The Program on African Social Research (PASR), in collaboration with LuCAC, hosted a workshop focused on the study of inequality in Africa, which continues to attract researchers from across the humanities, social sciences, and public health. The Covid-19 pandemic has added new urgency to inequality studies due to its disparate impacts both within and between countries. Moreover, new approaches to the study of inequality, particularly in the social sciences, are challenging standard theorizations of inequality as the just result of “merit-based” processes. These interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches have been driven by fresh analyses of data highlighting the persistence of inequalities between groups, including gender, race, ethnicity, and nations.
PASR invited proposals from scholars on the broad theme of the Political Economy of Inequality in Africa. These proposals could include theoretical explorations of how and why various inequalities emerge or descriptive/statistical analyses of innovative ways to document inequality in Africa. There is particular interest in work that focuses on marginalized groups or addresses understudied topics. Additionally, the workshop seeks analyses that illuminate how politics and economics, as well as different political and economic systems, can either exacerbate or mitigate inequalities, including studies of public policy efforts that have successfully reduced inequality.
The workshop was transregional and welcomed contributions from all disciplines, including political science, economics, history, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, public health, and cultural studies. The goal was to showcase the research of junior scholars, defined as PhD students and pre-tenure assistant professors or their equivalents. Participants were asked to contribute original papers of 2,500–3,000 words, which would be discussed at the workshop and subsequently revised for publication in the PASR open-access journal, African Social Research.
