This course explores and makes visible how historically dominant discourses about Africa are the products of historical forces and reflect a Western, Eurocentric bias. The course offers a lens into the study of Africa that highlights African knowledge producers while taking up the study of the continent and its peoples through various disciplinary angles.
This course has been designed with the generous support of the Boston University African Studies Center, K-16 African Studies Center.
By the end of the course, participants will:
- Develop a social justice perspective to teaching and learning about Africa in the larger context of dismantling Eurocentric views across disciplines in the curriculum;
- Gain tools to understand the politics of knowledge production regarding Africa and probe how people in the Western world have learned to view Africa and the consequences of this perspective
- Become familiar with Africa’s geographies from an anthropocentric perspective
- Identify key historical epochs, societies, political institutions, and knowledges that forged the history of the continent prior to European colonization.
- Probe ways that African knowledge, scholarship, literacies, art, music, scientific knowledge, politics, and popular culture can be centered in the disciplines of social science, science, mathematics, and the arts.
- Develop a teaching resource that instantiates the intersection of Africa-related knowledge or themes with your teaching discipline(s).
