Alliance for African Partnership Perspectives

Understanding the Quantitative Debt Owed to Africa

Nathaniel Stewart, James Uanhoro — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0500

In this thought piece, we trace the quantitative debt data science owes to Africa. Specifically, we trace Congolese labor and resources in laying the foundations for modern computing. Quantitative research would not be possible without Congolese contributions. Simultaneously, modern data science is positioned to pay the debt owed through supporting movement-building. We end the piece with a call to action. University-based researchers must use quantitative methods and software to pay the debt owed to the African diaspora.

Guest editors introductory note

Dr. Vaughn W. M. Watson — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Guest editors introductory note

Prologue

Dr. Jabbar Bennett — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Prologue

Black Artistic Imaginaries and the Endemicity of Antiblackness in the US University

Justin Coles, Gorana Gonzalez, Imani Wallace, Chanel Prince — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0500

In this reflective and conceptual essay, we discuss the ways the Black Healing, Joy, and Justice Collective (BHJJC) at UMass Amherst worked (and continues to work) to engage in departures from antiblackness in the wake of an anti-Black letter sent to all Black student groups and organizations in Fall 2021. Through our offering of Black artistic imaginaries, we detail how we leveraged the multimodal, artistic creations of Black ungraduated and graduate students to refuse fighting to speak back to the letter (something exterior to Blackness); turning inward to uplifting and further developing Black interior standpoints, which inherently work to reduce anti-Black harm.

Teaching Ethnicity to Engineering Students in a South African University

Fraser McNeill — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0500

This thought piece describes the experience of teaching ethnicity to first year engineering students in a South African university. It starts by outling the process by which the Humanities and Engineering faculties were brought into intellectual engagement. Written from the perspective of the lecturer, it develops an ethnographic analysis of teaching ‘constructivist’ ideas around ethnicity to a body of students who had, for the most part, never questioned that ethnicity could be anything else than ‘natural’, unchangeable and non-negotiable. This raises several points for discussion, which are taken up towards the end of the paper. I conclude that the course in question may well be building bridges between essentialist and historical understandings of ethnicity but that the sustained prominence of ethnic essentialisms in contemporary South Africa render this a partial process which often faces resistance from students.

Centralizing Place as Past(s), Present(s), Future(s)

Patriann Smith — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0500

In this brief essay, the theory of place is used in conjunction with a Sankofan to highlight the ways in which place functioned as both material and experiential and influence my situatedness as a literacy and language scholar, mother, and individual. Through this interconnection, I demonstrate how the “hybridities of identities and places” influenced my decisions to navigate positivistic as well as interpretivist, critical, and pluralist epistemologies while I straddled qualitative and quantitative worlds. My resulting scholarship demonstrates how critical literacy theory came to undergird the challenges posed to monoglossic language ideology as I advocate for heteroglossic norms and a raciolinguistic perspective in the racialized Englishes and literacies of Black (Caribbean) immigrant populations. Addressing perceptions that accompany the use of these Englishes across geographical, symbolic, and social borders through qualitative research, I illustrate why I also use quantitative methods to advocate for literacy instruction and assessment that acknowledges the intersecting influences of dialect, race, and culture in the literacies of Black immigrant multilingual youth. By engaging in this process, I demonstrate how my literacy research is largely intertwined with how I have engaged with the past and present to influence the future, thereby reflecting hybridities of literate identities and place. Implications for those who work with Black immigrants are provided.

Blackness is not Monolithic: Black Immigrant Women Scholars Enacting Change through Storytelling

Mellissa Gyimah-Concepcion, Dr. Adenekan — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Blackness is not monolithic; our identity as Black immigrant women scholars and college professors teaching American students in the U.S. has shaped our learning and instruction. Because of the layered challenges faced by female scholars, and the largely absent voices and experiences of Black women in the field, we noticed that not only are Black women literacy scholars’ lived experiences missing from the field, as Baker-Bell (2017) says, but Black immigrant women scholars’ lived experiences are missing from the field in the US as well. Thus, we feel compelled to make space for what this means in a US-based classroom context. There is an urgency to explore the intersectionality of our identities in the classroom through storytelling, so as to expand our students’ learning experiences and literacy practices. We essentially ask our students to move past what they think they already know about Blackness, to encompass a much broader, critical tapestry of identity, new vistas, and territories. This, in effect, should enrich their learning experiences.

