Frontiers of Belonging: Displacement, Refuge Seeking, and Hospitality in West and Central Africa is an International Research Training Group (IRTG) to enhance doctoral training by collaborating across disciplines, academic epistemologies, and methodologies. The key innovation of this North-South partnership is to mobilize expertise across borders to train doctoral students in three countries: French-English bilingual, anglophone-dominated Canada, a middle-power latecomer to internationalization in higher education; Ghana, an anglophone leader in higher education in West Africa; and French-English bilingual, francophone-dominated Cameroon in Central Africa. Other goals include the acquisition of digital, language, and communication skills to facilitate doctoral researchers’ knowledge mobilization. Finally, the project aims to bolster intersectoral collaboration, thereby increasing the accessibility and usability of research by including research subjects as co-producers of knowledge.
The project is funded primarily through a Partnership Development Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada, with additional contributions from the University of Ottawa, the University of Ghana-Legon, and the University of Douala—CERDYM.