Welcome to Africana Studies

The Africana Studies Program at UTK is committed to producing and disseminating interdisciplinary knowledge about Africa, African Americans, and other African Diasporas. It promotes creative and critical thinking skills through rigorous research, teaching, service, and publication on the cultures, arts, institutions, histories, political economies, and philosophies of African peoples and peoples of African descent worldwide. Africana Studies is a multicultural, interdisciplinary, and transnational intellectual paradigm that anchors its scholarship on local, national, regional, and global scales. It conceives of the African World as extending from Africa to North America, the Caribbean, South and Central America, Asia, and Europe.

The program is rooted in the traditions, history, and agency of the African Americans who were instrumental in the emergence of Africana Studies in the United States. As a discipline, Africana Studies fulfills the changing needs of our society and the wider world. It also makes a serious effort toward implementing the objectives of the College of Arts and Sciences and the strategic plans of the University of Tennessee by preparing students for a global world. The central goal of this program is therefore to provide students with a comprehensive interdisciplinary education and critical level of knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of the Africana experience in its multiple dimensions.

Hence, the curriculum of the program focuses on interrelated issues including:

The diversity and complexity of indigenous African cultures, histories, religions, and civilizations;
the impacts of slavery, colonialism, war, terrorism, genocide, racism, and imperialism;
the consequences of social inequalities in the form of race/ethnicity, class, and gender;
the issues of globalization and the fast changing world of science and technology;
the approaches of training students for leadership and service;
the disparities in health and education and environmental problems;
the positive impacts of social and national/civil rights movements; and

the importance of education, democracy, human rights, self-determination, multiculturalism, and sustainable development.

The program trains students of different backgrounds to explore and understand these and other relevant issues by using a variety of intellectual tools. These include critical interdisciplinary and multicultural approaches, theories, and comparative methodologies that develop thinking skills and knowledge for involvement in public issues. The aim is also to help students meet the personal and professional challenges of the twenty-first century. For its majors and minors, Africana Studies offers both specialized and general training, and prepares them to be productive and responsible global citizens and to enter job markets or graduate and professional fields. Furthermore, the program provides students with opportunities for scholarly and social interactions, exchange, and dialogue in the classroom and beyond, preparing them for the diversity of the global community.

Africana Studies enhances and expands the life of the mind by training students to become lifelong learners. It satisfies the academic needs of students and the College and University through classroom training, opportunities to study abroad, and participation in extracurricular activities, such as conferences and colloquia. The program also brings together scholars from social science disciplines and humanities who demonstrate their commitments to critical interdisciplinary scholarship and social justice. Scholars use this platform to deepen their on-going scholarly interactions and relationships. They offer diverse courses, collaborate in research, and develop cutting-edge scholarship. Africana Studies thus satisfies the needs of students and meets the demands of a global community.