Echoes in the Africana World is a conceptual framework coordinated by the Center for Africana Studies and Culture that features multiple engagements with the African Diaspora through transdisciplinary research, cultural exchanges, and topical explorations around local, national, and international inquiry. The purpose of the initiative is to implement collaborative scholarly approaches that are grounded in cultural principles drawing on the liberatory practices of the persons of African descent across time and space. Aiming to dispel distortions about Africana culture, identity, and history as they relate to the lives of Africana people who face daily challenges to their place in the world.
Featured projects include:
This is a Digital Humanities-based project designed to provide transnational cohorts of undergraduate students with the knowledge and empirical foundation to lead social and racial justice work at home, and in the broader world. The cohort utilizes a transdisciplinary humanities-specific approach to research (e.g., autoethnography, productions of literature, oral history, fieldwork, anthropological history, heritage tours, etc.) that leads the students in a scholarly mapping of their proximity to the lasting effects of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade (TST). The cohort has a particular focus on the miseducation of the persons of African descent and the subsequent inequalities that characterize their experiences transnationally. Students begin with translational research that explores the African epistemological framework that guided culture and development before the encounter with coloniality and enslavement. This is then followed by a critical exploration of the transatlantic slave trade, slavery, and colonialism to ongoing racialization processes to identify patterns of continuity and discontinuity in the present. This phase is critical to identifying the liberatory and life-thriving practices by which persons of African descent have resisted, coped, and innovatively adapted to racialization processes and conditions. Starting students there allows for a deeper understanding of the mass forced displacement that populated the Western world and its numerous implications for the formation of world society. Targeted faculty areas of expertise in art, history, land-based traditions, literature, political economy, or religious traditions will be studied to formalize and center culture as paramount to analysis and problem-solving.
Each cohort collaborates in the production of an interactive digital experience that allows visitors to follow student “maps” which provide detail through a series of digital humanities-based products such as digital stories or archiving. The course is co-taught by faculty from the University of Cape Coast, Ghana; University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados; Federal University, Bahia, Brazil, and Morehouse College in Atlanta, GA. Each of these institutions represents geographic regions where the slave trade either forcibly removed or deposited people with the group co-developing modules for a cohort of 10 students (2 students per institution) who attend 1-2 virtual classes per week for a total of 10-12 weeks.
Throughout the course, each student will be guided by their faculty mentor to complete short assignments and readings from a shared syllabus that leads up to the final product which will be shared in a virtual showcase of their digital humanities projects and placed in the digital repository.
Echoes Cohort 1 Faculty
Dr. Yanique Hume, University of the West Indies Cave Hill, Barbados
Dr. Emmanuel Saboro, University of Cape Coast, Ghana
Dr. De-Valera Botchway, University of Cape Coast, Ghana
Dr. Worth Hayes, Morehouse College, Atlanta, GA
Dr. Paola Baretto, Federal University, Bahia, Brazil
Drs. Leslie K. Etienne, Patricia Turley, and Eric Kyere, Indiana University Indianapolis
Echoes Cohort 1 Students
Zena Kerby (IUI student)
Bismark Jahgwan Sey Nyarko (Ghana)
Freda Owusu Ansah (Ghana)
Leidson Luis (Brazil)
Schaira Vitoria (Brazil)
Benedicta Arthur (Ghana)
Ralycia Andrews (St. Vincent/UWI)
Shakira Mohan (UWI)
Liam Wang (Morehouse)
The first virtual Cohort ran in Fall 2023 with Cohort 2 beginning in October 2024.
This portion of Echoes seeks to develop deeper engagements and inquiry into the African Diaspora by including CASC faculty, affiliated external community-based scholars, cultural workers, artists in curated cultural exchanges. The first of which convened in August 2024 in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil.
This phase of Echoes in the Africana World brings together CASC’s internal and external network of multidisciplined scholars, activists, artists, and practitioners in the developing a broader Digital Humanities project aimed at unifying all the elements of Echoes into a dynamic scholarly product. Metaphorically representing the underwater currents that flow through seas, the project focuses on the Black Atlantic and the disbursement of Africana people throughout it by the transatlantic slave trade. This project will deploy the marine biologists, ecosystem ecologists, and ornithologists from CASC’s Critical Black Ecology working group to measure physical legacies. Next, CASC’s Health Equity Working group’s social scientists, medical scholars, agriculturalists, and food ways specialists will extract data that frames the socio-economic legacies of slavery and colonialism based on the scientific findings. The culminating effort of the science and social science work will be the use of collective synthesis that will produce a myriad of scholarly products such as journal articles and book chapters. Also, CASC affiliate faculty scholars from teacher education, foundations of education, and curriculum development will work simultaneously to formalize a companion guide for teachers of school-aged children. The paramount form of dissemination however will be produced through the lens of the humanities and art, with literature and history framing the storytelling aspects that will be expressed by poets, musicians, theater and visual art artists.
This work will incorporate the full CASC global network to include the U.S., Ghana (West Africa), Kenya (East Africa), Barbados (Caribbean), Brazil (S. America)
Echoes in the Africana World aligns with the IU2030 strategic plan in these ways:
Transformative Research & Creativity
Goal 1: Increase Research Productivity by Expanding and Diversifying High-Impact
and Translational Research Areas
Goal 2: Enhance Community-Engaged Research and Public Scholarship
Goal 3: Strengthen Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Across the Research Enterprise
Goal 4: Enhance Support for Faculty Excellence in Research
Service to Our State and Beyond
Goal 5: Adapt Global Perspectives to Address Local Challenges
The project aligns also with IU’s pursuit of excellence in embodying the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including:
SDG 10 Reduced Inequalities: This study tour and cultural exchange encourage(s) the members to explore how their disciplines, research, or practice can embody concepts and pathways to equity by examining the root causes of inequality in the African diaspora.
SDG 16 Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions/SDG 17 Partnerships for the Goals: The Echoes in the Africana World Transnational Cohort offers faculty an opportunity to broaden a collaborative reach and impact through interactions that help to build stronger institutions through institutional relationships.
SDG 17 Partnerships are the cornerstone of our work. For example, through our project partners:
