Another Roadmap Africa Cluster (ARAC) is a 2022–2024 Jane Lombard Fellow, nominated by Özge Ersoy for the Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice Prize as part of the Vera List Center’s Correction* cycle of programs.

The Africa Cluster of the Another Roadmap School is a group of scholars and practitioners of artistic and cultural education who work in both formal and informal contexts across the African continent. ARAC was founded to foster Africa-based conversations around the arts and education and to invest in the development of a shared knowledge base and a structure of mutual learning that will benefit African practitioners and contribute to advances in thinking and practice worldwide.

Since 2015, ARAC has been collaborating on a joint program of research into arts educational practices in their respective locales. ARAC’s research is critically informed and grounded in historical analysis, particularly with respect to Africa’s colonial heritage (AKA “our common ghosts”). ARAC hopes that documenting, producing, and disseminating African knowledges—both theoretical and practical—will ultimately help to decenter Western epistemologies, thereby enabling practitioners, scholars, and students to forge deeper and more meaningful connections between their everyday, their learning experiences, and the continent’s rich and living heritage of symbolic creative practices.

“ARAC has an inspiring methodology to bring together research and artistic interventions ranging from in-depth analyses of specific case studies to initiatives to intervene into formal educational settings, self-organized initiatives, and international platforms at the same time.” 

-Özge Ersoy, Jane Lombard Prize Council