Publications

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved AI capabilities for non-Western languages and scripts. Drawing on my experience building and curating the Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC), a digital repository of over 14,500 newspaper articles and archival documents in French, English, Arabic, Hausa, and Ewe, I present a practical walkthrough of an AI-assisted research pipeline: from raw scans to interactive visualisation. The challenges I encountered with West African sources have direct parallels for scholars working with Asian languages and scripts. I outline three stages of a "datafication" workflow: (1) text extraction through OCR and HTR, where multimodal LLMs increasingly outperform traditional engines on degraded documents in non-Western scripts; (2) data enrichment, including named entity recognition; and (3) data visualisation, where scholars without programming expertise can use AI-assisted coding to build interactive dashboards and explore their data. I demonstrate this workflow through a sentiment analysis dashboard analysing how 12,000+ IWAC newspaper articles portray Islam across five West African countries. Featuring temporal trends, cross-country comparisons, and multi-model agreement metrics, the dashboard was developed without writing manually a single line of code, through iterative dialogue with AI assistants. I also introduce Google's NotebookLM for source analysis and synthesis. Where Arlette Farge (2013) located the "allure" of the archive in the slow, tactile encounter with the document, AI offers a pragmatic complement: rapid triage of the ever-growing personal collections of scans that scholars accumulate, serving as an intuition pump for thinking with sources rather than automating their consumption. Rather than a theoretical discussion, this talk is an invitation to experiment, turning dormant digital collections into active research instruments.

Este escrito narra el sentido que denota el sistema simbólico de la población negra del Chocó (Colombia) conectado con el territorio biogeográfico. A través de una exploración etnográfica, se muestra cómo la espiritualidad teje las prácticas ancestrales (religiosas, ecoculturales, de funebria y de ritmos musicales) con las identidades de los chocoanos, visibilizadas en su muntu, es decir, en su fuerza vital para revitalizar y recrear el mundo-vida en su territorio.

From early 1944 until 1946, more than 25,000 refugees from Yugoslavia, mostly from the Dalmatian coast and islands, stayed in refugee camps in Egypt at El Shatt. Located on the shores of the Suez Canal, this complex of tented camps on desert sands was jointly run by the British military, Yugoslav Partisans and international humanitarian organizations. After the war, most of the refugees returned to their homes and only a five-pointed star-shaped cemetery overlooked by the statue of a grieving Mother remained on the spot. This article shows that unlike most refugee camps, El Shatt was not forgotten after its closure, but instead memorialized from the very beginning. Based on extensive research in United Nations, British and Croatian archives, we ask how the camps in El Shatt were memorialized in changing circumstances from their closure to today. How was their memory integrated into dominant historical narratives and practices, and what roles did local, intimate individual and family experiences and practices play in this? Reasons for not forgetting El Shatt start with the extraordinary documentation of these camps because they stood at the beginning of the UN-centred international humanitarian regime and the founding of Socialist Yugoslavia. For the continuous memorialization, however, it was important that the refugees returned as a large group to Dalmatia, the same region where they had come from. The local communities of memories provided the foundation for the abundant movement and communication of memories of El Shatt across different registers, spaces, genres, times and media.

Indigenous communities such as the Misak people in Colombia continue to struggle against the consequences of colonization and violence, but at the same time, they propose emancipatory methodologies of knowledge production. These practices towards epistemic justice are crucial to assure the (re)existence of indigenous peoples and their wisdom in Abya Yala. In this vein, our article sheds light on research methodologies rooted in Misak cosmogonies and processes to validate ancestral knowledge production. Through ethnographic and participatory action research in the indigenous reserve of Shura Manéla in the Colombian Cauca Department, we got insight into the spiral of persistent existence (espiral de pervivencia) and the law of origin of the Misak people. On this basis, we describe the Latá-Latá methodology reinvented by the community to recover their ancestral knowledge, and the Pachakiwa social cartography applied to depict their territorial relations. Moreover, we explain how collective validation processes work in practice. This serves to open up a transdisciplinary discussion on the potentials and the limitations of such vernacular research methodologies. We observe that healing from the trauma of colonization and inferiorization is a key driver of indigenous research processes. Therefore, developing further emancipatory methodologies based on equal subject-subject relations is an urgent task in the field of decoloniality. Learning from communities like the Misak is an invitation to become aware of the pluriversal complexity, listen to silenced sagacity, and find methods to pursue epistemic equality.

