Black History Month

The goal of both the webinar and edited book is to bring together scholars, practitioners, and students, to generate knowledge that not only diagnoses problems but also illuminates pathways toward resilient, equitable, and sustainable futures for Africa and its global diaspora. This is done through an interdisciplinary, historically grounded, and African-centered approaches capable of addressing the complex and interconnected challenges of the Africana world.

Africa and its global diaspora stand at a critical juncture defined by rapid demographic expansion, intensifying climate impacts, persistent governance challenges, and the enduring legacies of colonial and neocolonial structures. With a current population of roughly 1.6 billion people on the continent and more than 200 million in the diaspora, Africa’s continental population is expected to double by 2070 and that of Sub-Saharan Africa is projected to reach two billion by 2070. This demographic expansion is occurring in the midst of interlocking global crisis-climate change, poverty, hunger, unemployment, inadequate social services, resource scarcity, extremism, and governance instability, (UNDESA, 2024; Fornono & Tiffin, 2024) that demand urgent, holistic, and historically grounded analysis. These crises are not isolated phenomena but are deeply intertwined and rooted in historical injustices, including the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, and neocolonial political and economic structures. Understanding how Africa and its diaspora will emerge from these historical experiences is crucial for shaping the continent’s future and achieving the goals of the new sustainable development agenda.

For long, there has been a traditional and longstanding tendency in academic and policy discourse to treat environment, development, and governance as separate domains (UN, 2015). This fragmented approach is increasingly untenable. Traditional top-down paradigms have failed to capture the complex feedback loops through which climate change exacerbates resource-based conflicts (IPCC, 2023), governance failures undermine pathways for just transitions and social justice, (Okereke, 2020; Carole-Anne & Okereke, 2022) and development initiatives generate new environmental pressures due to weak policies and implementation mechanisms (United Nations, 2015; UN Human Right Council, 2023; OHCHR, 2025. These academic and global assessments indicate that urgent, innovative, and multisectoral action is needed to prevent and mitigate the threats to human health and wellbeing posed by climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, and poverty. It is against this backdrop that our call seeks new scholarship and reflections that challenge compartmentalized thinking and instead foregrounds interdisciplinary, intersectional, and historically informed approaches.

The webinar, scheduled for February 27, 2026, as part of Black History Month activities of the Department of Africana Studies. It aims to foster robust dialogue that moves beyond simple causal explanations but instead treats environment, development, and governance as mutually constitutive. Contributors are encouraged to examine how governance, development and environmental sustainability intersect in practice. For example, historical land dispossession continues to shape contemporary land grabbing by multinational corporations on the continent, which in turn weakens African farmers’ ability to invest in high-yield agricultural projects, ultimately influencing soil health, biodiversity, and productivity. The webinar seeks to highlight this type of interconnection and to promote scholarships that are theoretically rich yet accessible to a broad audience, including students, policymakers, and practitioners.

The edited book will emerge in part from the webinar. It aims to move beyond the crisis-centered narratives that have long dominated scholarship on Africa by widening the scope of the discourse beyond a conference. In this regard, we seek empirically grounded and theoretically informed analyses that highlight Africans diversity and the innovative, resilient, and locally driven solutions emerging across Africa and the diaspora. The editors emphasize the importance of African-centered and post-colonial perspectives that challenge the universality of Western development, governance, and environmental paradigms. We call for direct engagement with scholarship that foregrounds African epistemologies and intellectual traditions, drawing on thinkers such as Mbembe (2001) and Abiodun (2023).

The book aims to decenter dominant narratives by interrogating the colonial legacies embedded in contemporary agri-business, poverty alleviation programs, civil society interventions, democracy, human rights, freedom, conservation models, urban planning frameworks, and global climate finance mechanisms. The ultimate goal is to produce a volume that bridges the gap between high-level policy analysis and critical academic theory, makes complex scholarship accessible to practitioners and students, and grounds policy debates in historical context and social complexity.

We welcome submissions from thematic areas that reflect the breadth and depth of the governance–development–environment nexus and beyond. These include:

1. Climate adaptation, extreme weather events, and the politics of climate finance.

2. Natural resource governance, extractive industries, environmental justice, and transboundary water management.

3. Agriculture, food systems, land tenure, and sustainable livelihoods.

4. Urbanization, including lifestyle, green infrastructure, waste management, and urban planning.

5. Civil society and social movements- youth climate activism, Indigenous-led conservation, digital activism,

6. Critiques of colonial legacies in post-independence development and legal frameworks. Gender, power, and political participation

7. Regional integration and inclusive development.

8. The role of international financial institutions,

9. United States, Europe, China, Russia–Africa relations and trade

10. Poverty and informal economies, migration

11. Democracy, decentralization, and local governance

12. Conflicts, instability, and displacement,

13. Pan-Africanism,

14. Race and class.

15. Black feminism,

16. Civil rights,

17. Neocolonialism, freedom, and human rights,

18. The alignment of African development with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the African Union’s Agenda 2063.

19. Other related themes.

• Interested authors must submit a 250–500-word abstract in a Word document for the webinar and edited book by February 20th, 2025, and abstracts for the edited book alone by March 31st, 2026. Both should be submitted to Africahubb@gmail.com.
• The abstract should include a provisional chapter title, central argument, research questions, theoretical framework, methodology, empirical focus, and a clear statement of the chapter’s contribution to the volume’s central theme. Authors should also include their WhatsApp contact information.
• Authors may indicate whether they wish their abstract to be considered for presentation at the webinar.
• Notification of acceptance will be made on rollout basis until April 1, 2026.
• Full manuscripts for accepted abstracts are due by October 31, 2026
• Reviewer feedback and comments shall be provided by November 30, 2026.
• Final revised chapters are due by December 31, 2026
• Publication is expected by March 2027.

All questions and concerns should be directed to the Africa Integrated Research Hub team via email, Africahubb@gmail.com

This initiative is jointly organized by the Department of Africana Studies at the University of Cincinnati and the Africa Integrated Research Hub (Africa-hub).

Dr. Violet Y. Fokum, (Political Scientist and Gender Activist) The University of Bamenda, UBa, Cameroon

Dr. Baba Adamu (Environmental Geographer)-University of Buea (UB), Cameroon

Dr. Mbuli C. Shei (Environmental Sociologist)- Independent Researcher, Canada

Dr. Lotsmart Fonjong (Multidisciplinary Scholar), University of Cincinnati, USA