12. Mai 2021 / Forschung

Call for Papers: The genre of reality. African Philosophy in the Covid-19 crisis

Asixoxe Conference on African Philosophy 2021, 15-16 June 2021, online

The global shock generated by the virulence of Covid-19 pandemic and various measures taken to curtail the spread of this pandemic put in question the way people negotiate their daily reality, and their relationship to the world. We no longer access the real through simulacra; the real itself is in transformation and is confronting us. Our very bodily reality has changed, impacting the way we meet, the way we interact, our relationships. Human interactions have been limited by face masks, social distancing, but also transposed into digital communication. 

The organisers invite interested scholars to submit abstracts relating to the following topics and questions:

• How is Covid-19 pandemic talked about in Africa? What are the texts and the textual genres that conceptualize Covid-19? How are these expressions culturally specific? What are the narratives of Covid-19, both in the sense of accounts of the experience of suffering from Covid-19 and in the sense of broader societal conceptualizations of the pandemic? How is Covid-19 talked about in African languages?

• What about medical ethics regarding the anti-covid 19 vaccine research, clinical trials, and its application to humans? Is there any philosophical argument in support of the growing up anti-vaccine activism in Africa? How far does the global medical system integrate indigenous knowledges in the struggle against Covid-19? What kind of metaphysics shapes the African countries health public policies?  How do our perceptions of solidarity change in the global scramble for the anti-Covid 19 vaccine? 

• How to reconcile the right to freedom of African people with the restrictive measures imposed by the state on the grounds of fighting the Covid-19 pandemic? How do anti-Covid measures affect social and cultural practices, and beliefs of African people, as for instance the metaphysics of sickness and death, or burial and mourning practices? How does the mask change our interaction with the face? How does it change the gaze? How do we approach the other and alterity in a situation of “covered faces”? 

• How are digital technologies accessed and used by Africans in the effort to help mitigate the effects of Covid-19 and of the anti-Covid measures? Is there any philosophical reading of the increasing digital divide between developed and developing countries? 

This year’s Asixoxe – Let’s Talk! African Philosophy Conference will be held online. The conference is hosted jointly by the Centre of Global Studies, Prague, Czech Republic and the Centre of African Philosophy, University of Bayreuth, Germany.

Please submit abstracts no later than 24^th May 2021 to Dr Albert Kasanda or Dr Alena Rettová.