Los invitamos a embarcar en un viaje poético-performativo por corrientes afrolatinas, guiado por artistas jóvenes de Colombia y Brasil. Este libro multimedia surge de un proyecto de intercambio que reúne a miembros y líderes afrodescendientes de la Corporación Cultural Candilé de Cartagena de Indias y la red REPROTAI (Rede de Protagonistas em Ação de Itapagipe) de Salvador de Bahía a través de un proceso de arte-educación presencial y virtual realizado a lo largo de cuatro años. El intercambio cultural se inspira en el método de Investigación-Acción Participativa propuesto por el sociólogo colombiano Orlando Fals Borda, diseñado para contribuir a la (re-)construcción de conocimientos marginados, silenciados e invisibilizados por los discursos predominantes en el campo académico, artístico, político y la sociedad civil. Esta iniciativa establece un diálogo transdisciplinario entre saberes, memorias y prácticas creativas que permite vislumbrar múltiples perspectivas sobre los espacios sociales y morales en la diáspora africana, más específicamente en dos antiguos puertos de la trata transatlántica de africanos esclavizados. Ambas ciudades son – más allá de lugares traumáticos – espacios prolíficos de resistencia, reinvención, superación y transformación.

Documents on the social media platform Twitter are formulated in short and simple style, instead of being written extensively and elaborately. Further, the core message of a post is often encoded into characteristic phrases called hashtags. These hashtags illustrate the semantics of a post or tie it to a specific topic. In this paper, we propose multiple approaches of using hashtags and their surrounding texts to improve topic modeling of short texts. We use transfer learning by applying a pre-trained word embedding of hashtags to derive preliminary topics. These function as supervising information, or seed topics and are passed to Archetypal LDA (A-LDA), a recent variant of Latent Dirichlet Allocation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach using a large corpus of posts exemplarily on Twitter. Our approaches improve the topic model's qualities in terms of various quantitative metrics. Moreover, the presented algorithms used to extract seed topics can be utilized as form of lightweight topic model by themselves. Hence, our approaches create additional analytical opportunities and can help to gain a more detailed understanding of what people are talking about on social media. By using big data in terms of millions of tweets for preprocessing and fine-tuning, we enable the classification algorithm to produce topics that are very coherent to the reader.

Though often overlooked, parental navigations play an important role in the difficult pathways of rural children through changing eduscapes in northern Benin. Arguing that parents are deeply involved in their children’s trajectories towards making a living, I analyse the care and support parents see themselves as responsible for. A neoliberal and increasingly privatized schooling system creating unequal chances in combination with the demand of ‘Education for all’ responsibilizes parents for their children’s success, and a tight labour market makes it additionally difficult for youth to find positions in the urban space. In consequence, parents are more intensively investing in their children’s education and related costs than ever before, without feeling that these investments lead to what parents value as success. Due to the lack of parental experience in the neoliberal eduscapes and the lack of cultural and social capitals – parents describe it as ‘blindness’ – parental actions in the eduscapes could best be described as navigations which are entangled with those of their children. In these navigations, parents give their children what they never received from their own parents, but also expect or hope them to become what they never were. Both parents and children navigate, I argue, towards an unknown and uncertain future in ‘radical openness’.

