Research Sections

Six thematic fields, organized into Research Sections, provide a coherent structure to our research projects. Most projects pursue an inter- and/or transdisciplinary agenda and involve close cooperation between researchers from Bayreuth, Africa, and our global network.

Please find the current Africa Multiple Cluster Research digest here:

Affiliations

Today’s African nation states maintain multiple, often overlapping, competing political, economic and social affiliations that change over time and redefine societal issues. In this thematic field we propose to analyse the tensions, obstacles and temporal evolution as well as the benefits and challenges connected with such affiliations, especially as they play out in regional economic communities. ...more

Arts and Aesthetics

This research Section addresses the multiplicity of artworks. Hence, instead of taking given unities in aesthetics for granted as our starting point, we will focus on ongoing processes of creation, mediation and interpretation as well as how artworks shape and are shaped by material and social conditions. ...more

Knowledges

The RS Knowledges will investigate knowledges and their global and local impacts. It will study the trajectories and politics of processes of knowledge, with respect to a) the un/doing of knowledges, b) the scopes and scales of knowledges, and c) the politics of knowledges.
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Learning​

This RS seeks to realise an understanding of multiple and interrelated processes of learning in Africa and their connectedness beyond the continent, with particular reference to—and relevance for—the cluster’s key concepts of multiplicity and relationality. ...more

Mobilities

While mobility has increased dramatically around the globe over the last decades, a focus on the Global South and Africa in particular reveals selective and ambiguous mobilities. This RS empirically and conceptually interrogates these complex patterns of (im)mobility: the movements and blockages of people, things and ideas, within, towards and outwards from Africa. ...more

Moralities

The objective of this RS is to study modes of “doing ethics” in contexts where questions of well-being and societal transformation are at stake, especially in fields characterised by transnational interactions such as development, social/religious movements or international justice.  ...more