Everyone can be more intentional about reading, citing, and assigning scholarship about Africa and by African scholars
This article was written by Brian Ekdale, who was a faculty member at the Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change on "Local Media Futures and Democratic Health" in July 2025.
Salzburg Global’s annual spotlight on “Centering Africa” provides an opportunity for all of us to consider what it means to center Africa in our professional lives. As a university professor of European descent based in the United States, I’ve unfortunately seen the marginalization of African scholarship and scholars. Despite this reality, I believe there are tangible steps all of us can take to center African voices in our research and work.
Publishing Inequities
For the past several years, my collaborators and I have been studying which countries are represented in academic journals. The evidence is clear. The majority of publications in peer-reviewed journals are written by scholars based in the Global North. Alternatively, very few publications are written by scholars based in Africa.
For one study, we examined each author’s country of affiliation for more than 120,000 articles published in 400 communication journals between 1990 and 2019. We found 43% of the publications were written by scholars based in the United States and another 10% were written by scholars based in the United Kingdom. Compare that with Africa, which was responsible for less than 2% of the publications in our dataset.
Not only are African scholars published less frequently, their publications receive far fewer citations. In a separate study, we found this citation disparity to be true even when African scholars publish in the same journals as their peers from the Global North.
In short, our research demonstrates African scholars and scholarship does not receive the attention it deserves. While this reflects a structural problem within academia to which there are no easy solutions, there are a few small changes academics everywhere can make to better center Africa - being intentional about what they read, cite, and assign to their students.
Read, Cite, Assign
Read. The first thing academics can do is read research about Africa and especially research written by African authors. While African scholarship can be found in mainstream journals, it is also important to seek out this work in specialty and region-focused journals. For example, in my field of communication and media studies, there are several journals that specialize in scholarship about Africa, including (but not limited to):
Cite. No matter your area of interest, once you start reading scholarship about Africa and by Africans, you will find work that is relevant to your research. By citing African scholars and scholarship, you raise the visibility of this work, which increases the likelihood that others will do the same.
Assign. When we assign readings in our classes, we communicate to our students which ideas, voices, and places we believe are worthy of our time and attention. By assigning readings about Africa and by Africans, we indicate to our students that this work is worth our consideration.
Graduate students, in particular, view readings included in a course syllabus as part of the so-called “canon,” key works necessary for mastery of a particular subfield. Yet, a 2020 study found that graduate syllabi all too often privilege scholarship written by white men from the Global North. We all have an opportunity to change that.
Centering Africa in Scholarship
Each of us can take responsibility for whose ideas we attend to and value. For researchers who are truly interested in “Centering Africa,” a good place to start is by seeking out and taking scholarship about Africa and by Africans more seriously.
Brian Ekdale is a professor at the University of Iowa. His research is primarily qualitative and constructivist, informed by a pragmatic approach that draws on social scientific methodologies and theories to answer diverse research questions. Brian's research program includes three main areas: digital media production often in African contexts; interdisciplinary, collaborative work on personalization algorithms and society; and investigations into global disparities in scholarly knowledge production.
This article is part of our Annual Spotlight: “Centering Africa." Across our sessions and events in 2025, Salzburg Global is highlighting the central role that the African continent will play in global development now and in the next decades. As demographic trends across much of the world project a future of older and less productive economies, the African continent stands out for its growing youth population, dynamism and innovation. In reimagining an international system that better responds to the needs of the 21st century, it is our hope that Salzburg Global can play a small but meaningful role in centering African ideas, innovations, and perspectives in global forums like ours.
