Research
Afrocentric Grounded Research
Research is central to the mission of the Africana Research & Cultural Renaissance Center. ARC supports rigorous scholarship on African and African diasporic histories, cultures, knowledge systems, heritage, communities, and contemporary experiences.
ARC’s guiding research framework is Afrocentric. Rooted in the discipline of Africana Studies, Afrocentricity approaches African people as agents, subjects, and producers of knowledge rather than as objects observed primarily through perspectives developed outside their own historical and cultural experiences.
An Afrocentric approach places African and African-descended peoples at the center of research concerning their lives. It asks researchers to examine where African people are located within a historical event, cultural practice, institution, or system of knowledge. It also considers how Africana peoples understood their own experiences, exercised agency, created meaning, preserved knowledge, and responded to the conditions surrounding them.
This does not mean that ARC research ignores other peoples, perspectives, or bodies of knowledge. Rather, it means that research about Africana peoples should not automatically treat Eurocentric experiences, concepts, or interests as the universal standard through which African life is interpreted, as has historically been the dominant approach. ARC begins with the histories, cultures, intellectual traditions, languages, values, and lived experiences of African and African-descended peoples while remaining committed to evidence, scholarly rigor, and responsible inquiry.
Through this framework, ARC recognizes Africana communities not simply as sources of information but as producers, interpreters, and custodians of knowledge. When appropriate, communities should help shape the questions, methods, interpretation, stewardship, and public presentation of research concerning their histories and cultures.
What an Afrocentric Research Framework Means
An Afrocentric research framework guides both what ARC studies and how that research is conducted.
ARC-supported research seeks to:
- Center African agency in the interpretation of African and African diasporic experiences.
- Locate cultural practices within their African and diasporic historical contexts.
- Recognize the intellectual traditions and knowledge systems developed by Africana peoples.
- Examine how African-descended communities preserved, adapted, and recreated cultural knowledge.
- Challenge interpretations that erase African origins, minimize African agency, or treat Africana experiences as marginal.
- Engage communities as participants in the production and stewardship of knowledge.
- Produce research that is academically rigorous, culturally responsible, and publicly meaningful.
Afrocentricity therefore provides ARC with more than a subject of study. It supplies the intellectual orientation through which the Center identifies research questions, evaluates evidence, interprets cultural meaning, develops partnerships, and communicates its findings.
Our Three Research Pillars
Within its Afrocentric framework, ARC organizes its research through three connected pillars: cultural restoration, cultural rectification, and cultural property.
Cultural Restoration
Cultural restoration involves the recovery, documentation, preservation, and continued development of African and African diasporic knowledge.
Enslavement, colonialism, displacement, segregation, and cultural suppression disrupted the transmission of many African traditions. Despite these conditions, African-descended peoples preserved, adapted, and recreated cultural knowledge across generations.
ARC supports research that identifies these continuities and places them within their proper African and diasporic contexts. This includes research on language, spirituality, music, foodways, naming practices, family and kinship structures, artistic expression, political thought, migration, cultural memory, and community institutions.
Cultural restoration does not assume that African culture remained unchanged across time or geography. It examines how Africana peoples actively retained, transformed, and created cultural practices in response to new historical conditions. The purpose is not simply to recreate the past, but to restore access to knowledge that has been obscured, devalued, fragmented, or separated from its communities of origin.
This work may include archival research, oral histories, genealogy, cultural mapping, preservation initiatives, public education, and collaboration with families, organizations, and community knowledge holders.
Cultural Rectification
Cultural rectification involves identifying and correcting incomplete, distorted, or harmful representations of African and African-descended peoples.
African and African diasporic histories have frequently been interpreted through frameworks that minimize African agency, ignore African knowledge, or separate Black cultural contributions from the communities that created them. Such interpretations continue to influence education, museums, media, public memory, public policy, and popular culture.
Using an Afrocentric framework, ARC examines where African people have been displaced from the center of narratives concerning their own experiences. The Center asks whose perspectives shaped those narratives, whose interests they served, what evidence was excluded, and how the story changes when Africana peoples are understood as active historical and cultural agents.
Cultural rectification does more than add African people to an existing account. It may require reconsidering the assumptions, concepts, categories, and standards through which the account was originally produced.
