Calls & Grants

IFRA-Nigeria is opening its call for the 2027 Research Grants!

Open to second year master's students, doctoral and postdoctoral students, as well as researchers working in humanities and social sciences on a country under IFRA-Nigeria's geographical mandate (Nigeria, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Niger, Chad and Togo). We accept applications in French or English.

Download the full call or read more below.

Deadline for application: 30 October 2026, 23:59 WAT.

Ahead of the 2027 Presidential elections in Nigeria, IFRA-Nigeria is reopening it's Elections Observatory project. Like in 2023, a set of upcoming researchers will receive a grant to conduct fieldwork related to the elections between December 2026 and January 2027. Their findings will be published in a Working Papers article (you can find here the 2023 edition).

Deadline for applications: 20 October, 2026. 

You can download the full call here.

On 23 July 2026, Géo-Cités (CRIA), IFRA-Nigeria and the University of Ibadan will organise a workshop on "Sensitive and minority archives: select, digitize and archiving." The workshop is part of the ongoing research project (in consolidation phase)  “Archiving and Digitizing African Futures: Minority Memories and Heritage,” which uses archival materials to study the memory and heritage of groups in Africa that are marginalized, stigmatized, dissident, or underrepresented, as well as their visions of the future. The “archival turn,” which originated in the English-speaking world, questions the notion of archives produced in colonial contexts. African researchers have reinterpreted colonial archives from an Afrocentric perspective, considering, for example, oral traditions, performance, and gestural expression as “archives” within the framework of a living, fluid, and relational archival approach (Adeduntan A., Omitola O., 2023). Some co-produced projects aim to return these archives to marginalized groups: examples include digital archive projects highlighting forms of emancipation such as the “Archives of Nigerian Left” in Nigeria or, in South Africa, the “GALA Queer Archives,” as well as the digital community archive project “A People’s Guide to Archives and Democracy.”

Download the full call.

The Department of History, University of Ibadan in collaboration with the French Institute for Research in Africa (IFRA-Nigeria) and the Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan invite scholars, researchers and practitioners to submit papers for an upcoming international conference themed: “Urban Myths and Experiences in Africa”.

Full call

Cities are built environments where people converge to live, work, exchange, and interact. As such, they constitute tangible economic, social, and political centres. Yet cities are not only material spaces. They are also shaped by the ways people imagine, dream about, narrate, and experience them across different scales of time and space. Cities are produced as much through concrete infrastructures and institutions as through practices and imagination.

CCA, Lagos Archives and IFRA-Nigeria invite applications from artists, curators, and researchers working across disciplines and media for a two-day workshop under the FEF Alternative Heritage Project.

Archives in Practice explores the archive not as a static repository, but as a site of inquiry and production. Archives generate new knowledge, new questions and new artistic production.

This workshop brings together eight Lagos-based participants for a focused engagement with the CCA, Lagos archive. Rather than offering a survey of the collection, it creates space for active, critical engagement.

Participants will be introduced to the CCA archive and its holdings, including exhibition files, correspondence, photographs, programme records, administrative documents and the accumulated traces of over two decades of curatorial life in Lagos. The aim is not completeness, but depth: to surface the archive’s textures, contradictions, and gaps, and to support participants in developing their own lines of inquiry.

Between 2 to 6 November 2026, the seventh edition of the Itinerant Doctoral School (EDI) will take place at Félix Houphouët-Boigny University in Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire). This doctoral school is a partnership between the Institut de recherche sur le Maghreb contemporain (IRMC – Tunis), the Institut français de recherche en Afrique (IFRA – Nigeria), the Centre Jacques Berque (CJB – Rabat), the Scientific Interest Group “Pensées Genre Penser Autrement” (GIS – PGPA) of Félix Houphouët-Boigny University, and Alassane Ouattara University.

Doctoral students in social sciences enrolled in a PhD program at a university or research institution located in an African country can apply to participate in the doctoral school.

Application deadline: June 10, 2026 

Download the full call in English

Download the full call in French

IFRA-Nigeria is organizing a masterclass tailored for Master’s students and PhD candidates in Ibadan with a keen interest in architectural and cultural research between 13 and 16 April. This workshop will concentrate on the essentials of conducting rigorous research and will offer hands-on training in the exploration of Nigerian vernacular architecture.

Download the call here or read it below

The deadline was extended to 13 March 2026.

Sources. Materials & Fieldwork in African Studies opened a call for abstracts on the theme "Sound Recordings". Contributions in English, French and Portuguese. This issue of Sources ambitions to bring together multiple disciplinary perspectives on one or more sound sources produced in Africa. 

Sources is an interdisciplinary, multilingual, open-access peer-reviewed journal supported by the French Institutes for Research in Sub-Saharan African, including IFRA-Nigeria, and the Laboratoire des Afriques. You can read here the full call in English and the full call in French. 

Deadline for abstracts: 10 February 2026

IFRA-Nigeria will organize a 4-day training workshop for second year Master students and PhD students based in Ibadan, from 9 - 12 February 2026. This workshop is an opportunity to experiment and learn from the use of sensitive methods as a tool for both ethnographic investigation and research restitution.

The National Museum of Lagos and IFRA-Nigeria are offering academic research grants for researchers to work on the documents and artifacts of the Museum, focusing on questionning the notions of "heritages" and "alternative heritages". 

Each of the selected researchers will have to participate to a colloquium that will be organized in May 2026 in Lagos on the theme “Re-Imagining Nigeria Heritage” and will have subsequently to submit awritten article for IFRA-Nigeria working papers .

This grant is part of our Nigerian Alternative Heritages project, made possible by the French Embassy Fund. 

Deadline for applications: 7 December 2025

Read the full call below or download it here.

Marie Lureau, Research Project Manager at IFRA-Nigeria, will hold an exploratory panel at the Lagos Studies Association Conference 2026 focusing on 'non-religion' and 'anti-religion' on the African continent. This panel will seek to open secularism studies, largely built on the Western world, to Africa. It questions the various experiences of 'non-religion' on the continent, the forms of 'anti-religion' in activism, their intellectual roots and the best terms to define them. 

Read the full call below or download it here. 

Deadline for abstracts: 1 January 2026.

Dr Delphine Manetta, IFRA’s deputy director, will hold a panel at the Lagos Studies Association Conference 2026 focusing on the role of care in the construction of masculinities in Africa, but proposing several shifts in perspective from the literature from a perspective that emerged with Western scholars to one more centered on African perspectives. It will also discuss care as a critical tool for discussing the imaginaries surrounding masculinities in Africa and understanding experiences of masculinity in different social settings.

Deadline for abstracts: 1 January 2026

Read the full call below or download it here.