We examine 'Africa' in its global interdependence, historical and contemporary dimensions and social, political, economic and linguistic dynamics. Our current research projects deal with spatialization processes, city and urbanization, governance, the circulation of knowledge and technologies, with postcoloniality and theories from the South, and with new concepts of language. We are concerned with global models and processes and interested in possibilities and forms of appropriation and agency at local and regional levels.
- The politics of social cohesion in Africa: Comparing governmentalities across post-trauma societies: Rwanda, South Africa and South Africa
2024 — 2027 (part of the Research Institute Social Cohesion)
Ulf Engel
Read More - African non-military conflict intervention practices
2022 — 2026 (together with the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF / HSFK) and the University Duisburg-Essen —BMBF research network)
Ulf Engel
Read more - Recalibrating Afrikanistik
2019 – 2026 (VW Foundation, World Knowledge – Rare Subjects)
Rose Marie Beck
read more - Interregionalism and Security in the Sahel: The African Union, ECOWAS, and the European Union
2020 – 2023 (2nd phase, SFB 1199, B07)
Ulf Engel
mehr erfahren - Language as archive: European linguistics and the social history of the Sahara and Sahel in the eighteenth and nineteenth century
2019 – 2023
Ari Awagana
read more - Precarious and Informal Labour in South Africa and Nigeria
01.2019 – 12.2019
Dmitri van den Bersselaar
read more
- Local Self-Governance for the Provision of Security: Vigilantes in Burkina Faso
Duration: 2019 – 2022
Institute of African Studies - Doing the City. Socio-Spatial Navigation in Urban Africa
Duration: 2017 – 2021
Institute of African Studies - Gold Mining and New Regulations of (Sub)National Spaces in Africa. Katja Werthmann
Duration: 01.2016 – 12.2019
Institute of African Studies - Baada ya Kimbunga, Shuwari.Ushairi wa mtungaji Haji Gora Haji – After the hurricane, the calm. The poetry of Haji Gora Haji. Irene Brunotti
Duration: 2016 – 2017
Institute of African Studies, Univeristy of Naples L'Orientale (Prof. Dr. Flavia Aiello) - New Dynamics in Swahili Studies. Rose Marie Beck
Duration: 06.2014 – 12.2016
Institute of African Studies, Afrikanistik - ATAKS – Afrikanetzwerk Tansania – Äthiopien – Kamerun – Südafrika. Rose Marie Beck
Duration: 01.2012 – 12.2015
Institute of African Studies, Afrikanistik - The Critical Junctures of Globalisation. Ulf Engel
Duration: 2006 – 2015
Institute of African Studies, Geografy, EasternEuropean Studies, Japanese Studies, Sociology, Political Science, History, Oriental Studies
- Swahili Forum is a peer-reviewed open-access journal which provides a unique platform for research articles on Swahili language, literature as well as on Swahili-speaking cultures and societies in Eastern Africa and the diaspora.
- Afrikanists Assemble is a Video Podcast produced by Recalibrating Afrikanistik, a collaborative research project of six partnering universities in Europe and Africa. In every monthly episode of Afrikanists Assemble contributors from various academic backgrounds answer a question related to the field of Afrikanistik and African Studies.
- Shuwari, Haji Gora Haji (2019), edited and translated by Irene Brunotti and Flavia Aiello, with a video project by our students Yann Labry and Jakob Zeyer.
- Relanguaging Language from a South African Township School, Lara-Stephanie Krause (2021). Using data from a long-term ethnographic study of English language classrooms in a South African township, this book highlights linguistic expertise in a setting where it is not usually expected or sought. Rather than being 'peripheral and unskilled', South African township teachers and learners emerge as skilled (re)languagers central to the workings of South African education, and to our understanding of how language classrooms work. This book foregrounds the heterogeneity, flexibility and creativity of day-to-day language practices that African urban spaces are known for, and conceptualises language teaching not as a progression from one fixed language to another, but as a circular sorting process between linguistic heterogeneity (languaging) and homogeneity (a standard language).
- City Life in Africa. Anthropological Insights, Katja Werthmann (2022). This book introduces readers to the anthropology of urban life in Africa, showing what ethnography can teach us about African city dwellers’ own notions, practices, and reflections. It asks what anthropologists have come to learn about Africans’ views on city life. It provides a critical acclaim of ethnographies in English, French, and German and elucidates anthropology’s contribution to understanding city life in Africa. It highlights the significance of female, African and Diaspora scholars for an emerging urban anthropology of Africa. The chapters are organized according to everyday activities of city dwellers: moving, connecting, governing, working, dwelling, and wayfinding.
- Gold, Finance and Imperialism in South Africa, 1887-1902: A View from the Stock Exchange, Mariusz Lukasiewicz (2024). This book provides a unique account of the financial and political history of the South African War by analysing the organisation and operations of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE), the oldest existing stock exchange in the African continent. Identifying the JSE as the nexus between international finance, South African gold mining and British imperialism, the book exposes the financial and political connections between Johannesburg, Pretoria, London, and Paris during the final stage of the imperial ‘scramble for southern Africa.’ It provides the first empirical examination of how international finance, imperial politics, and racialised industrial relations became entrenched in a key financial intermediary in colonial South Africa - first in Kimberley in the Cape Colony, and then in Johannesburg in the ZAR. By studying the Johannesburg capital market’s social microstructures, the author demonstrates how colonial and international financial intermediaries underwrote and financed the largest wave of mining investments in Africa prior to the First World War.