Publications

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.

In this essay, we offer an economics-rooted conceptualisation of the term “relationality”. To achieve the fundamental purpose of economic analysis, we argue, it is useful to conceptualise “relationality” as a process of exploring links that explain outcomes. In alignment with the broad objective of economic research, our perspective on “relationality” sheds light on how it can aid in comprehending our world as is and how it came to be. We illustrate the power of our suggested conceptualisation of “relationality” via three specific empirical applications, including the analysis of regional economic integration in Africa. We also discuss the potential of our conceptualisation in “Reconfiguring African Studies”.

Ziel dieses Beitrags ist es, den Gebrauch von Phraseologismen in der Gesundheitskommunikation zu untersuchen. Ausgehend von einem Korpus, das aus Plakaten der HIV/AIDS-Aufklärung im frankophonen Afrika besteht, liegt der Fokus auf den Beziehungen der Phraseologismen zu Bildelementen. Die Analyse dieses bislang wenig beachteten Typs der sozialen Werbung zeigt, dass Phraseologismen in den Aufklärungsbotschaften eher selten vorkommen und zudem jene mit schwacher semantischer Idiomatizität überwiegen. Diese sind vergleichsweise transparent, da ihre phraseologische kaum von der wörtlichen Bedeutung abweicht, welche in der Regel durch ein Bildelement illustriert wird.

The chapter discusses the idea and ideology of “art for art’s sake” in historical context. It argues that the late nineteenth-century aestheticist version of this concept must be seen as a particular configuration with roots stretching back to antiquity. It presents a number of systematic clusters proposed by historians of aesthetics for approaching art for art’s sake and explores key elements of the debates in which the idea was fielded. These include the artwork’s autonomy, its reference to external reality, its value and utility (including the obligation to moral didacticism), and the shifting roles of critics and of audiences/readers.

How can cinema be used to understand our society? Different sociologists asked throughout history this question. Generally, they assume that since all subjects act within social institutions, films necessarily tell us something about aspects of life in society. Besides, their "visual power," and their narratives, would be even able to shape our expectations in unconscious ways. That's because the “social life” is presented to us as orderly, where people accept prescribed roles that they find satisfactory or unsatisfactory. Some of them portray alienation and despair, as well as a series of ways in which people face their social conditions and the challenges that life imposes on them. In this sense, watching a film becomes a sociologically significant event as its experience affects us emotionally, psychologically, and pedagogically. Based on this, the paper aims to discuss some sociological perspectives on the relationship between art, cinema, and society.

Un mundo marcado cada vez más por las desigualdades, violencias y restricciones de movilidad, nos motivó a analizar fenómenos relacionados con las fronteras, sean políticas, geográficas, simbólicas, sociales, psicológicas o virtuales, que controlan cuerpos y regulan vidas. Dichos fenómenos se encuentran presentes en las fronteras internas y externas de muchos países latinoamericanos. En este texto planteamos que el arte de frontera está evidenciando la cromática del poder, (re)creando intersticios que desmantelan la estructura jerarquizada de separación. Nos referimos a proyectos que se nutren y retroalimentan de diversos discursos, acciones y posibilidades simbólicas, en zonas intersticiales de espacio y tiempo, caracterizadas por oposiciones antonímicas, como centro/periferia, superioridad/inferioridad o riqueza/pobreza. Estos proyectos se nombran como arte de frontera, comprendiendo como tal, aquél que procura reconocer y replantear cualquier tipo de límite, realizado por artistas que enfocan su interés en espacios impregnados de violencia, incomprensión, conflictos, diferencias, resentimientos y malentendidos. Para analizar este acontecer seleccionamos las fronteras nacionales e intraurbanas pertenecientes a las ciudades de Tijuana (México) y Salvador de Bahía (Brasil).

Exploring the art of living in unequal and racist societies across the Black Atlantic requires decolonial methods that go beyond logocentric approaches. Cultural expressions such as music, dance and poetry offer a chance for a co-production of knowledges that transcends epistemological, socio-spatial and racial boundaries. This paper revolves around the quest for a life in dignity and possible ways of transformation towards this horizon. It is based on the ongoing research project “Moral Geographies of (Re-)Existence” that brings together Afro-diasporic artists, academics and community actors to explore, discuss and exchange different answers to the empowering question of a life in dignity. Diverse actors from Brazil, Colombia, Mozambique and Germany engage in this collaborative approach to participatory research-creation. Working remotely under Covid-19 conditions, we produced six transdisciplinary video performances in this collective. Different types of knowledges emerge from a dialogue of music, dance, poetry and academic concepts, fulfilling the different needs and interests of the participants. The focus of this paper lies on diverse modes of (re-)existence that appear in the videos and map out struggles for a life in dignity. Multiple rhythms, movements and images envision an ethics and aesthetics of existence in the African diaspora. Combining academic research with artistic production not only unfolds conditions of racialized exploitation, but also helps discover possibilities of transformation and overcoming. Thus, connecting artists, researchers and community actors from Latin America, Africa and Europe through Afro-diasporic music and culture stimulates mutual learning processes and contributes to academic and racial justice.

