Knowledge Production Conferences with PAPA (Point Sud)

MIASA CC-BY-4.0: Poster Knowledge Production Conferences

MIASA collaborates with the Point Sud programme and its Pilote African Postgraduate Academy (PAPA). PAPA targets early career scholars who are based at universities in Francophone Africa. PAPA is comprised of 15 fellows and conceived as a course and mentorship programme. Together with PAPA, MIASA has co-organized three conferences on knowledge production, using a theoretical approach in order to explore key concepts which are addressed by MIASA, such as sustainable governance, conflict and crisis. The conferences aim at decoding concepts which are commonly used in the social sciences as “black boxes”, concepts developed elsewhere, but with which African researchers are constantly called upon to analyze and describe their environment. These conferences thus contribute to the process of re-appropriating a science of Africa that was originally built without the continent.

The first conference was held during MIASA’s preliminary phase in November 2019 in Bamako, focusing on the concept of sustainable governance. The second conference was organised in December 2021 in Accra. This conference invited scholar to rethink the conceptual framework of conflicts in Africa. The third conference is organised in November 2024 in Maputo. This conference inquires the usefulness of the concept of crisis, analysing this concept in contexts of governance issues, social movements and geopolitical reconfiguration, actions of armed terrorist groups, development of self-defense and coups d’état as well as economic crisis(es) and market challenges in the age of neoliberalism.

See also the report on the second MIASA-PAPA Knowledge Production conference: https://miasa.hypotheses.org/2546.