Salvador da Bahia (Brazil) and Cartagena de Indias (Colombia) are traumatic places where Afro-diasporic communities challenge persistent colonial ideologies through manifold practices of resistance. Both cities were former ports of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans and, nowadays, they are recognized as UNESCO World Heritage sites. This paper explores how residents of marginalized neighborhoods in both cities struggle against domination by means of cultural practices such as music, dance and poetry. Their movements, rhythms, song texts and Afro hairstyles contest racialized stigmatization and inscribe counter-narratives in spaces structured by (neo-)colonial hierarchies. They help recover from traumatic experiences, preserve silenced memories, reconstruct fragmented identities and re-signify neglected knowledges. To engage with these bodily modes of cultural resistance, which are often sidelined by Western academia, we developed an approach of participatory action research with the REPROTAI network from Salvador and the Candilé cultural group from Cartagena. Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, however, we have been realizing our activities only in the virtual sphere. Thereby, the bodily dimension of cultural resistance turned out to be even more important than previously thought. Against this backdrop, my paper explores the notion of Epistemologies of the Body, focusing on those processes of resistance that are ephemeral, tactical and corporeal. This is particularly important in places where black bodies have been systematically objectified and violated for centuries. As a whole, the project aims at calling our attention to collective practices which are often overlooked by linguistic and discursive academic approaches.

Nach einer knappen Formulierung von Minimalkriterien für die hier vorgenommene Zuordnung von Beiträgen und Forschungsprojekten zur erziehungswissenschaftlichen Netzwerkforschung wird zunächst anhand ausgewählter Beispiele der zumeist metaphorische Charakter des Begriffs des Netzwerkes in der Erziehungswissenschaft erläutert. Dabei fällt die positive Konnotation von Netzwerken und den Praktiken des Netzwerkens auf. Es folgt die Darstellung von Anwendungen der SNA in der Disziplin. Abschließend wird das Desiderat theoretischer Beiträge und Überlegungen diskutiert.

This article interrogates the European biometric ID system and securitisation measures in West African borders which have become detrimental to, first, African migrants and, second, both African and European security objectives. Using the Niger’s experience, we demonstrate how migrants’ identity problems as well as their atomisation and loosening of their social integration are directly linked to the criminalising and dehumanising border security practices they now face. This article reveals the multiple forms and effects of the unimpeded European biometric/digital control over African territorial borderlands and (im)mobilities. First is the subversion of African states’ administrative, decisional, sovereign and territorial prerogatives by way of enacting digital territorial borderscapes that enforce migrants’ identity de(re)construction. Second, the use of ‘biometric power’ to facilitate a specific modality of neoliberal biometric power relations which perpetuates global inequalities in biometric identification and (im)mobility governance. Lastly, migrants’ recourse to agentic mechanisms to contest the European biometric ID system, via discoveries and implantation of parallel border routes.

This article argues that the European biometric ID installations and securitization practices at West African borders harm African migrants and compromise the security goals of Europe and Africa. Using Niger's experience, I contend that migrants' poor adaption to the biometric border processes is closely connected to their identity conflicts, as well as their atomization and weakening of their social integration. The new border security measures are implicated in the state's criminalizing and dehumanizing practices which migrants and borderbrokers experience every day. I coin two concepts, namely, biometric reborderization and agentic deborderization, to draw close attention to ways by which the European biometric projects are significantly reconfiguring African borders. These borders now represent both a dynamic space for migration control, and contested sites of biometric circumvention and subversion by biometric noncompliant migrants who constantly negotiate alternative means for mobilities. Moral mobility agents contest/circumvent European biometric reborderization via the use of parallel border routes. Related Articles Byrne, Jennifer. 2016. “Contextual Identity among Liberian Refugees in Ghana: Identity Salience in a Protracted Refugee Situation.” Politics & Policy 44(4): 751–82. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12169. Djeufack Dongmo, Aristophane, and Désiré Avom. 2024. “Urbanization, Civil Conflict, and the Severity of Food Insecurity in Africa.” Politics & Policy 52(1): 140–68. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12572. Garrett, Terence M., and Arthur J. Sementelli. 2023. “Revisiting the Policy Implications of COVID-19, Asylum Seekers, and Migrants on the Mexico–U.S. Border: Creating (and Maintaining) States of Exception in the Trump and Biden Administrations.” Politics & Policy 51(3): 458–75. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12537.

