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Photocredit acknowledgment: Akosua Asamoabea Ampofo
Professor: Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana
AKOSUA
Adomako Ampofo
- Fellow, Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences
- Editor-in-Chief, Contemporary Journal of African Studies
- Co-Editor, Critical Investigations into Humanitarianism in Africa blog
- 2023-2024 Wangari Maathai Visiting Professor at the University of Kassel
Adomako Ampofo is Professor of African and Gender Studies at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana (UG). In 2005 she 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. She is the immediate past President of the African Studies Association of Africa; an honorary Professor at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Birmingham; a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences; and the 2023-2024 Wangari Maathai Visiting Professor at the University of Kassel.
Adomako Ampofo considers herself an activist scholar, and at the heart of her work are questions of identity and power—within families, institutions, political and religious spaces, and the knowledge industry.
Her areas of interest include African Knowledge systems; Higher education; Race and Identity Politics; Gender relations; Masculinities; and Popular Culture. In her current work on black masculinities, she explores the shifting nature of identities among young men in Africa and the diaspora. Earlier work on masculinities has explored the ways in which the discourse of “men of God” (i.e religious leaders) becomes a meta knowledge and (re)defines femininity. Her most recent book, co-edited with Josephine Beoku-Betts, is titled Producing Inclusive Feminist Knowledge: Positionalities and Discourses in the Global South (Bingley: Emerald Publishing 2021). She co-produced the documentary When Women Speak with Kate Skinner (and directed by Aseye Tamakloe, 2022) as part of a project titled, an “Archive of Activism: Gender and Public History in Postcolonial Ghana”. The project seeks to create a publicly accessible archive of gender activism and “political women”.
Recent Publications
Adomako Ampofo, Akosua. 2023. “Social Justice and Community Studies: Scholar Activist Intersectional Approaches”
in Mary Romero (Ed.) Handbook on Intersectionality, Edward Elgar: 370-384.
Adomako Ampofo, Akosua and Deborah Atobrah (in press). "Women in Ghana"
In The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History, Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.ORE_AFH-00539.R2.
Adomako Ampofo, Akosua and Josephine Beoku-Betts. 2021. (Eds.) Producing Inclusive Feminist Knowledge: Positionalities and Discourses in the Global South.
Bingley: Emerald Publishing (2021).
“No matter how dark the cloud, there is always a thin, silver lining, and that is what we must look for. The silver lining will come, if not to us then to the next generation or the generation after that. And maybe with that generation the lining will no longer be thin.”