Global South Thought

Background
The Partnership for Africa’s Next Generation of Academics (PANGeA), supported in part by the Gerda Henkel Foundation and its Lisa Maskell Fellowship, has graduated multiple generations of doctoral scholars in the historical humanities, arts and social sciences since its establishment in 2010. These alumni are leading professionals and scholars across Africa, contributing to industry, the public sector and university leadership. Since 2024, PANGeA has partnered with the Young Scholars Initiative for an Africa Connect conference hosted by Kenyatta University, and the partnership has gone from strength to strength, with YSI hosting a pre-conference for the 2026 PANGeA Homecoming in Stellenbosch, South Africa.
Fifteen years on, the PANGeA network is organising an Alumni Homecoming Conference.
Who can attend?
The one-day preconference will bring together young scholars across the arts, languages, and social sciences to reflect on critical questions facing humanities scholarship in a rapidly evolving and increasingly polarised world. The preconference will prioritise young scholars within Southern Africa.
Conference Theme: Global South Thought
The conference foregrounds contemporary debates on thinking from the Global South. It provides a platform for scholars to critically consider the specificity of the African context and case studies or methodologies from within their discipline. The conference takes the shared experience of precarity as a point of departure to examine how humanities scholars are responding to evolving forms of insecurity within rapidly changing global systems. It invites critical engagement with the implications of emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence whether in industry, the public sector or the academy. Participants will reflect on current challenges, and propose collective strategies for sustaining and advancing humanities scholarship in Africa.
Drawing on Selma Sevenhuijsen’s (2014) concept of ‘active attention’, including care, reliability, and respect for pluralism, the conference provides a space to engage the 21st century attention deficit. What should we be attentive to as scholars in the arts and social sciences?

Conference Thematic Areas
We invite presentations on the following broad topics, (with an emphasis on precarity and/or active attention):

Historicizing Africa
The future of humanities scholarship in Africa
Language, society and multilingualism
Environmental humanities
Digital futures
Politics, governance and citizenship
Artistic practice and creative research
Indigenous knowledge and storying
Archiving and memory
Poverty, inequality and development
Gender, sexuality and inclusion
Decolonizing knowledge
Strengthening African education

Submission of Abstracts
We invite you to submit an abstract of 300 words. Please accompany your abstract with a bio of 100 words.
Selected papers from the conference will be published in an edited volume. Presenters who are selected for this publication opportunity will be notified a month after the conference dates and given time to develop full manuscripts.

For any inquiries send your email to vmoyo972@gmail.com