Afterword: Democracy, Education, and Public Scholarship

This book highlights an African perspective on the democracy project. This afterword argues that local manifestations of communication around elections are an integral part of the universal archive that shapes the history of democracy. In centering African examples in this collection, we are not in any way advocating for closure. Rather, we hope that these examples can help us all expand our analytical arenas, especially about the crises of democracy in our time. We suggest two key areas in which we can foster critical reconsiderations of contemporary Afrocentric political communication—education and public scholarship. We highlight how this book could be useful as teaching material for graduate and undergraduate students in diverse fields of inquiry and the essential value of academic inquiry in fostering public engagement through transparent deliberation.