This call is for co-panelists for the session, "Streets as Living Archives: Bodies, Movement, and Alternative Epistemologies in Urban Africa" at the African Studies Association's Annual Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, November 20-22, 2025. To see all sessions at ASA2025, visit https://africanstudies.org/annual-meetings/2025-call-for-co-panelists/
Panel session description:
In recent years, urban studies of Africa have grappled with a persistent epistemological challenge: how to theorize city life beyond frameworks inherited from Global North traditions. This panel calls for abstract submissions that address this challenge by examining how African streets and the bodies that give them life constitute vital but often overlooked repositories of urban knowledge and theoretical innovation. This call seeks contributions that explore how street life generates distinctive epistemological frameworks through the daily choreography of bodies – from market women and street vendors to public transportation workers and pedestrians – producing what can be termed “corporeal cartographies” that map alternative understandings of African urban space, time, and sociocultural relations. Contributions that examine how bodies navigate, claim, and transform street spaces and how street-based epistemologies offer crucial insights into questions of sovereignty, belonging, cultural production, and urban futures are invited.
This call addresses some key questions, including, but not limited to, the following:
How do embodied practices and everyday movements in African urban streets generate theoretical frameworks that extend beyond conventional urban theory?
What forms of knowledge and understanding about urban life emerge when we conceptualize African streets as living archives rather than mere infrastructure?
How do the intersections of bodies, space, and movement in African streets produce alternative ways of knowing that challenge established academic paradigms?
In what ways can street-based epistemologies inform broader debates about sovereignty, citizenship, cultural production, and urban futures in Africa and beyond?
This panel seeks to advance recent calls to recognize African knowledge production in unexpected places, particularly in everyday practices that challenge academic conventions about what constitutes theory.
For submissions, please send a 250-word abstract and a short bio to Bankole Wright (bbank015@fiu.edu) by March 9, 2025.