Trusting Women of Color: Lessons from American Higher Education on Organizational Change through an Intersectional Lens

Lauren Anderson — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0500

The Office of Diversity and Equity is a vital functional area for higher education in America. In being Chief Diversity Officers at the intersections of race and gender, it is integral that institutions are devoted to addressing the challenges of women of color in creating institutional changes in their position. Research revealed the imperative nature of organizations in creating and sustaining equitable policies and practices that acknowledges and takes seriously the epistemologies of multiple marginalized employees and key stakeholders in order to create liberating spaces for individuals and communities to thrive and live.

African-Centered Hybridity: A Reconceptualization of Africanness in this Colonially guised Globalized Era

Araba Osei-Tutu — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0500

This piece problematizes conceptualizations of African identities that are not centered in specific linguistic and cultural roots that can be traced back to the continent. Defining Africanness as related to cultures, worldviews and languages on the continent, the reconceptualization of Africanness in the Diaspora, the concept of blackness that is challenged by northern and southern Africa, a case is made for what I term African-Centered Hybridity. I argue that the concept or ideology that we have become so globalized culturally, linguistically, and in identities to the extent that one cannot speak of identifiable or tangible African identities or cultures is a form of re-colonization under the guise of globalization. I conclude that higher educational institutions, Africans and Africanists should engage and employ curricular, pedagogical and research tenets centered in inclusivity in order to curb the assault on African cultures, languages, worldviews and identities. This way colonialism guised under this globalized era can be resisted.

Ethics, the university, and society: toward a decolonial approach to research ethics

Natalie Tegama, Dr Alison Fox — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Research ethics should sit at the very core of knowledge production in universities and other research institutions. It is the critical facet that foreshadows decisions as to whether research proposals have ethical merits, how researchers engage with and apply ethical principles to their work and in shaping the output. As a result of its role in knowledge production the university, as an institution, has since the 19^th century played a key role as a site of scientific and social innovation. Governments and other institutions routinely cite university publications as policy justification. This paper charts the current and potential role of ethical review committees in global North universities in supporting ethical research relevant to global South contexts. This calls for attention to be paid to how research ethics is defined and whose work is included in its definition. This paper examines societal inequity resulting from histories of colonial thinking in the global North and how this has affected its universities, for example on whose voices are heard and whose values are valued. It looks towards how decolonial approaches can be taken to recalibrate research ethics for epistemic justice. It particularly draws on examples of research in African contexts, drawing on the first author’s particular experience and perspectives, and draws from the second author’s commitment to contributing to practical responses by ethical committees and those producing ethical guidance in the global North.

Disaggregating Blackness or Dissolving Binaries?

Eileen Boswell — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0500

Invisible taxonomies of race, and of language, are insidious. In contemporary U.S. higher education, colloquial references to ‘international’ confer accolades and ‘global’ resonates with positive potential, whereas students who bear the labels ‘migrant’ or ‘refugee’—despite their vase cultural competence—are dismissed or disdained as inferior, damaged goods from undesirable places. Using the critical race theoretical framework of “tools of thought” (Delgado and Stefancic, 2017), this paper explores the questions of (a) What biases and ethnic whitewashing result from the limited tools of thought, such as the terms ‘domestic’ and ‘international’, that U.S. higher education uses to describe African-heritage students? and (b) How might the label ‘Black/African American’ essentialize and homogenize these students? This exploration was part of a larger qualitative study that sought to dissolve the international/domestic binary and ask African students—irrespective of the passports they hold—what their experiences of anti-Black racism are on predominantly White campuses.

A critique of public policy initiatives to address unequal educational outcomes for Black students in Ontario, Canada, 1987-2021

James Alan Oloo — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 00:00:00 -0500

This study identifies and critiques public policy initiatives that have been implemented in Ontario, Canada to help address unequal educational outcomes for its Black students. Since the mid-1980s, Ontario has been governed by six governors from three political parties. All have implemented, supported, or ammended laws and policy documents aimed at addressing the unequal educational opportunies and outcomes for Black students. Black population in Canada doubled in size between 1996 and 2016. Over 56% of the Black population was first generation immigrants, and more than one half of Canada's Black population reside in Ontario. The study uses the methodology employed by George et al. (2020), which involved online search for Ontario Ministry of Education policy documents that are relevant to K-12 education and were released between 1987 and 2021 and is situated within a critical race lens. Four common policy strands stand out across the policy documents that were reviewed: Race, streaming, discrimination, and zero tolerance approach to school discipline. Altertative policy approaches are presented.