Foto: Marko Scholz
Project management: Prof. Dr. Andreas Mehler (University of Freiburg), Prof. Dr. Mamadou Diawara (Goethe University Frankfurt am Main / Frobenius Institute)
Project staff: Dr. Stefan Schmid (Center for Interdisciplinary African Studies), Dr. Marko Scholze (Goethe University Frankfurt am Main)
Project partners: Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, University of Freiburg, German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA), University of Konstanz, German Historical Institute in Paris
Funding: Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), University of Ghana
Duration: September 2020 – August 2026
The Maria Sibylla Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA), comprising four partner institutions, is an international research center at the University of Ghana in Legon, Accra. It promotes collaboration between Ghanaian scholars and their international counterparts across disciplines and national borders.
MIASA is committed to reducing global asymmetries in knowledge production and fostering greater collaboration among researchers from Anglophone and Francophone Africa. MIASA’s overarching goal is to increase the global visibility of humanities, social sciences, and cultural studies research by scholars from Sub-Saharan Africa. To achieve this, the research network awarded grants to early-career researchers as well as established scholars who worked on the overarching theme of “Sustainable Governance” during the project’s preliminary phase from 2018 to 2020. The Frankfurt subproject is responsible within the research group for organizing international conferences that shed light on key aspects of the theme “sustainable governance” and are conducted in collaboration with the African partner institutions of the Point Sud network, which is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Through these conferences, MIASA gains greater visibility in Ghana and, in particular, within the academic communities of West, Central, and Southern Africa, laying the foundation for sustainable continental collaboration. Furthermore, by being rooted in Anglo-, Franco-, and Lusophone Africa, the conferences help overcome language barriers. The planned international writing workshops at the University of Ghana will make an important contribution to the advancement of early-career researchers, where participants will improve their academic writing skills and develop their own publication strategies. The various activities of the participating partner institutions are interlinked to, for example, enable young researchers from the writing workshops to participate in the international MIASA conferences or policy workshops.
MIASA website: https://miasa.ug.edu.gh/
