ASAA 2025 – African Responses to Global Vulnerabilities: Building Hope for the Future
The African Studies Association of Africa (ASAA) invites scholars, researchers, activists, policymakers, and practitioners to submit papers for its 6th Biennial Conference, to be held in Praia, Cabo Verde (Campus do Palmarejo Grande), from September 24 to 27, 2025. Co-hosted by the Universidade de Cabo Verde (Uni-CV), the ASAA’s 6th Biennial Conference provides a vital platform to engage with Africa’s critical challenges and explore opportunities for redress. Through collective reflection, inquiry, and dialogue, we aim to build a collaborative vision for global futures that center Africa in processes of hope-building, resilience, and growth in a complex and despairing global landscape.
The ASAA2025 conference theme is, “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 the 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.
We seek to deepen this inquiry by posing essential questions: What are Africa’s experiences with global vulnerabilities? How has, how is, and how should Africa respond to the planet’s vulnerabilities? How is and has Africa been, and how should it be located in these global processes? In what specific ways have these global processes affected Africans and shaped African experiences? How do these experiences define current subjectivities, and how will they shape future imaginaries? What historical and contemporary frameworks for responding to global vulnerabilities emerge from Africa? In what ways has Africa been, is it currently, and could it in the future reshape how we think about and engage with global processes of vulnerability? Whether past, present, or future, our planet has multiple calamities that expose global life and non-life forms to myriad fragilities. Vulnerability is simply the quality of being easily hurt or attacked. It designates a susceptibility to injury and suffering, activated or made possible by political, economic, cultural, social, financial, environmental, and many other factors that take away dignity, respect, agency, ability, and capacities for resistance. Yet, a perception of global Africa and its people as a threat to the normalcy established to protect the West, as European borders are fortified to defend the fortress and keep out that threat from those regarded as lesser humans, comes with high costs – economic, political, social, cultural, etc. Whether articulated as shock, crisis, insecurities, or duress, vulnerability is a critical condition that has long defined our global entanglements. It describes the human condition and affects all planetary life and non-life forms. Embedded in global power processes and matrices that unleash disproportionate relationships to its consequences, vulnerability constitutes the basis of survival and the intersection of power asymmetries that determine our relationship with the planet. To thrive, surviving and developing capacities and strategies for overcoming vulnerabilities is imperative.
For the 2025 conference, we invite participants to critically revisit the question of vulnerability—a fundamental aspect of human existence. At its core, vulnerability refers to the capacity to be easily hurt or exposed to harm. It signifies susceptibility to injury and suffering, often intensified by political, economic, cultural, social, financial, environmental, and numerous other forces that strip away dignity, agency, respectability, and capacities for resistance. Whether experienced as shock, crisis, insecurity, or duress, vulnerability is a fundamental condition affecting all forms of life, woven into the fabric of planetary interdependence and power relations.
While vulnerability has global dimensions, its impacts are unequally distributed, shaped by systems of power that expose certain regions and populations to heightened risks and disadvantages. Historically, Africa has been positioned within global narratives as a space saturated with vulnerabilities—illustrated through its experiences of slavery, colonization, globalization, narrow nationalism, humanitarian crises, poverty, health challenges, knowledge subjugation, and climate change. These portrayals emphasize Africa’s exposure to vulnerabilities, often overlooking the broader power structures that contribute to these conditions.
However, alongside these narratives of vulnerability, Africa is also recognized as a landscape of resilience, adaptability, and resourcefulness. Far from being solely a site of crisis, the continent embodies powerful examples of survival, creativity, resistance, and endurance. The conference seeks to explore this complex interplay between vulnerability and resilience, inviting participants to examine how African societies navigate, negotiate, and transform conditions of vulnerability in ways that contribute to local and global understandings of human strength and adaptability.
Through diverse perspectives and interdisciplinary discussions, we aim to broaden the conversation around vulnerability, shifting from reductive frameworks to more nuanced understandings that recognize Africa’s contributions to global discourses on resilience, sustainability, and the collective future of our planet.
Through diverse perspectives and interdisciplinary discussions, the 2025 conference aims to broaden the conversation on how Africa can offer new ways of rethinking and working with vulnerability. This year’s conference is organized in Cesaria Evora’s home country, commemorating Cabo Verde’s 50th anniversary of independence and the 100th anniversary of Amical Cabral. Co-hosted by Uni-CV, we offer an interdisciplinary space to foster conversations between disciplines – social sciences and humanities (SSH) and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) – focusing on the production of new knowledge about global vulnerabilities from and/or through Africa. .
As always, we envision the conference as a festival of ideas, exchanges, and encounters and a space for scholarly experimentation. Scholars, activists, architects, artists, and policymakers across different generations, disciplines, and sub-fields are invited to propose panels on the conference theme. Selected outputs will be published in our new academic journal, Bokutani.
Streams:
- Forms of Vulnerabilities and African Articulations
- Strategies of Survival and Forms of Resistance / Resilience
- Expressions and Constructions of Hope and Hopefulness
- Global (Dis-)Entanglements
- Future Imaginaries
- Knowledge, Inquiry and Epistemologies
- Others