Africana Routes, Africana Migrations

The Africana Routes, Africana Migrations faculty research group interrogates the colonial and extractive roots of traditional international education models and works to reconstruct them through the lens of Africana Studies and transnational feminist solidarity. Rooted in a commitment to ethical engagement, Africana Routes aims to expand and deepen student travel experiences by centering the histories, cultures, and contemporary realities of African and diasporic communities.

The overall goal of this project is to conceptualize student travel programming in ways that interrogate and improve upon existing modes of international engagement, both within and outside of higher education. The project engages students, faculty, and staff in critical reading and discussions about the historic roots of study abroad models in missionary, extractionist relations between traveling students and their sponsor institutions, on the one hand, and the host communities, on the other. In addition to this conceptual (re-)framing, this project intends to expand study abroad opportunities for students in Africana Studies while also providing models and resources for the development of ethical, intellectually—and culturally—enriching study opportunities in the African diaspora that will benefit a wider range of students and host communities.

Across the Africana world, regions with dense communities of African or Afro Descendant peoples, there has in recent years been a boom in new forms of tourism and travel. Visitors from the global north have increasingly engaged regions of Africa, South America, and beyond through the prism of heritage travel or heritage studies. While this development holds tremendous creative, economic, and diplomatic possibilities, it is also attended by important questions of ethics and equity. We are interested in understanding how contemporary practices of travel and tourism function to produce or entrench inequalities—including economic, gender, infrastructure, racial, and resource inequalities—between the Global North and South, which are themselves refracted into inequalities among communities on the ground.

During the 2025-26 academic year we will continue our work focused on creating spaces for knowledge sharing by holding a series of moderated, hybrid conversations that will feature members of the Barnard community and external participants, focusing on topics such as gender, race, and travel, the ethics of travel, reflections on study abroad experiences, knowledge sharing across SLACS, screenings, bookclubs, and talkbacks.

Participants

Abosede George is the Tow Associate Professor of History at Barnard College. She teaches courses on African migrations, urban history, childhood and youth, and women, gender, and sexuality in African History. A native of Lagos, Nigeria, and a self-identified life-long migrant, she has lived in Zaire, Mali, the United States, and The Netherlands, and she has traveled as an African woman through five of the seven continents. Her articles have appeared in the American Historical Review, the Journal of Social History, Meridians, and The Washington Post among other publications. Her prize-winning book, Making Modern Girls: A History of Girlhood, Labor, and Social Development, was published in 2014 by Ohio University Press. She is currently working on a history of free Black migration from various parts of the African diaspora to Lagos, West Africa across the nineteenth century. Follow The Ekopolitan Project on FB, IG, or Twitter to learn more.

Tamara J. Walker is Claire Tow Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Barnard College. She is the author of Exquisite Slaves: Race, Clothing, and Status in Colonial Lima, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017 and won the 2018 Harriet Tubman Prize from the Schomburg Center for Research on Black Culture. Her most recent book, Beyond the Shores: A History of African Americans Abroad (Crown, June 2023), was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. She is currently at work on two new research projects, one focused on race and visual culture in Latin America (under contract, University of Texas Press), and the other on the interconnected history of slavery and piracy. Her teaching covers these diverse thematic areas as well, and she offers courses on topics such as Afro-Latin American Art, Afro-Latin American History and Culture, Slavery & Freedom in Latin America, and Black Americans Abroad. She teaches on Afro-Latin American history, art, and Black internationalism. Tamara is also the co-founder of The Wandering Scholar, a nonprofit expanding access to global travel for underrepresented students. The organization also produces multi-media content embodying their vision of engaged, globally-minded citizenship, including the newsletter Postcards and the podcast Why We Wander.