Promoting human mobility and reducing inequality among countries are the Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs) targets. However, measuring human mobility, assessing its heterogeneity and changes, and exploring associated mechanisms and context effects are still key challenges, especially for developing countries. This study attempts to review the concept of human mobility with complex thinking, assess human mobility across forty countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), and examine the effect of climatic and socioeconomic factors. Based on the coined definition of human mobility, international migration and cross-border trips are taken to assess human mobility in terms of permanent migration and temporary moves. The forty SSA countries are hence classified into four mobility groups. Regression models are performed to identify key determinants and estimate their effects on mobility. The results reveal that seven of these forty countries had a high mobility, whereas most experienced a decline in permanent migration. Lesotho, Cabo Verde, and Namibia presented high temporary moves, while Eritrea, Rwanda, Equatorial Guinea, and Liberia had a high permanent migration. Climatic and socioeconomic conditions demonstrated significant effects on mobility but were different for temporary moves and permanent migration. Wet extremes reduced mobility, whereas extreme temperature variations had positive effects. Dry extremes promoted permanent migration but inhibited temporary moves. Economic wealth and political instability promoted permanent migration, while the young population counteracted temporary moves. Food insecurity and migrant networks stimulated human mobility. The analysis emphasises the interest in analysing human mobility for risk reduction and sustainability management at the multi-county level.

«‹Rassen› gibt es nicht!» Diesen Satz haben wohl alle, die sich mit Rassismus beschäftigen, so oder ähnlich bereits einmal gehört oder gelesen, und viele dürften ihn auch schon selbst einmal geäussert haben, um sich damit gegen ein biologisches Verständnis zur Einteilung von Menschen nach Herkunft und Hautfarbe abzugrenzen. Oft wird dabei auf die Autorität naturwissenschaftlicher Expertise rekurriert, wenn beispielsweise angeführt wird, dass «es keine ‹Rassen› gibt» (Arndt 2011, 660), dass «Rassen […] keine biologischen Tatsachen» seien, es «keine wissenschaftliche Basis für die Einteilung der Menschheit in Rassen» gebe (Degele 2008, 96) bzw. dass «‹Rassen› […] keine biologische Realität» hätten (El-Tayeb 2005, 7). Solche Aussagen sind wichtig, um gegen Versuche vorzugehen, soziale Ungleichheit, Ausbeutung und Rassismus mit biologischen Differenzierungen zu rechtfertigen. «Rasse» erscheint in derlei Äusserungen aber überwiegend als anachronistische Fiktion sowie als Produkt pseudowissenschaftlicher Verirrungen, denen in aufklärerischer Manier – so die Hoffnung – die Faktizität neuester wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnisse entgegenzusetzen sei. Doch die häufige Wiederholung dieser Aussagen hat bis heute weder biologische Rassifizierungen abgeschafft, noch Rassismus beendet. Zudem wird zumeist übersehen, dass dadurch die Biologie und insbesondere die Bedingungen und Praktiken biologischer Wissensproduktion der kritischen Betrachtung entzogen werden, wodurch wichtige Aspekte des Problems Rasse aus dem Blick geraten.

Connecting creative movements of Black re-existence across the African diaspora is crucial to fight colonial and racist exclusion. However, this requires highly sensitive means and media to express bodily, emotional and spiritual experiences of transformation that can hardly be captured by logocentric approaches. Against this backdrop, the multimedia book “Todo Rio Resiste Mar: Cartografias de Memorias Afrolatinas” (dirs. Valerie V. V. Gruber and Gilbert Shang Ndi, Andarilha Edições 2023, https://doi.org/10.15495/EPub_UBT_00007702) presents illustrations, poems, memoirs, choreographic and music performances created by young Afrodescendant artists from marginalised communities in Salvador da Bahia (Brazil) and Cartagena de Indias (Colombia). The anthology is the result of an exchange programme carried out over four years based on transdisciplinary methods of participatory action research, social arts and research-creation. The design of the e-book follows the journey of a river returning to the ocean, meandering through complex social and cultural territories. The encounter of different waters and currents is more than just a metaphor; it is the conceptual ground for the understanding of Afro-Latin American re-existence, personal and collective overcoming as well as decolonial healing. This presentation invites the public to dive into the rhythms, memories and imaginations of the exchange participants, reorganized in a map-collage with strong audio-visual impulses. The diverse voices and representations will set afloat discussions on the ethics and aesthetics of Afro-Latin American struggles against colonialism and racism, while raising questions on the degree to which traumatic experiences can be transmitted and transformed through artistic means across time, space and power hierarchies.

