African Graduate Student Association 2026 Symposium

The African Graduate Students Association (AGSA) at the University of Michigan invites you to its 2026 Graduate Research Symposium, a one-day interdisciplinary academic gathering that centers African scholarship as a driving force in global knowledge production.

Guided by the theme “We Are the Archive,” the symposium asserts that African scholars do not merely respond to existing bodies of knowledge, we actively produce, expand, and redefine them. Across disciplines, research conducted by Africans on the continent and across the diaspora, engages some of the most pressing global challenges in science, health, technology, governance, economics, development, and the humanities. Across generations, the multiplicity of African knowledge (and its diaspora) have shaped foundational debates and advanced new methods across disciplines. This symposium highlights research that is rigorous and original, and attentive to the questions, archives, and intellectual genealogies that animate African, and diasporic inquiry. We convene to share work, grounded in theory, empirical data, innovation, and lived experience, generating new scholarship and practice.

“We Are the Archive” is a declaration and an invitation. It calls on participants to envision African research as transformative rather than reactive, generative rather than marginal, and innovative rather than imitative. This symposium foregrounds scholarship that affirms African agency, creativity, and intellectual continuity across time and space.