The work of academics serves the public good, which global citizens must be able to trust and believe that scholars are experts in their field, have done their due diligence, and produce new knowledge for the benefit of humanity and the world. To be sure, scholars disagree on different topics largely owing to different lived experiences, academic training, disciplinary focus and expertise, and ideological perspectives. Nevertheless, scholars must maintain personal and professional integrity, scholarly rigor, as well as intellectual and academic honesty in their work. With artificial intelligence software becoming increasingly easy to access and seductive to use as well as the value of scholarly research and university training in question and academic freedom threatened, scholarly research in Africana Studies must maintain its commitment to academic excellence and social responsibility¹ because the past, present, and future of African people and their descendants are at stake. This article is a primer for understanding scholarly research in Africana Studies and its significance.

Africana Studies (also known as Black Studies, African American Studies, Africology, and Pan African Studies) has its disciplinary origins in the Black Campus Movements of the late 1960s and early ‘70s.²  As an academic discipline, “a specialized branch of study and knowledge,” Maulana Karenga asserts that Africana Studies is “the critical and systematic study of the thought and practice of African people in their current and historical unfolding.” Here Karenga uses African and Black interchangeably explaining further that Africana Studies, “is critical in that it is characterized by careful analysis and considered judgment. And it is systematic in that it is structured and methodical in its pursuit and presentation of knowledge.”³ As a serious academic enterprise, Africana Studies is more than studying “Black stuff.” In fact, it moves beyond traditional European and Euro-American disciplines and epistemologies, while re-centering African people and people of African descent through developing paradigms, theories and concepts consistent with African and African Diasporic cultures and experiences. In this regard, Joshua Myers explains that “knowledge of the world was filtered through a particular way of conceiving reality. One could not simply apply them to Black experiences without care. Or without acknowledging how Black life was connected to the very contexts through which disciplines emerged.”⁴ Developing and advancing Africana Studies, then, requires the ongoing re-creation and re-conceptualization of the discipline’s epistemologies.

The role and function of education and research should enhance people’s understanding of their individual and collective selves, as well as humanity. Attempts to universalize or generalize knowledge often reflect the most deeply held values of the theorist or school of thought. In a society where anti-Black racist ideas permeate throughout institutions, systems, and structures including academia,⁵ African people and people of African descent can ill afford to assume that education and research is “one size fits all.”June Jordan was correct in 1969 when she asserted that Black people must know themselves (individually and collectively) as well as their profession. She posits,

In other words, research in Africana Studies informs and reaffirms Black people about the African and African Diasporic experience, while also interrogating anti-Black racist ideas and practices embedded in other disciplines, professions, and society. As part of the Black intellectual tradition, Africana Studies research then, is descriptive, corrective, and prescriptive.⁷ It is appropriate and necessary in all facets of Black life (past, present, and future) because Black life is literally and figuratively at stake. As a result, Africana Studies researchers must remain committed to rigorous, relevant, and righteous research. It is an intellectually and academically rigorous discipline that researches and produces knowledge, corrects and addresses misinformation, as well as produces scholarship that will increase the quality of life and material conditions of African people and their descendants.⁸ Being critical, systematic, structured, and methodical makes research in Africana Studies scientific and the Africana scholar a specialist.

Africana Studies centers African people and people of African descent in the analysis while recognizing and highlighting their struggles and creative agency. In a diasporan context, Delores Aldridge and Carlene Young state that Africana Studies is “the systematic investigation of people of African descent in their contacts with Europeans, their dispersal throughout the diaspora, and the subsequent institutionalization of racism and oppression as means of economic, political, and social subordination.”⁹ This investigation informs how and why Black people are in their present condition, while simultaneously seeking to contribute to creating a world better than it was inherited. James L. Conyers, Jr. adds, “Africana Studies is the global Pan Africanist study of African phenomena interpreted from an Afrocentric perspective.”¹⁰ In Africana Studies research, as in any discipline, facts are engaged to understand specific events or phenomena that are known to have happened or existed. Different scholarly perspectives, however, inform how those facts are understood within disciplinary and theoretical frameworks.¹¹ In scientific research, it is the methodology (the paradigms, theories, concepts, and methods) that inform the research process and analysis.