This article discusses the European migration control system and its connection to the facilitation of migrant smuggling in West Africa. Using Nigeria’s experience, the paper explores the key developments that contributed to the expansion of the migrant smuggling business, namely, the European biometric ID systems, the digitalization of external borders, and intensive border securitization. These key measures are linked to the emergence and deepening of the operations of the new identity and document fraud cartel in Nigeria, a sub-component of the smuggling business model. I delineate a new conceptual framework, “biometric border paradox,” to depict the contradiction of the European migration control system in its external borders in Africa. The problem is linked to the new form of biometric ID and travel document fraud in corporate (government) agencies: the “corporate smugglers.” I coin two key concepts to describe this modality: “biometricycle” and “biometricyclists,” which refer to a tricycle-smuggling network that operates through the biometric ID system, involving three groups: local identity-faking entrepreneurs, IT experts, and corporate officials within the government’s biometric ID sector and immigration service. Vulnerable migrants who do not comply with the new biometric ID systems fall victim to biometric ID and travel document fraud, which exposes them to certain types of identity conflicts, state criminalization, and loss of social integration.

Africa’s linguistic diversity and cultural richness make it an ideal setting for incorporating case studies of toponyms (place names) into the university linguistics curriculum. By examining the toponyms of Kibera slum areas in Kenya and those of the people of Sabalibougou in Southern Mali, this article explores the various ways that toponyms can be used to enhance the understanding of African languages and cultures. Based on the premise that toponyms communicate knowledge about the natural world, peoples’ experiences, indigenous and local languages, and history, the two case studies of this article highlight the following factors as reasons why toponyms should be studied and incorporated into the university’s linguistics curricula: (i) They reveal the interplay between history, socio-political manifestations, and language; (ii) provide awareness of the role of geography on language, language contact, and language endangerment; (iii) facilitate the relationship between language and culture; and (iv) allow practising orthography, phonetic transcription, and morphosemantics of African languages. Hence, incorporating toponym case studies, like those provided in this study, into the linguistics curriculum can enable students to better comprehend and appreciate Africa’s linguistic diversity and cultural richness, ultimately contributing to the decolonisation of education in Africa.

This Working Paper is the revised transcript of the New Year Lecture by the dean of the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth, which won the coveted funding of the Excellence Strategy of the German Federal and State Government. The agenda of reconfiguring African Studies features not only in the lecture title, but is also prominent in the cluster's agenda. However, drafting a successful proposal is one thing; implementing the agenda is another. The paper explores the various layers, levels, and intricacies implied in the reconfiguration of African Studies, and also highlights the conceptual shift required to steer the study of Africa in new directions.

The quest for transdisciplinary research requires academics to collaborate with actors from heterogeneous fields, both inside and outside academia. In order to transcend disciplinary, social, symbolic or physical boundaries, co-producers of knowledge need to deal with multiple relations, theories and practices taken for granted in each field involved. This presentation explores how field alignments can be made between researchers, artists and activists in order to create synergies and produce knowledge collaboratively. It draws on a participatory research project developed with diverse actors from Brazil, Colombia, Mozambique, Cameroon and Germany, who share a common interest in understanding whether and how the arts can contribute to processes of transformation in communities afflicted by violence, racism and social exclusion. The reflection shows how the research field emerges as a fluid third space co-created by actors with specific knowledges and positionalities. Ultimately, this presentation raises fundamental questions on whose queries, assumptions, interests, theories and methodologies count as legitimate, giving them the power to (re)define a research field.