This paper engages in an ocean-centred reading of the novels Le pagne léger and Patera by Aïssatou Diamanka-Besland and Celles qui attendent by Fatou Diome. I show how the liminal space of the coast enables the characters to think and imagine beyond restrictions on land, but also to overcome notions of the ocean as either an adversary or a source of income. In the novels, the acknowledgment of the powerful presence of the ocean opens new paths to navigate towards self-determination and rebirth. The novels can inspire us, as readers and researchers, to acknowledge the powerful presence of the ocean in our academic work. I argue that Fatou Diome and Aïssatou Diamanka‐Besland propose to navigate with the ocean, an ally and agent in drafting a ‘blue’ ecocritcism.

Over the past two years, AI has transformed the development of the Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC), an open-access database of over 14,500 documents covering Muslim public life in six West African countries. Built and maintained by a single researcher without dedicated staff, IWAC now relies on LLMs for tasks that would otherwise require a full team: from OCR on degraded scans to named entity recognition. This paper turns to the next challenge: using AI not only to help process the collection, but to mediate access to it. Keyword search, the default entry point, falters with a corpus of this kind. The term “hadj” retrieves both articles about the pilgrimage to Mecca and those mentioning individuals bearing the honorific “El Hadj.” A single imam appears under more than twenty spelling variants. Searches miss synonyms and conceptual relationships: a query for “hajj” will not surface documents discussing “pilgrimage to Mecca” unless those exact words appear. OCR noise from newspapers further obscures the corpus. IWAC’s audience extends well beyond specialists: journalists, students, civil society actors, and diaspora communities all stand to benefit. Yet these keyword-dependent barriers demand domain expertise to navigate. Democratising the archive means building entry points that meet users where they are. This paper presents two complementary, experimental AI-mediated approaches developed to open IWAC to broader publics. A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, an open standard for connecting AI assistants to external data sources, provides structured, read-only access through sixteen tools for searching articles, querying authority records, and retrieving sentiment analysis from three AI models. Following Cohen’s (2025) analogy, MCP does for AI what IIIF does for images: a decentralised standard that preserves institutional data sovereignty while enabling discovery. An agent skill, a modular instruction set written in Markdown, encodes the domain knowledge that transforms raw tool access into methodical research. The skill structures the AI’s reasoning into a five-phase workflow inspired by archival research practice: scoping coverage; systematic searching with French-language variants and Arabic-Islamic transliteration alternatives; deep reading of individual sources; triangulating across subsets; and synthesising findings with confidence grading. It also documents collection bias. If the MCP server provides the plumbing, the skill provides the intelligence: the curator’s methodological expertise made transferable, versionable, and inspectable. This architecture offers an ethical framework for connecting commercial LLMs to open-access digital collections. Whereas initiatives such as “Small Models for GLAM” pursue specialised models fine-tuned on cultural heritage data, MCP offers a complementary path: a standardised interface that lets any LLM — commercial or open-source — query a collection without retraining. Rather than surrendering data to extractive training pipelines, MCP keeps the collection on its own infrastructure while the AI queries it through defined tools, and the skill layer makes every assumption transparent. For African digital collections, historically subject to extractive knowledge practices, this preserves sovereignty while enabling AI-enhanced access. The planned next step is a conversational assistant on the IWAC website, powered by an open-source LLM and these same tools. The paper speaks to Topic 1 (methods for analysing historical sources) and Topic 2 (transforming everyday research workflows).

This article frames the concept of biometric coloniality of power in the Global South – to explain how alliances of powerful global institutions, big tech companies and the compliant emerging biometric states operate on the basis of a lucrative digital consensus to carry out techno-­capitalist biometric ID interventions, which reproduce colonial relations of domination. We use Nigeria’s experience and examples from other African countries to demonstrate that the emergence of biometric states is linked to specific interconnected spaces of biometric data struggle and exploitation where the uses/abuses of biometric data are performed and contested. This article maps out new biometric orders of power at multiple levels/scales, and explicitly draws out ways biometric categories and social hierarchies are used to produce racialised and gendered subjects. The article argues that biometric coloniality inherently creates a biometric state with a peculiar character of biometric dysfunctionality and authoritarianism, both effectively institutionalised to the exclusion and disempowerment of the citizens/biometric subjects. We conclude that the chain of unbridled extraction of digital data, its commodification and dispossession, which is bounded by digital consensus, can only be broken by the conscious awakening of digital subjects.

