Universities on the African continent been important sites for contingent processes of africanisation and decolonization over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Since the period of structural adjustment in the 1980s, many public universities face major infrastructural challenges and limited material resource. Student numbers, especially in Faculties of Literature and the Humanities, continue to expand rapidly. Using interdisciplinary methods, ‘The Creative Lives of African Universities’ (AFRIUNI) project explores cultural representations (literature, theatre, hip hop, slam, visual art, cinema) and lived experiences of university life from 1960 to the present day. The particular focus is on public universities within the socio-political contexts of four multilingual cities: Dakar (Senegal), Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire), Yaoundé (Cameroon) and Abomey-Calavi (Benin). Faced with global challenges of climate emergency, demographic expansion, mobility, and a digital revolution, the project draws on its context-specific findings to think creatively and collaboratively about the role and meaning of higher education, especially in the humanities. The project seeks transformative, fine-grained understanding of how these contested institutions have been perceived, experienced, and reimagined, deepening shared knowledge of inequalities in the institutionalized production and circulation of knowledge.
The objectives are organised under three strands:
Strand one ('Representations') aims to give visibility to cutting-edge research co-produced by the project team:
O1.1. To survey and analyse collaboratively the creative representations of life on university campuses in four multilingual, historically francophone, African cities (Dakar, Abidjan, Abomey-Calavi, Yaoundé), from 1960 to the present day. These will include African campus novels, spoken word poetry, film and art works.
O1.2. To dialogue with, and provide greater visibility for, endogenous critical concepts and terms within the space of the university, through a methodology that attends to the aesthetics of knowledge production.
O1.3. To consider in particular how these creative forms respond to bureaucracy as a lived experience.
Strand two (‘Curriculum’) aims to provide empirical understanding of literary curricula and pedagogy:
O2.1 To explore the history of literary curricula at the four partner institutions, through archival research, oral histories, and observation of classes/lectures.
O2.2 To map how these institutions (and key individuals within them) have approached literary pedagogy, with a particular attention to the languages of pedagogy, role of pan-Africanism, and status of translation within the curriculum.
Strand three ('Student lives') aims to consider the lived experience of students in the Humanities:
O3.1. To develop a participatory methodology with student co-researchers to investigate the lived experience and perceptions of studying literature in the four selected partner institutions.
O3.2. To leverage these methodologies as a means to understand what it means to be human in the current context of globalising HE, demographic change, climate crisis, the digital revolution in the global South, decolonial thought/epistemology, and multilingualism, where each is understood to have profound potential impact on individuals’ sense of identity, political subjectivity, and social attitudes.
