of stretchered out hair. These earlier groups are not called, technically, Diaspora. Only recent migrants to the West, Europe, Asia Minor, Asia and the Americas are called Diaspora: they migrated voluntarily for various reasons or they were forced out of Africa as captives. Part of the challenges that African Studies instigate are fraught because of (a) the participation of continental Africans in slavery wars in Eastern, Central Africa, Northern and Central Africa; (b) the Middle Passage of the Atlantic and the Sahara/Pacific; (c) the empty baggage syndrome and epistemicide and, (d) the Willie Lunch Syndrome of Divide and Conquer exemplified in Obama phenomenon. African studies writ large must then encompass (a) Repairing the Breach; (b) Recovering the Heritage - Calypso, Blues and Jazz, Reggae, Rastafari, Sports; (c) Restoring Indigenous Knowledge Systems by erasing epistemicide and (d) Restoring the African humanity. These efforts must be multi/inter disciplinary and encompass all domains of human intellectual theory and practice. Recovering the human intellectual traditions and knowledge systems of continental and Diasporas would be a treasure trove of ideas to solve many of the challenges faced by humanity today; this will require transcending what Claude Ake has dubbed “Social Science as Imperialism”. In this essay, I attempt to sketch what would constitute a more appropriate, historiographically accurate and globally judicious understanding of African Studies that is holistic. My goal is to sketch an African Studies that is not segmented on the basis of the agendas of exogenous forces bent on decimating global African peoples, by playing diverse groups against each other, but one which recognizes the continuity of human heritage as primarily African heritage writ large, and one which recognizes that the African Diasporas, recent and classical, are all continuous with Africa feeding and renewing the world with humanity by virtue of being the original home of humanity. This calls for so many different approaches, but primary being the complete overhaul of the current curricula used to programme the minds of humanity, especially those emanating from European climes, to persist in negro-gaze: the objectification and exoticization of Africa and peoples of Africa globally, thereby derogating their humanities and agencies.

The book “African Studies Centres Around the World – A Network-Based Inventory” compiles a selection of contributions by the directors of eleven African Studies centres from four continents. They comprise Africa’s oldest centre on the continent, at the University of Cape Town, the European centres in Bordeaux, Lisbon and Hradec Králové and the two North American Universities of Florida and Indiana. Central and South America’s contributions to African Studies is represented by the centres in San José, Costa Rica, Santiago de Cuba and Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. The Asian centres are located at Jawaharlal University in Mumbai, India, and at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul, South Korea. The eleven chapters show the very diverse history of the centres, explaining their different structures, underpinning the need for more exchange and collaborative research. The volume presents some aspects of the ongoing critical reflections on the historical and political development of African Studies in various parts of the world, disseminating first-hand knowledge while the chapters encourage to open the exchange and collaboration across regional, disciplinary and academic boundaries.

In the coming decades, smallholder agriculture in the Global South will experience significant transformations due to environmental challenges, urbanization and demographic shifts. Although current research offers valuable perspectives on agrarian change, few studies have systematically tracked transitions in smallholder agriculture over time. Understanding long-term dynamics and integrating insights from diverse regions and sub-populations are essential for crafting effective and sustainable rural policies. This study employs a mixed-methods approach, combining quantitative longitudinal data from four time points (2010, 2014, 2019, and 2023) with qualitative insights from 10 villages within the Agincourt Health and Demographic Surveillance System site in Bushbuckridge, Mpumalanga Province, South Africa. Through both quantitative modeling and qualitative analysis, we explore agrarian trajectories, revealing trends, determinants, and transitions among various agrarian strategies. The findings emphasize the significant role of migrant and local off-farm employment in influencing the likelihood and level of subsistence farming, highlighting the dynamic nature of agrarian livelihoods. The impact of demographic factors, such as household size and gender, vary across different agrarian strategies. These insights offer valuable guidance for policy and intervention strategies aimed at enhancing rural livelihoods.

Child labour continues to be a global problem affecting children and families across the globe. It is work performed by a child that is likely to interfere with their education or harm their health, physical, mental, moral, or social development. To address the problem, the international community agreed to adopt different legal frameworks on child labour. Malawi ratified these international human rights instruments and has even enacted domestic legislation to overcome the problem. Furthermore, initiatives that include the legal ban on child labour, access to education initiatives, poverty alleviation programmes, and direct interventions by governments and the International Labour Organisation (ILO) on incentive-based schemes have been implemented to combat the problem. Despite these efforts, child labour is increasing, especially in the agricultural sector. In this study, I argue that there is a gap between the promise the legal framework gives children of addressing child labour and the reality of the problem. Thus, the existing legal framework on child labour fails to operate to cure child labour, mainly as a result of contextual barriers outside and within the law. At its core, the thesis argues that children in Malawi experience their childhood in a context where they are expected to work for their households’ survival strategies and as expected by the community. The thesis demonstrates that if the gap between the legal frameworks on child labour and the reality of child labour on the ground is to be addressed, there is a need to reimagine and restate the notion of childhood through the lens of integrated childhood. This new integrated childhood perspective acknowledges the reality that children's roles are incorporated into household survival strategies and community expectations, which sometimes diverge from the legally framed notion of childhood and child labour captured in international and Malawi's legal frameworks. The study explores its research questions by employing socio-legal research methods that first involve desk research, followed by empirical field research that incorporates Theatre for Development (TfD) as a research approach. Through a performative analysis in the TfD process, the child labour legal framework is examined alongside the communities’ lived realities to explore both analytical and practical solutions to the problem of child labour in Malawi.