5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

The history of sociology in Africa is not very well-known, even if the cases of North African Arab countries are better known than those of Sub-Saharan countries – with the exception of South Africa or Nigeria. The session would like to open new opportunities for discussing both a general process of emergence of the discipline on the continent while taking specific national or transnational situations into consideration.
The session, that considers both North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa, includes papers about the impact of colonization on the presence or absence of sociology in some countries, the meaning of colonial sociology, the foundation of sociology departments and associations, the training of African sociologists, the role played by some Western sociologists in the making of national sociology (for instance the Swedish sociologist and former ISA President Ulf Himmelstrand in Nigeria in the early 1960s), but also the importance of some big research centres like the CODESRIA in Dakar (created in 1973) or the CERDAS in Kinshasa (created in 1974) in the emergence of African social sciences and the call for more African-centered ones.