The Academic Nonsense of "Theoretical Framework"
Moses Ebe Ochonu
The Academic Nonsense Called “Theoretical Framework” in Nigerian Universities
By Moses E. Ochonu
Note: I wrote this reflection last night as a Facebook update in the aftermath of a vibrant discussion in a seminar I gave yesterday to advanced graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and junior faculty at the ongoing Lagos Studies Conference at the University of Lagos. We covered several topics but this was by far the most animated and vexing issue for the participants. There is outrage out there against silly regimentations that lack intellectual logic and are only grounded in the silly bureaucratic justification of homogenization, control, and conformity. This is a more polished version of what I told the participants and I have sent it to them as an email attachment.
Why do Nigerian universities require all academic dissertations in the social sciences and humanities to include a section called "theoretical framework"? There is no logic or compelling scholarly reason other than the inexplicable Nigerian desire for regimentation, uniformity, and unnecessary complication.
And of course, there is the ego and procedural obsession factor: they made us do this, so now that we're professors, our students have to do it too.
The fetishization of the “theoretical framework” is a recent development in Nigerian universities. When I was an undergraduate, there was no such blanket requirement. It is lazy and counterproductive, a poor, foolish, and misguided attempt to copy theoretical trends in the Western academy. This mimicry completely and fundamentally misunderstands the theoretical turn in global humanities and social science scholarship, not to mention the point of theorization in the first place.
First of all, what is the point of requiring "theoretical framework" of everyone in the social science and humanities as if all topical explorations have to have theoretical endpoints? Some topics, by their nature, lend themselves to theoretical explorations and reflections. Others don't and that's okay. As long as the scholarship is rigorous and has a structuring set of arguments that are borne out by the data, it is fine.
Not all works have to be theoretically informed or make theoretical contributions. In historical scholarship for instance, a good narrative that is framed in a sound argument is what we're looking for, not forced theoretical discussions.
There are disciplinary differences that make the blanket imposition of the theoretical framework requirement silly. For some disciplines, theory and theoretical framing are integral to their practice. For others, that is not the case. Literary scholarship, for instance, may be more theoretical than other fields. While requiring students in literary studies to write in the theoretical vocabulary of the field or to engage with consequential theoretical conversations of the field or at least demonstrate some familiarity with these conversations, requiring a history and education student to do the same is stupid.
And even in the theory-inclined fields, not all topics are theory-laden or require theoretical explorations or conclusions.
Secondly, theory can never be imposed or should never be imposed. That produces bad scholarship. Requiring students to have a theoretical framework even before they've done the research or analyzed their data prejudges the work and imposes a predetermined direction and outcome on the dissertation. It amounts to doing scholarship backwards. It stifles scholarly innovation and originality. More tragically, requiring a theoretical framework upfront is bad scholarly practice because it disrespects the data and the analysis/arguments that the data supports.
Thirdly, imposing the "theoretical framework" requirement reverses the proper order of the empirical/theoretical dyad. Even in scholarship that lends itself to theoretical reflection and arguments, such theories emanate from the work, from a rigorous distillation of the theoretical implications and insights of the analysis. Imposing theory by choosing some random theory of some random (probably dead) white person defeats the purpose and silences the potential theoretical contributions of the dissertation.
It is during the process of data analysis and the development of the work's arguments and insights that its theoretical implications and its connections to or divergence from existing theoretical postulations becomes clear, giving the scholar a clear entry point to engage critically with the existing theoretical literature and to highlight the theoretical contributions and insights of the work in relation to existing theories. Proper theorizing flows from compelling analysis of data, not the other way round. I don’t understand why a student is required to adopt a so-called theoretical framework ab initio, before the research is done, before the analyses are complete — before the work’s arguments and insights are fully collated and distilled into a set of disciplined postulations on knowledge aka theories.
If a topic has theoretical dimensions, why not simply, as a supervisor, encourage the student to 1) be conscious of the theoretical implications and insights, and 2) highlight these theoretical interventions? Why is a "theoretical framework" section needed? And if you must carve out a section, why not title it "theoretical insights" or “theoretical reflections” or some other similarly flexible and less restrictive category? Doing so gives the student the leeway, flexibility, and incentive to actually reflect on and then highlight the work's theoretical insights (in relation to other theories) instead of blindly dropping the names of some white theorists, whose theories may or may not relate to his work, just to fulfill the requirement of having a so-called theoretical framework? Why do you have to require an arbitrary, mechanical section on theoretical framework?
The result of the current requirement in Nigerian universities is that students who have theoretical statements to make through their work cannot do so because the "theoretical framework" requirement merely demands a mechanical homage to existing theories and neither produces a critical assessment of or engagement with such theories nor a powerful enunciation of the work's theoretical takeaways. As practiced in Nigeria, the blanket theoretical framework requirement is nothing more than an annoying, one-size-fits-all name dropping exercise that destroys a dissertation's originality by imposing an awkward theory on it.