Studies continue to assume an unbridgeable gap between scientific representations and ontological realities in Africa. Histories of foreign scientific interventions on the continent have often emphasized the role of scientists as agents of empire. However, there is a growing body of historiography that explores how adaptation and translation took place against the backdrop of the massive power imbalances that characterized such knowledge transfers, including in relation to the complex and shifting positions of the scientists themselves. This article focuses on black American agricultural scientists who advised the Liberian government on how to grow surplus crops nationally. It examines their practice of linking science to local knowledge. It also explores their personal negotiations with American empire as they infused their work with black internationalist theories of liberation and racial uplift. By looking at scientists on the ground or in the field, we can learn more about embedded processes of epistemic and political negotiation and critique.

This article seeks to comprehend the concept of “space” and “borders” from several sociological perspectives, taking as an example the social experience of moving bodies in the context of globalization and international migration. Firstly, the different definitions of both concepts for the social sciences are discussed, and especially Georg Simmel’s contribution to the study of social life as a “spatial dimension”. Secondly, it considers the different variants related to the power relation and control of bodies, from a biological menace idea, in different spaces as the basis of social “inclusion” and “exclusion”. Finally, it argues that the nation’s spatial and border dimension is today being challenged primarily because of the migratory flows of different physical and especially virtual mobility forms. Based on these sociological concepts and notions, the article then tries to offer an expanded and complex perspective of “spatiality”, “borders”, and “displacement” in understanding the new political and cultural dimensions of contemporary societies.

Even though Africa has proven to be the most fertile ground for testing international legal regimes, scholarly accounts remain pessimistic in assessing these experiments. Drawing on international adjudication theories, scholars paint a gloomy picture of Africa’s Regional Economic Community (REC) courts, dubbing them as having limited or narrow authority (Alter, Helfer and Madsen 2016). By favouring state-driven compliance processes as a measure of performance, these approaches understate the peculiarities in which REC courts operate. Located at the intersection of opposing and fragile national and regional integration politics, the courts rely on key non-state actors to foster judicial empowerment (Gathii 2020). Likewise, courts in hybrid democracies in Africa count on allies to construct judicial autonomy (Trochev and Ellett 2014). Even though recent work on African REC courts posits that international adjudication in Africa is carving out its own path, a systematic analysis of how these courts negotiate judicial politics is still lacking. Through an in-depth study of the East African Court of Justice (EACJ), this paper seeks to examine how Africa’s REC courts construct and exercise their power. It highlights the promising and volatile path that these courts have trodden and seeks to explain their emerging judicial power. Following Piana (2020), I conceptualise judicial power as a combination of the actors’ agency and the structural conditions conferring authority to the court. Thus, the paper foregrounds judges and their key constituencies as a window into understanding the adjudication processes. Arguing that judges are social and political actors, who operate within existing power configurations, the paper considers the judges’ diverse relational attributes as central to shaping judicial power. The author draws on expert interviews, court documents and an analysis of judgements to systematically assess the courts’ functioning and interrogate the relevant actors’ intrinsic motivations. Initially, the paper delves into a review of the court’s structural norms (organisational and institutional). Subsequently, it provides insights into the court’s composition and output and ponders what these attributes could reveal about the performance of international courts in Africa. Lastly, it briefly considers international adjudication theories and illustrates that they do not transfer with ease to the EACJ. This paper finds that the EACJ has gone from having an empty docket to becoming an active court that proactively interprets Treaty provisions to an impressive range of subject matters. Likewise, preliminary findings from interviews highlight the use of the courts as arenas of political mobilisation. However, the opaque procedure for judges’ nomination poses an obstacle to judicial independence and the courts’ legitimacy. In sum, the paper highlights that REC courts in Africa are challenging international adjudication theories by pushing their expectations and breaking new ground. It also expands our understanding of some of the key players in regional politics whilst unravelling intricate details about the rule of law in Africa.

This working paper looks at the connections between the editorial projects of Mensagem (edited in Lisbon, by Casa dos Estudantes do Império, 1948 – 1965), Présence Africaine (Paris, France and Dakar, Senegal, from 1947) and Black Orpheus (Ibadan, Nigeria, 1957 - 1975). It will reflect on the mobility of objects and ideas through the networks established within Africa and Europe by the negritudinists, Pan-African, or anticolonial writers and intellectuals discussed in those reviews. The circulations of texts, authors, and translations between those three literary projects were connected to a conception of art committed to the dignification of cultures and knowledges beyond Eurocentric conceptions. While it maps connections, circulations, and translations of printed material, this working paper also problematizes the dynamics and imbalances that characterized those publications, related both to intellectual displacement and to the consequences of colonial rule on the conceptual and socio-political systems.