Anton Wilhelm Amo Lecture 2025: Where are the therapeutic intellectuals? Popular culture and autobiographical narratives for justice and healing; Invited Speaker: Akosua Adomako Ampofo (Professor of African and Gender Studies, CEO & Director 715 House Media)

Abstract:

Our era is defined by a deep sense of urgency, and a collective sense of despair, even hopelessness, among many young people. Africans and people of African descent have highly developed skills to cope with turbulence, pain and trauma—slavery, colonialism, the effects of our neo-liberal and capitalist world. Yet we have not had to live with them at this level of such high decibels’ soundbites. We the ‘elders’ often look back wistfully on a supposed glorious past; and indeed, the practice of reminiscing can move beyond sentimentality to activating future healing projects. However, articulating visions of a hopeful and more just future is not work we can simply hand over to the next generation; it is work we must do in solidarity with them. This is even more important as some young people, both within and outside the academy, bring charges of exclusivity, academic classism, and chauvinism against the inhabitants of the ivory-tower. Many young academics are uncertain whether to reform, break and rebuild, or discard the academy completely. They want to see a deeper engagement with the public, especially around topical subjects of immigration, climate and environmental calamities, wars, sexual abuse, cyber bullying, social and economic inequalities, and shrinking academic freedom, to name a few.  They also want to see greater social responsibility within our institutions. The philosophical and ethical ideals of African cosmologies of human interconnectedness, nurtured in community, but respecting individual humanness, have long sustained us. Amo, in one of his writings, reflected these ideals when he noted that, “to be alive and to exist are not synonymous. Everything that is alive exists, but not everything that exists is alive.” How can erstwhile and modern philosophies cooperate to advance vision and purpose, including in the academy? In this lecture I seek to bring older and contemporary philosophers (especially from popular culture) into conversation to suggest some answers to these questions. 

Akosua Adomako Ampofo is a Professor of African and gender studies and currently the 2025 Claude AkeChair at the Nordic Africa Institute, and the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University. Her research examines the politics of Knowledge (production); Gender relations; Masculinities; and recently she is examining healing narratives. Her scholarship integrates critical theory with artistic expressions, highlighting the transformative power of the arts in advocating for marginalized voices.  Her most recent book, co-edited with Josephine Beoku-Betts, is titled Producing Inclusive Feminist Knowledge: Positionalities and Discourses in the Global South (Emerald Publishing, 2021). In 2022 she co-produced the award-winning documentary When Women Speak with Kate Skinner and directed by Aseye Tamakloe  as part of the project, an “Archive of Activism: Gender and Public History in Postcolonial Ghana”. 

In 2005 Adomako Ampofo became the foundation Director of the University of Ghana’s Centre for Gender Studies and Advocacy and from 2010-2015 she was the Director of the Institute of African Studies, also at the University of Ghana.  She is the founding vice-president and immediate past President of the African Studies Association of Africa and a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has been an honorary Professor at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Birmingham, and in 2023-2024 she was the Wangari Maathai Visiting Professor at the University of Kassel. 

Akosua Adomako Ampofo serves or has served on the boards of several organisations such as the U.S African Studies Association; The Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship (University of Pretoria); the Perivoli Africa Research Centre (University of Bristol); Institute for Humanities in Africa (University of Cape Town); the North Rhine-Westphalia Academy of International Affairs (Bonn); “Beyond Borders” ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius Scholarship Programme (Hamburg); the Next Generation of the US Social Science Research Council, among others, and currently chairs the “Africa Multiple” Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth, and the Africa Coalition for Academic Freedom. 

Adomako Ampofo’s work has been variously recognized: She has been a Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio centre; a Mellon Fellow at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cape Town; a three-time Fulbright Scholar (Junior Fulbright Scholar; a New Century Fulbright Scholar and a Senior Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence). In 2010 she was awarded the Feminist Activism Award by Sociologists for Women and Society; in 2015, she was the US African Studies Association’s African Studies ReviewDistinguished lecturer; and in 2019 she delivered the Audrey Richards Distinguished Public Lecture at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Cambridge. 

In 2024 she established 715House Productions, a creative media company, with her daughter, Akosua-Asamoabea Ampofo. A life-long learner, she is currently pursuing a course in the Business of Entertainment at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.