The Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence (AM) is a consortium of five research centers designed to develop new responses to the theoretical, methodological and structural challenges facing African Studies: The research centers are at the University of Bayreuth, Germany; Rhodes University, Makhanda, South Africa; Moi University Eldoret, Kenya; Joseph Ki-Zerbo University, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso; the University of Lagos, Akoka, Nigeria. AM is funded by a program of the German federal and state governments, which aims to strengthen top-level research.
Since its inception in 2019 the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence has led innovative approaches and forms of collaborative research, with the objective of reconfiguring African Studies on both the conceptual and the structural level. Africa Multiple is thus pioneering changes to power imbalances in the production and transmission of knowledge in African Studies. In the first funding phase (AM 1.0: 2019-2025) collaboration was established among the five research centers and we built new structures of exchange and knowledge production. Together, we have co-created a transformative space to advance the study of African and African diasporic ways of life through the pursuit of new inter- and transdisciplinary forms of cutting-edge research and theory-building. The next seven-year funding phase of Africa Multiple (AM 2.0, 2026–2032) will strengthen the close collaboration between the five Africa Multiple Research Centers, establishing sustainable structures in research, early career support and research data management, as well as gender and diversity.
One main objective in AM 2.0 is to promote research on multiple, relational, and reflexive processes of world-making as they pertain to Africa. Cluster-funded projects will contribute to re-imagining the world from African perspectives more broadly and to re-thinking what world is, how it came to be that way, and what it could become. With this, our collaborative research aims to address and analyze the current global challenges and concomitant power dynamics, relationalities and agencies as they pertain to Africa and the multiple world(s) Africa co-constitutes.