The Program on African Social Research* (https://www.pasiri.org/) The Program on African Social Research (PASR) was founded to center African knowledge production within social science research globally. We do this by creating opportunities for junior scholars based in Africa. By providing access to international networks and building networks across the African continent, we work to help junior scholars improve and disseminate their research, and to create opportunities for mentoring and meaningful collaborative possibilities. PASR is supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. It is based at the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, Baruch College, City University of New York.

Makerere Institute of Social Research (MISR) is a centre for critical scholarship and research that was established in 1948 in Uganda and was transformed from being a centre for commissioned research detached from the university into a doctoral and research unit of the university in 2010-2012. Committed to endogenous knowledge creation and to generating a pool of high quality and strategic thinkers for the country and the region who can think the world from various disciplinary and geographical locations, MISR currently offers a full-time Interdisciplinary MPhil/PhD in Social Studies as its flagship program.

The Center for African Studies (CAS) at the University of Cape Town is the longestestablished institution of its kind. Re-launched in 2012, it carries a mandate for promoting and supporting African Studies across the various Faculties of the University of Cape Town. It coheres around an undergraduate and graduate teaching program, and houses and supports a number of projects, including The African Studies Gallery, the journal Social Dynamics, research projects, seminars and conferences, socially engaged research with public intellectuals and community organisations, and various publication initiatives. CAS has been an important flashpoint in the life of the institution which has generated important debates about the study of Africa, colonial pasts and postcolonial futures. Part of the mission of African Studies at UCT is to draw on the resources of these debates, as well as other similar debates in universities across the global south, to re-imagine and reconfigure inherited architectures of knowledge. In our pursuit of a critical humanities and social sciences we understand ourselves to be situated at the cutting edge of new knowledge formations, engaged in critiques of inherited institutional and disciplinary forms, while immersed in a rigorous engagement with the critical and intellectual traditions of Africa, situated comparatively. We endeavour to draw on these traditions of knowledge to re-write the past, to contribute to better understandings of the major predicaments of the present, and to facilitate the imaginings of new futures.

 

*African Social Research is an open access publication. Authors retain all rights to their contributions. To cite: Decoloniality and Decolonization in Africa, African Social Research 5 (Winter 2024).