From 26 to 28 August 2026, the Swiss Society for African Studies (SGAS/SSEA) and the Association for African Studies in Germany (VAD) held their joint biennial conference in Basel, Switzerland. Under the theme “African Perspectives on Global Transformations,” the conference responded to urgent calls for decolonisation, epistemic justice, reparations, climate justice, and restitution. It brought together scholars from Europe, Africa, and beyond in a range of panels and interactive formats.
The PolMig project team, represented by Franzisca Zanker, Jamila Hamidu, Edwin Mutyenyoka, and Sophia Stille, made a strong contribution to the programme, reflecting the project’s commitment to advancing research on migrant political agency from an Afrocentric perspective.
Franzisca Zanker and Mary Setrana convened and chaired a double panel on Afro-feminist approaches to research, policy, and practice. In this session, Sophia Stille presented part of her PhD research with a paper titled “‘Labour Exports’ in Times of Racial Capitalism: An Afro-Feminist Analysis of Malawi’s Recent Labour Migration Regime”. Jamila Hamidu delivered an engaging paper entitled “Tamale – The Boom City: How Climate Change Displacement Created Opportunities of Urban Expansion and Precarity”.
The team also co-organised and actively participated in an interactive workshop titled “From Observers to ‘Spect-actors’: Participatory Theatre as Decolonial-Feminist Research Method”, led by Sophia Stille, Edwin Mutyenyoka, and Céline Barry. The workshop explored Forum Theatre as a tool for decolonial-feminist knowledge production, showcasing the innovative method that is central to the PolMig project’s methodology.