Abdoulaye Gueye, holder of the EHESS/Iméra Chair in Transregional Studies 2025–2026, is organising a research workshop aimed at bringing together researchers and academics based in Africa and outside the continent on March 16th and 17th 2026.
Credit: Eléa Ropiot – amU
The state of scientific production in Africa
This workshop aims to bring into conversation Africa-based scholars and academics outside of the continent. Engaging with a burgeoning scholarship on the state of research production in Africa, this roster of sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and scholars in literary studies will further investigate key concerns about knowledge production in the continent, including but not limited to the following:
- The state of intra-continental and intercontinental collaborations among African-based scholars.
- African-based authors’ access to publication in North-based academic journals in context of stark inequality between the value accorded to journals published in the North and the value granted to academic outlets in Africa.
- Gender disparity and its causes within African knowledge production.
- The meaning accorded to “decolonization of African knowledge production” and the empirical translation thereof.
What historical development?
Africa’s role and place in the global activity of knowledge production have consumed the continent’s scholars and statesmen since the decolonization wave. In a vein reminiscent of W.E.B Du Bois’ (1897) view that the elevation of the black people to the status of other racial groups would require the rejection of assimilation to, and sheer imitation of the white populace, a programmatic and militant discourse took over the continent’s intellectual sphere in the early years of independence.
The primary objective of this discourse was to underscore the value of African knowledge production and support the intellectual autonomy of operation of African universities. Thus, in his speech delivered at the inauguration of the University of Dakar in 1959, Léopold Sédar Senghor, the first President of Senegal, loyal to his own reputation as a diplomatic interlocutor, politely contradicted the French-born scholar and first rector of this institution, Lucien Paye. In response to the latter’s injunction to anchor the newly minted institution in the French intellectual tradition, Senghor affirmed that this university must “[be] at the service of Africa [by] introducing alongside European classics other disciplines such as Negro-African linguistics” (Bailleul, 1984). The idea that Africa boosts local epistemologies as worthy of consideration as the European ones is more than implied in Senghor’s speech.
A few years after his Senegalese counterpart, in 1963, the Ghanaian President, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, set in motion a more concrete and disruptive initiative than Senghor’s discourse. This consists in the creation of the African Studies Institute at the University of Ghana. The initiative, he argued, would bring forth an African-centered perspective, draw inspiration from Africa’s pre-colonial institutions of higher learning, put at center stage the study of African societies’ realities, and pursue the creation a body of knowledge addressing the needs and interrogations of Africans (Agbodeka, 1998; Crawford & al., 2021; Kane, 2016).
Younger generations of African scholars have renewed this project. From Ngugi wa’ Thiongo’s Decoloning the Mind to the more robust debate on African philosophy, the question posed is that of the autonomy of African knowledge production from Western canons (wa Thiong’o, 1986). The recent movement labeled African decolonial theory questions the resilience of Western canons within the field of knowledge production in Africa, and advocates for a greater autonomy of this field from the Western intellectual sphere (Ntoshe, 2004; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2020).
- Thomas Véret, Associate Professor, University of Rouen (France) ;
- Hélène Quashie, Senior Researcher, LARTES (Senegal) ;
- Suzanne Koch, Professor of Sociology, Technology University of Munich (Germany) ;
- Abdoulaye Gueye, Professor, University of Ottawa (Canada) et titulaire de la chaire EHESS/Iméra – Etudes transrégionales 2025-2026 ;
- Innocent Azilan, Junior Researcher, Université de Lomé (Togo) ;
- Patricia Alonso-Alvarez, Junior Researcher, Université Carlos III, Madrid (Spain) ;
- Shizuku Shinagawa, Doctoral Researcher, Technology University of Munich (Germany) ;
- Cécile Van Den Avenne, Directrice de recherche, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Marseille (France).
Practical information
- Date: Monday 16th and Tuesday 17th of March 2026
- Time:
- Monday, March 16th: 1pm to 5pm
- Tuesday, March 17th: 9am to 5pm
- Location: Maison Neuve conference room (first floor), Iméra, 2 place Leverrier 13004 Marseille
Coming to Iméra
- Pedestrian access: meet at the gate at 2 place Leverrier, 13004 Marseille.
- PRM access: entrance via Allée Jean-Louis Pons, 13004 Marseille.
