The ASAA2025 conference theme “African Responses to Global Vulnerabilities: Building Hope for the Future” will explore how forms and articulations of African agency have shaped our collective histories, cohabitation, dignity, knowledge, sovereignty, violence, survival, and hopes for imaginaries of better futures.
We are particularly interested in unpacking intersections between the past, the present, and the future in tackling challenges of vulnerabilities, enunciations of resilience, and expectations of resolution. These processes and interventions of hope are oriented towards building individual and collective futures not merely of survival but, importantly, of solidarity and collective thriving.
As the world faces an era marked by climate change, economic disparities, health crises, and geopolitical tensions, amongst other challenges, the Conference will also illustrate empirically how Africans have and continue to experience and respond to various global vulnerabilities that pose profound challenges to our social, economic, and political landscapes.
We do not seek to tout narratives of doom, although there is an important cathartic role in collective mourning. Nor do we seek to project romanticized discourses of African survivability that currently dominate some of the work on vulnerabilities in Africa. Building on decolonial, feminist, Indigenous, queer, and other Africa-centered frameworks, ASAA’s 2025 conference will explore how Africa’s experiences of, and responses to, vulnerabilities are or can generate new global modes of thinking, researching, being, becoming, co-existence, survival, and habitability.