CODESRIA
Call for Papers
Journal of Higher Education in Africa: Thematic Issue No. 1, 2012
The University and its Territory* in Africa

Call outline

The aim of this issue is to discuss the multi-dimensional interactions between African universities and 'their' territory. More than anywhere else, African universities are facing the hardly reconcilable missions and objectives of meeting growing socio-educational demands, maintaining academic standards to preserve their reputation, contributing to local development while keeping their autonomy and negotiating political pressures. These are challenges which young African universities are confronted with in a context of declining public funding. This issue proposes to analyze those interactions and their mutual effects.

Theme and subthemes

Universities have always been considered as key drivers of the economic development of 'their' immediate environment and perceived as visibility factor by local authorities and economic powers because of their capacity to link the global and the local communities. Equally, universities have come to realize that their own reputation and visibility is increasingly tied to their context, and have in recent years emphasized their 'engagement' initiatives with the communities and authorities that constitute their local territory.

Beside the general interest it conveys worldwide, this theme is to reveal new meanings in the African context, given that modern cities and universities have expanded simultaneously and significantly during the post colonial period. Small and medium size towns and modern universities that existed before independence hardly interacted in any formal sense with local communities because they were extraverted and were, more often than not, at the service of colonization. After independence, universities in Africa adopted contrasting approaches toward regional and community engagement from one country to another. Overall, a strengthening of the new relationship between universities and their environment entailed supplementing their traditional academic missions (teaching and research) with a developmental agenda in areas of administrative and technical skill provision, and of applied research among others. As a result, universities are today faced with the reality of being embedded within their region or city and interact with a range of local stakeholders with diverse demands.

Combining economic, cultural, and political dimensions, interactions between the university and their territory will be analysed as areas of mutual perceptions, of conflicts and opportunities towards a better understanding of African Universities’ spatial identity.

The following themes are suggested as potential areas of interests to pitch paper proposals, but contributions on germane issues are also welcome.

The economic, urban and spatial management dimensions

How are university sites chosen? What policies and strategies interfere in the edification of university campuses? In many African countries, despite current economic and financial pressures, policy makers are subject to intense pressure resulting from the rising social demand for higher education or from political bargaining. This pressure, compounded by the weakness or even the absence of economic development programs, has often turned the establishment of universities into core elements of regional and urban management.

To what extent does access to higher education policies determine the configuration of urban spaces? The high increase in student enrolment, combined with the specific student culture, customarily known to be demanding, are likely to be of impact on the type of infrastructures and facilities available as a result of management strategies or in response to market opportunities.

What evidence do we have of the local impact of universities’ knowledge transfer activities (provision of skills and applied knowledge to local administration and businesses)?

To what extent does the funding of universities encourage the development of local strategies? How is their economic impact assessed and what are the perceptions associated with them among local stakeholders? To what extent do universities, as major local employers, impact on the local labour market, on local salaries and rights of other sectors’ employees?

Papers discussing the meaning of the concept of territoriality for virtual universities or universities combining contact modes with distance learning are particularly welcome. The journal is also interested in complex identities and forms of multiple territorial embeddedness as in the case of universities based in provincial towns and opening study centres in the larger cities.

The socio-political dimension

What forms of cohabitation exist between academic, cultural and economic spaces? How do universities engage with local authorities and communities? Can universities be considered as proactive local stakeholders? What institutional strategies can be said to be directly or indirectly responding to local specific needs or demands (in public health, innovation, etc)? Do universities have a clear strategy of 'community service' through extra-mural adult classes, student placements, health consultancy and campaigns? Does the presence of academics and students influence the local political make up in any specific way? Part of the university’s attractiveness, which helps recruit the best students, the more reputed academics and also bring about international collaborations (indispensable for visibility outside the national confines) depends on the attractiveness of nearby cities (conditions of accommodation, accessibility, entertainment, culture, security, etc). To what extent does the presence of a university influence those characteristics of its immediate environment?

The responsiveness-autonomy dilemma

Questions related to the level of embeddedness of the university in its place may also be approached through the prism of academic autonomy. Is the development agenda often governing the establishment of new institutions threatening their autonomy? In practice, it has been proved that in Africa, the autonomy of universities is often mitigated by their dependence in many respects, especially financially, vis a vis the state. One can, therefore, expect the relationship between the university and the city to be heavily mediated by the state factor. While academic freedom and the franchises universitaires are still routinely threatened by state interventions in certain African countries, 'autonomy' has lately tended to effectively mean the shedding off of state responsibility in funding the institutions and the consequent arrival of private firms, transforming campuses to business quarters, with shops, banks, private providers competing with lecture rooms for space. Elsewhere, private universities have started to build new terms of territorial loyalty and processes of international accreditation have submitted public institutions to extra-territorial opportunities and allegiance. How all these processes are effectively framing the academic/community engagement will be of interest to this thematic issue.

The cultural dimension

Do universities contribute to the conception of an urban and territorial identity that they would identify as 'their' place? Do they play the sort of identity building role which religious, political or ethnic institutions claim to be playing? Do they have a local research agenda contributing to a better understanding of their cultural environment? What attitudes have local institutions and their staff offered in contexts of urban violence or ethnic and religious strife?

Rather than adopting a normative position or assuming a positive role for universities in African societies, this thematic issue will aim to draw on empirical evidence and concrete case studies to highlight the diversity of models and forms of interactions between universities and their claimed or assigned local territory. Paper proposals in English or French are welcome from all areas of the social sciences, provided that they are empirically and theoretically informed.

Hocine Khelfaoui & Yann Lebeau
Editors

Agenda
• June 20th, 2011: Submission of a 350 word abstract (including title and a maximum of 5 references) in French or English.
• October 1st, 2011: Submission of articles (up to 8,000 words including references).
• October–November 2011: Peer review and revision of articles.
• December 2011: Submission of final articles.
All submissions should be sent to: [email][email protected]

* Space, place and territory are polysemic terms in social science, often used interchangeably. For the purpose of this call we are deliberately using them in their loosest sense, but we will expect contributions to clearly define the geographical entities referred to as well as the universities’ forms of spatial loyalty described and discussed. Depending on local configurations, the spatial delimitation of a town may be accepted as a reference for the local actions and forms of identification of universities while in other contexts several institutions may have to share an urban environment, prompting complex territorial strategies. Elsewhere, the spatial loyalty of a university will contractually impact on a much larger regional, provincial or state territory (or even beyond in case of distance learning institutions).