Este ensaio apresenta uma reflexão sobre o poder testemunhal de fotografias tiradas no campo de extermínio nazista de Auschwitz-Birkenau. Pretende-se, a partir delas, problematizar a relação entre fotografia, memória e história, na medida em que tais imagens nos podem fornecer uma possibilidade de pensarmos como um testemunho visual pode aperfeiçoar grandes narrativas históricas da representação do holocausto – desde um objeto de memória de natureza tipicamente mediada (VAN DJICK, 2007). Nesses termos, a fotografia se manifesta aqui contra as vontades de desaparecimento, ligando-se à memória coletiva e à temporalidade. Finalmente, buscar-se-á entender como o político e o poético se entrecruzam nessas imagens, pensadas por Didi-Huberman (2012) como um ato contra a própria razão da história e contra a política de desimaginação e do inimaginável, dando um novo rumo às representações públicas do holocausto, em oposição à proposta da Shoah Foundantion.

Arlette Farge's celebrated model of archival research — the slow, tactile encounter with documents in a silent reading room — presupposes well-ordered European institutions. For historians of West Africa, the reality is different: newspaper archives scattered across countries and continents, poorly catalogued, physically deteriorating, and sometimes easier to find in Berlin or Washington than in their countries of origin. Fieldwork often becomes a race to photograph as much as possible, leaving thousands of images unprocessed on hard drives for years. The gap between digitisation (capturing documents) and datafication (transforming them into searchable, structured data) is one of the most significant unacknowledged obstacles in contemporary historical research. This presentation draws on the Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC), an open-access database of over 14,500 newspaper articles, to show how AI can address this bottleneck. It discusses multimodal OCR for complex layouts, named entity recognition adapted to West African contexts, and corpus-level triage through sentiment analysis. It then introduces agentic AI pipelines — systems where specialised sub-agents autonomously handle image processing, text extraction, and metadata enrichment under human supervision — as a way to make these methods accessible to researchers without programming expertise. The talk concludes by reflecting on the stakes of using Western-built tools to make non-European knowledge visible.

While World War II was ravaging Europe, thousands of Polish people found a safe haven in British colonial Africa. This forgotten history shows us that migration patterns are constantly changing.

Cet article explore l'intersection de la géographie des conflits et de la médiation sociale, avec un focus particulier sur les zones frontalières du nord du Bénin, à travers une approche qualitative. Il examine comment les dynamiques foncières, les identités culturelles et les tensions ethniques interagissent dans un contexte de conflits territoriaux exacerbés par l'émergence de groupes armés et d'activités terroristes. S'appuyant sur la théorie de la transformation des conflits de Lederach, J. P. (1995), l'étude utilise des méthodes qualitatives pour analyser les défis de la médiation et évaluer l'efficacité des pratiques traditionnelles face à ces complexités. L'article propose des stratégies de médiation innovantes, basées sur des analyses qualitatives approfondies des perspectives locales et des dynamiques socioculturelles, promouvant une approche de médiation flexible et inclusive. Ces stratégies recommandent l'implication d'acteurs infra-étatiques et non étatiques, soulignant la nécessité de réinventer les pratiques de médiation pour établir une paix durable. Les orientations pratiques dérivées de l'analyse qualitative offrent des perspectives précieuses pour les médiateurs et les décideurs dans des contextes de conflit intense.

In view of the developments of eSciences and accompanying infrastructures in German academia, the Cluster of Excellence Africa Multiple with its Digital Solutions portfolio has set the ambitious aim of establishing a digital research repository for its disciplinary heterogenous research projects ranging from economics to climate studies to linguistics, history and media studies, the “only” common ground being the studied area “Africa” and “African diasporas”. The four thematic sections that all touch upon eSciences, or put more generally, the digital transformation of the academic world and society from very different perspectives and disciplinary diversity. Be it knowledge management as a big data business model for academic services, digital neo-colonialism, the different legal aspects, problems of bias in semantic data processing, digitalization projects in Africa or digitization projects and collections built up in Europe.