Basel Summer School in African Studies

The Basel Summer School in African Studies aims at stimulating and consolidating a new perspective on African Studies. It is organised by the Centre in Basel every second year alternating with the CODESRIA/ZASB Summer School held on the continent. The Basel Summer School is offered in the framework of the swissuniversities-funded Basel Graduate Network African Studies.

The focus of the Summer School is on African Studies as an instance of “area studies”. It addresses themes that are theoretically, conceptually and methodologically relevant to the pursuit of reflection on the intellectual challenge of Africa as an object of knowledge and its contribution to general scholarship. The goals of the Summer School can be broadly defined in the following manner:

• The Summer School allows PhD students, under the guidance of senior scholars, to engage critically with new theoretical, conceptual and methodological developments in African Studies and make them relevant to their work.
• The Summer School provokes PhD students to reflect on the potential relevance of knowledge on Africa to the task of improving our theoretical, conceptual and methodological tools both for the disciplines as well as for interdisciplinary work.
• The Summer School fosters among PhD students a sense of belonging to a community of scholars in pursuit of knowledge and scholarship.
• The Summer School encourages junior scholars to work towards carving a space for African Studies in the broader field of scholarship and in this way helping African Studies to place itself right at the centre of knowledge production.