Black Planetary Studies (BPS) is a dreaming that emerges from specific places but aspires for planetary freedom. In a world of deepening social fragmentation, BPS responds with an agile scholarly and activist agenda that resists the atomisation of life and struggle. At its centre, BPS asks how we might craft a scholarly agenda of care that includes the human, but goes beyond Anthropocentric preoccupations. It is care, solidarity, and curiosity for multispecies, elemental, ancestral, spiritual life, and matter. BPS is social, ecological, and political. It commits to the freedom and well-being of the Malawian migrant, the Palestinian women, Sudanese child, the laden river in the south of Johannesburg, the abandon of the Wild Coast ocean, and the joy of the people gathered in the meeting places of Lwandle and Nomzamo.
BPS emerges from the Institute for Social and Health Sciences’ Centre for Black Planetary Studies, University of South Africa. But its ambition is planetary. This is to say that it transcends institutional, national, individual and species parochialism. To say we study everything would be subject to criticism that emphasises a lack of programmatic coherence. But in truth, BPS’ knowledge agenda is transdisciplinary. While trained in discipline, our first task is to shake off the constraints of discipline, which limit our parameters of care and expertise. We make up for ‘expertise’ limitations with bucketloads of curiosity and wide reading in the wild agendas of multispecies literatures and decolonial, multimodal methods.
Our promiscuous knowledge agenda allows us to pivot and lean into, but not to be entirely subject to, institutional and funding agendas. While not entirely constrained by presentivist lenses, we are conscious of the polycrisis of this moment. We attune to longstanding vexing problems but remain pivot-ready through assembling an agile knowledge base that contributes to resourcing students for futures we can predict and those we cannot fully anticipate. With this in mind, we have organised our programming to:
New materialist futures which rewire the knowledge agenda towards the sentience of things. The gut, brain, cybernetics, sand, disorder, wind.
Loosely defined, BPS’ agenda maintains porous borders always open to new pathways, wander and wonder, opportunity, and heartache. It is a rhizomatic agenda on the move like water, mist, kelp, sand, and feelings. Oriented through black ways of knowing, it asks researchers and students to think from black. Here, black is body, but it is also African geography, political commitment and aspiration for joy not dimmed by the fear of failure, defeat, or error. To think from black, then, is to refuse the fragmentation of the world into separate crises, species, wounds, disciplines, and futures. It is to begin from black life, black place, black study, and black imagination as ways of reading planetary entanglement. For us, BPS is experimental. It is a bold commitment to the edges and frontiers of knowledge and life from this margin of the African continent.
Last modified: 2026/09/07