ARC supports research that develops more accurate interpretations grounded in historical evidence, cultural context, and Africana perspectives.
Cultural Property
Cultural property concerns the authority of African and African-descended peoples over the knowledge, objects, traditions, and creative expressions produced by their communities.
Africana cultural contributions have often been collected, removed, displayed, reproduced, appropriated, or commercialized without proper attribution, meaningful participation, or shared benefit. Cultural objects and human remains have also been taken from African and African-descended communities through colonial violence, scientific exploitation, theft, and unequal systems of exchange.
Through an Afrocentric framework, ARC approaches cultural property from the standpoint of the people and communities that created, maintained, or inherited that cultural knowledge. This requires attention not only to legal ownership but also to historical responsibility, cultural authority, ethical stewardship, recognition, restitution, and community benefit.
ARC supports research on cultural ownership, appropriation, attribution, repatriation, restitution, intellectual property, and benefit-sharing. This work helps Africana communities document their contributions and participate in decisions concerning how their heritage is interpreted, preserved, circulated, and used.
Research Areas
ARC supports research in areas that include:
- African and African diasporic history
- Afrocentric theory and methodology
- African cultural continuities throughout the diaspora
- Migration and community formation
- Genealogy, ancestry, and family history
- Oral history and community memory
- Language and naming traditions
- Religion and spirituality
- Music, art, and expressive culture
- Foodways and agricultural knowledge
- Family, kinship, and social organization
- Political thought and social movements
- Cultural institutions and professional organizations
- Cultural ownership, appropriation, and restitution
- Digital humanities and cultural mapping
- Public history and cultural preservation
These areas identify subjects that closely align with ARC’s mission but do not limit the range of research the Center may support.
Research Methods
ARC supports research methods appropriate to the questions, communities, and materials being studied. These may include archival research, oral history, interviews, genealogy, historical analysis, cultural analysis, geographic information systems, digital mapping, database development, field research, media analysis, and the study of material and visual culture.
The use of a particular method does not by itself make research Afrocentric. The Afrocentric character of the research comes from the location and orientation of the researcher: the questions being asked, the assumptions guiding the study, the treatment of African agency, the cultural context used to interpret evidence, and the relationship between the research and the communities involved.
ARC also values knowledge preserved within families, cultural practices, local organizations, neighborhoods, oral traditions, and community institutions. When this knowledge is incorporated into a project, the Center seeks to establish respectful and transparent research relationships.
Community-Engaged Research
ARC recognizes that communities should have a meaningful role in research concerning their histories, cultures, and experiences.
Community participation should extend beyond supplying information to university researchers. When appropriate, community partners may help identify research questions, locate historical materials, interpret cultural practices, establish ethical protocols, determine how knowledge is preserved, and shape how findings are presented to the public.
ARC seeks to develop research relationships that are respectful, transparent, and mutually beneficial. Particular attention is given to informed consent, attribution, cultural sensitivity, access, ownership, and the proper stewardship of community knowledge.
Student Research and Training
ARC provides undergraduate and graduate students with opportunities to participate in meaningful research grounded in Africana Studies and Afrocentric methodology.
Students may assist with archival work, oral histories, genealogy, mapping, data collection, cultural analysis, writing, editing, media production, and public presentation. They may work alongside faculty, visiting scholars, community partners, and other students.
Through this work, students learn how to locate African people as agents within research, examine evidence within its cultural context, recognize the authority of community knowledge, and communicate findings responsibly.
Students also develop practical research skills while learning how scholarship can preserve knowledge, correct public narratives, strengthen communities, and shape cultural policy.
Sharing Our Research
ARC works to make its research accessible within and beyond the university.
Findings may be shared through scholarly publications, reports, conferences, public lectures, exhibitions, digital archives, interactive maps, documentaries, podcasts, educational materials, and community programs.
The Center’s goal is not only to produce knowledge about Africana peoples. It is to produce knowledge grounded in Africana perspectives and to ensure that this work reaches the students, scholars, institutions, and communities that can use it.
Stay Connected
Africana Research & Cultural Renaissance Center
5500 Campanile Drive
San Diego, CA 92182-6032
Location: Arts and Letters (AL) 378
Email: [email protected]