The CAAS Conference 2026 will be held at Glendon Campus, York University, in Toronto, Canada from June 9-12, 2026. The conference is themed “Global Africa: Legacies, Change, and Aspirations” and will be a hybrid event, offering both in-person and virtual participation options.
The notion of “Global Africa” aims to capture the tensions between promise and precarity, opportunity and constraint, while reflecting the aspirations of a continent navigating a rapidly shifting economic and political landscape. Tied to this are the growing presence of emerging powers such as Brazil, China, and India, nations that are also competing for resources and political influence across the continent. In the face of these changes, several questions arise: How can Africa strategically leverage these geopolitical shifts and, in so doing, escape a new ”Scramble for Africa”? How can the continent harness the vast potential of its greatest asset, its vibrant youth, to advance sustainable development? And how can we recover and adopt Indigenous African knowledge systems to confront global challenges (e.g., sociopolitical, environmental, etc.)?
This year’s CAAS conference theme invites a broad spectrum of papers that address these issues and beyond from historical, contemporary, and imaginative or forward-looking perspectives. CAAS welcomes Africanist academics, independent researchers, policy-makers, practitioners, and community organisations on the continent and in the Diaspora to submit analytical, theoretical, empirical and policy-oriented contributions that will spark rich intellectual conversations about the meaning, possibilities and limits of Global Africa; however, one chooses to define it.
While CAAS is eager to receive papers that critically engage with the conference theme from diverse perspectives, they also encourage multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary contributions that push the boundaries of African studies across its many fields.
Submission deadlines for African-based scholars and students is 15 December 2025 and 15 January 2026 for non-African based scholars and students.
The Call for Proposals is now open - submission guidelines and paper subthemes, as well as further information can be found on the CAAS Website.