Suchergebnisse

The disciplinary credo for Africana Studies is Academic Excellence and Social Responsibility. Africana Studies as an academic discipline is charged with the responsibility to operate from this position, not in the abstract, but as an actionable modality that manifests itself in the nature of the work being done by African-centered scholars. Clearly, the 21st century beckons the emergence of a theoretical construct, that advances the recognition and illumination of systems of thought which are antithetical to the well-being of people of African descent. This work introduces the theoretical construct Agency Reduction Formation (ARF) as a practical theory to guide Applied Africana Studies practitioners in their respective work and to re-energize the necessity of collective efficacy for people of African descent.

In the 21st century, there still exists a wide degree of misunderstanding concerning the discipline of Africana Studies. The continued lack of information regarding the different schools of thought and clear markers of the differences is problematic on many levels. This work seeks to bring clarity to the questions surrounding the epistemological and methodological locations and to introduce a conceptual metric that speaks to the African-centered school of thought specifically.

In the American academy, there is quite possibly no other discipline with the history of (Black) Africana Studies. Founded on the idea of struggle and resistance and eventually becoming the intellectual arm of the Black Power movement, the field has for decades institutionalized and established itself as a cogent and coherent academic discipline. The flagship course for the discipline has always been the introductory course from the field's inception. One of the central questions that loom in many Africana circles concerns building egalitarian consensus on the teaching of the introductory course. This work seeks to address that issue by offering plausible guidelines for instructors and practitioners to follow.

This article explores attempts to transform Black forms of Christianity to assess their effectiveness in relationship to advancing African agency and cultural values. Utilizing an Afrocentric perspective that insists on discovering location in phenomenal and intellectual texts as a way of indicating distance from reality and history, this work intends to examine the relevance of the Word Church formation in the African American community. This article does not ask whether one form of religion is superior to another but rather how a certain form of spirituality is congruent to historical realities. Taking the term Colonial Christianity to mean the specific religion transmitted to enslaved and free Africans in the United States of America between the l7th and 20th centuries, this article engages the permutations of that religion in the minds of Africans in order to examine psychological dislocation.

The illusion of community and sisterhood: reduction of agency for feminists of color within academia /Kaila Adia Story --The Wright way: Bobby Wright and the construction of a critical race psychology /DeReef Jamison --Cheikh Anta Diop's "two cradle theory," racism and the cultural realities of African descended people in America /Karanja Carroll --Anthropology and (the) Black experience-revisited /Dawn Elissa Fischer --Theories and paradigm: researching in Africana studies /Serie McDougal --Assessing African Americans' current economic status in Philadelphia /Justin Gammage --The misrepresentation of African womanhood in rap music videos: a discussion with Africana females /Marquita M. Gammage --Agency reduction formation: locating an egalitarian hermeneutic /Michael Tillotson.

The current intellectual and political climate dictates a need for an empirically driven trajectory for the discipline of African American studies. An African-centered worldview in concert with a theoretical research framework to guide Africana studies scholars' use of social science research methods is what is presented in this work. In the 21st century, the unique interests of African-descended people are best served by the empirical approach, specifically when legislative bodies and social service providers require data-based solutions to social problems. Applied Africana Studies is a theoretical framework that guides the production of scholarship that is both centered and relevant to the needs and interests of people of African descent. In some quarters, the empirical method is dismissed because of its disproportionate use by non-African researchers and their politically driven agendas against the interests of African people. To address this, the training of African-centered empirical practitioners who hold the terminal degree in African American studies is an absolute imperative to advance African development on African terms in the 21st century.