CAS Student Symposium 2026: The Politics of Survival

The 2026 CAS Student Symposium brought together 61 students and faculty members for an afternoon organized around the theme —The Politics of Survival: State, Body, and Imagination in African and Diasporic Contexts. The symposium provided a focused platform for exploring critical issues affecting African and diasporic communities—such as land, governance, public health, religious identity, and daily survival negotiations. The afternoon was reflective, creative, and vibrant with intellectual exchange.

One of the clear highlights of this year's symposium was the strong participation from undergraduate students. Undergraduates engaged seriously with their own work and with the work of their peers and demonstrated the kind of intellectual commitment that makes the symposium worth holding.

The range of topics and disciplinary fields represented was equally uplifting. Across four panels, presenters explored urban housing and ecological precarity in Senegal and Madagascar, drought as a political weapon in Zimbabwe, biometric governance and citizenship in Kenya, cobalt extraction and sexual violence in the DRC, skin bleaching as a public health issue, vaccine design for malaria, AfroGospel and youth political agency in Nigeria, and LGBTQ+ voices within Pentecostal Christianity. The breadth was real—ecology, public health, history, political science, religious studies, and literary analysis all had a place in the room. This range contributes to what makes the symposium unique: it embraces complexity without reducing it to a single perspective.

The Council on African Studies is proud to have hosted this year's symposium. The afternoon reaffirmed that students across Yale are doing meaningful, rigorous work on Africa and the diaspora—and that they deserve a dedicated forum to share and sharpen it. The 2026 symposium made that case well.

Written by: Paul Essah