African Women in the Academy and Beyond: Review Essay

Abstract

Publishing stands at the tail end of one academic process and at the start of another. On the one hand, it represents a culmination of a research process, a process that begins with conceptualizing a topic, setting research instruments, collecting data, analyzing it and writing up the findings into a coherent text. This is a process whose very nature is woven with the trails and travails of the academy and academic work. These involve, among other things, power and power relations within and beyond the academy. The academy reflects the culture, values and power situation of the wider society. It, in turn, reproduces these relations in its administrative and management cadres, in its curriculum and knowledge producing and imparting organs and processes. The nature of power in the wider society is also mirrored in the student admission processes, the faculty recruitment procedures, and in the academy’s overall goals and the way these goals are identified, structured, processed and articulated. Power relations in the wider society, as in the academy, are structured along class, gender, religious, ideological and racial lines. These also have a bearing on the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, mechanisms that determine who belongs and who does not. These lines demarcate member as opposed to non-members, insiders as opposed to outsiders, and therefore have a direct bearing on access to the academy and its resources, on equity in administrative and managerial representation.