As a discipline, Africana Studies has and continues to make its own contribution to scientific research. It is imperative then, for students of Africana Studies to develop and fine-tune their ability to gather, interpret, evaluate, and analyze research produced by others as part of the literature review. In addition, students must develop their own skills in conducting independent and original research whether qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods approaches, including formulating a sound research question, design, and method. Kelly Jacobs asserts that, “the researcher must be fully aware of the methodologies and processes a study will contain in advance of following through with the research process. Additionally, it is imperative that a person conducting research formulate a research question or problem that will withstand outside scrutiny in terms of the procedures required to be undertaken.”¹² Paying attention to the soundness of the research question, research design, theoretical frameworks, and methodological approaches are essential for conducting credible and rigorous scholarship in Africana Studies. Essentially, scientific research requires research skills that must be learned, developed, and mastered.

Serie McDougal explains that scholarly training in scientific research prepares people for the pursuit of knowledge. In fact, in social scientific research, knowledge is necessary for society as it assists in understanding “issues such as unemployment, academic achievement, housing discrimination, and police brutality.”¹³ Africana Studies, then, engages the full experience of African people and people of African descent past, present, and future. It examines multiple dimensions of the Black experience in areas such as history, psychology, economics, politics, education, spirituality, sports, war, popular culture, literature, as well as the creative and performing arts, to name a few. Considering that Africana Studies is “interdisciplinary and has multiple dimensions,”¹⁴ it is primed and ready to offer “its own concepts, theories, and paradigms” to “multiple subject areas.”¹⁵ Here, African people, people of African descent, and Africana phenomena are the domains of inquiry that focus the investigation. The people are viewed as creative agents in their own individual and collective lives. In addition, their cultures are valued as unique contributions to the diversity of humanity. Essentially, the hopes, dreams, fears, and experiences of Black people are explored to make sense of their realities informed by their individual and collective perspectives.

Research in Africana Studies informs analysis and understanding of African people’s and people of African descent’s experiences. More than a generic internet search or video on a social media platform, Conyers asserts that scholarly “research is the guiding force, which allows scholars and students to locate, retain, and interpret key information with relationship to the transaction and function of humans.”¹⁶ In other words, research is the catalyst for finding, understanding, and exploring the diverse meanings of human experiences. More than recounting facts, Africana Studies contributes to knowledge production. That is, the Africana scholar unearths new information, analyzes all available information on the subject, works to understand the information, and then interprets the meaning and significance. New knowledge then, is created, applied, and used to make sense of as well as improve personal, professional, and shared realities.

Scholarly research in Africana Studies is a serious endeavor requiring committed researchers to employ integrity and rigor in their work. As knowledge producers, researchers can ill afford to be seduced by shortcuts or financial rewards from interest groups to suppress or distort knowledge and information.Students and scholars of Africana Studies, then, continue to develop and master the necessary research skills, then produce quality research because the humanity and dignity of African people and people and people of African descent as well as their quality of life and material conditions are at stake.¹⁷

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Maulana Karenga, Introduction to Black Studies, 4th Edition (Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press, 2010) 25-26.
Ibram Rogers, The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education 1965-1972, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.)
Maulana Karenga, Introduction to Black Studies, 4th Edition (Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press, 2010) 3-4.
Joshua Myers, Of Black Study (Pluto Press: Las Vegas, 2023) 9.
Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Bold Type Books, 2016); Terence Keel, Divine Variations: How Christian Thought Became Racial Science (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018); Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans- And How we can Fix it (New York: Crown, 2021); Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1992).
June Jordan, “Black Studies: Bringing Back the Person,” in June Jordan: Civil Wars (Boston: Beacon Press, 1981), 52; emphasis in the original.
Manning Marable, “Introduction: Black Studies and the Racial Mountain,” in Dispatches from the Ebony Tower: Intellectuals Confront the African American Experience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000) 1-2.
Ibid.
Delores P. Aldridge and Carlene Young, “Historical Development and Introduction to the Academy,” in Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2003) 3.
James L. Conyers, Jr., “Introduction,” Qualitative Methods in Africana Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Examining Africana Phenomena, (Boulder: University Press of America, 2016) xi.
Serie McDougal, III, Research Methods in Africana Studies, (New York: Peter Lang, 2014).
Kelly Jacobs, “Qualitative Research in Africana Studies,” Qualitative Methods in Africana Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Examining Africana Phenomena, (Boulder: University Press of America, 2016) 303.
Serie McDougal, III, Ibid, 2.
Ibid, 30-31.
Ibid, 31.
James L. Conyers, Jr., Ibid. xv.
M. Keith Claybrook, Jr., “What is ‘Freedom’ in the Black Freedom Struggle?” Black Perspectives, January 11, 2024; https://www.aaihs.org/what-is-this-freedom-in-the-Black-freedom-struggle/ (Accessed 4/9/2025).