6th Summer School in African Studies and Area Studies in Africa

The Summer School is offered with the generous support of the Oumou Dilly Foundation (Switzerland) in cooperation with CODESRIA and aims at strengthening the links between the CODESRIA community of scholars and scholars from the African Studies community in Switzerland.

In focused training sessions, the Summer School will address theoretical and conceptual issues bearing on the difference between understanding and defining a problem (basic research) and identifying solutions and their scope (applied research), as well as policy issues on the conditions, which must be created for solutions to work (implementation). This will be done with attention to issues of transdisciplinarity and the co-production of knowledge. Given the importance of coming to terms with calls for the decolonization of development cooperation, there will be a focus on the role of values and norms in transferring knowledge between academic actors, policy-makers and society more generally and on their implications for developing and implementing policies in particular.

Objective

• The overall objective of the Summer School is to stimulate and consolidate interdisciplinary approaches to research on Africa, but also on other regions of the world undertaken from within the African continent. It focuses on African Studies as an instance of area studies and seeks to identify themes that are theoretically, conceptually, and methodologically relevant to the reflection on the intellectual challenge of Africa as an ‘object’ of knowledge and its contribution to general scholarship while inquiring into the relevance of the findings to African approaches to other regions.

Goals

• The goals of the Summer School are the following:
  • Give current PhD students and early career scholars the opportunity to engage critically with new theoretical, conceptual, and methodological issues relating to African Studies relevant to their work.
  • Encourage participants to reflect on the potential relevance of African epistemology and ontology in enhancing theoretical, conceptual, and methodological tools both in their disciplines as well as in interdisciplinary work.
  • Foster among summer school beneficiaries a sense of belonging to a community of scholars in pursuit of African-informed scholarship.
  • Stimulate emerging scholars to work towards carving a space for African Studies in the broader field of scholarship and, in this way, helping African Studies to claim a place right at the center of knowledge production in Africa and globally.
  • The Summer School offers young SSH scholars a platform to examine the challenges of the tension and the potential for mutual fertilization between the requirements of scholarly standards and social impact in Africa. Participants will reflect on their research’s potential for societal transformation, develop theoretical and methodological skills in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaboration, and learn to locate themselves in various academic and policy fields from an African lens.

Theme

• Making knowledge policy-relevant: The SSH’s role in global sustainable development.

Cost Covered

• Travel, accommodation and meals during the Summer School will be provided for participants from African Institutions. The Convenors of the Summer School will also be open to receiving a limited number of applicants able and willing to pay the cost of participation in the School.

Eligibility Criteria

• The 6th CODESRIA/ZASB Summer School invites applications from doctoral students interested in exploring these issues as part of a larger framework of engaging with methodological challenges in African Studies.
• The Summer School is open for PhD students and early career scholars at Higher Education institutions on the African continent. Preference will be given to those in their first or second year of PhD enrollment). Applications will be considered from students working in the following disciplines: Social Anthropology, Sociology, History, Religion, Philosophy, Gender studies and Political science. Applications from PhD students registered in Swiss universities are also encouraged.

For more information, visit CODESRIA.