And, by the way, every work has theory that is either explicit or implicit, whether the author chooses to highlight them or not. A perceptive reader can identify and grasp the theoretical implications and insights even without a separate, demarcated "theory" section. Sometimes the theory is implied in the analysis can be seen, so requiring a section/chapter dedicated to announcing the work's "theory" is redundant and infantilizes the reader.
The "theoretical framework" requirement also makes a dissertation difficult to read as the transition from the work's findings and contentions to the "theoretical framework" is often forced, abrupt, and jarring.
In its Nigerian iteration, the tyranny of the theoretical framework requirement does nothing but theoretically restrict the work, putting its arguments and theoretical insights in the shadow of some Euro-American theories with little or no relevance to the work in question or to our African realities and phenomena.
Nigeria has so much to offer the world of theory and African scholarship is dripping with potential theoretical contributions, but the arbitrary imposition of a "theoretical framework" requirement kills off or buries such original theoretical contributions by imposing a prepackaged, usually foreign, theory on a work that is chocked full of its own theoretical insights — insights that, if properly distilled and highlighted to stand on their own confident African legs, can revise, challenge, or deepen existing Euro-American theories.
Ogechi Anyanwu
Call for Contributors
Africana World in Perspective: An Introduction to Africa and the African Diaspora
Edited
Michael Mwenda Kithinji and Ogechi Emmanuel Anyanwu
We would like to invite you to contribute a chapter in an edited textbook focusing on the Africana experience worldwide. This book is intended to give both instructors and college students a comprehensive and up-to-date account of historical and contemporary issues characterizing the Black experience including the socio-cultural, political, and economic struggles and progress, artistic expressiveness, religious and philosophical worldviews, innovation and other achievements. The mainstreaming of the African and the African Diaspora studies in the institutions of higher education is one of the major achievements of the nationalist movements in Africa and the civil rights struggles in the United States. Since the late 1950s, institutions of higher learning in Africa, North America, Europe, and more recently Asia have established programs and departments that offer majors and minors in different facets of the Black experience. Variously referred as Africana Studies, Pan-African Studies, Black Studies, African and African American/Diaspora Studies and so on, these programs serve to challenge the dominant Eurocentric intellectual cannons that dominate scholarship in the West. Although these programs and departments help to diversify university curricula and provide counter narratives that humanize the marginalized, still only a few universities and colleges in North America have established them. Instead of creating programs and departments, many universities and colleges have incorporated individual courses on the Africana experiences in the curriculum of traditional disciplines such as history, political science, sociology, philosophy, and literature.
In universities and colleges that offer a major or a minor in Black/Africana studies, students are required to take an introductory survey course on the Black experience. The introductory survey course on the Africana people is significant because to most students it is their first encounter with the study of those descended from Africa. This course can serve an even greater value if incorporated into the curriculum of traditional liberal arts degrees such as history, when you consider the higher education trends underway with the composition of students becoming increasingly diverse, and students clamoring for more inclusive learning experiences. The introductory survey course on the experiences of African descended people should therefore be seen as an opportunity to enrich the liberal arts curriculum in all institutions of higher learning. Due to its significance, this course should be designed in a thoughtful manner that will make it accessible to freshmen students and take into consideration the global nature of the experiences of Africana people. There are very limited introductory level teaching resources such as textbooks and source documents that depict the global nature of the Black experiences. Through this call, we are aiming to bring together scholars on Africa and the African Diaspora studies to create a teaching resource that is both accessible and rich in learning and teaching activities. In addition to textual narrative on various chapters, the resource will include study activities, source documents, and question banks that will make both teaching and learning an interesting and intellectually stimulating endeavor.
Instructions:
The editors would like to invite you to contribute a chapter in this edited book. Each manuscript should explore any of the themes below. The editors welcome scholarly submissions from academics and researchers in the field. Please consult the list of themes below and send an email to mkit...@uca.edu indicating your interest on or before August 20, 2019. Once your theme is approved, we will send instructions on how to complete your chapters which is expected on October 31, 2019. Each chapter should have between 6,000 and 8,000 words; it must be original and should not be previously published or simultaneously been reviewed elsewhere for publication. All submissions will be peer-reviewed before they are accepted for publication. For any further inquiries, do not hesitate to contact the editors.
Locating and Conceptualizing Africana People
1. Africana Spaces and Places
2. Development of the Field of Africana Studies
3. The Western Conceptual View of Africana People
Early Africa
4. Africa and the Origin of Humans and Civilization
5. Centralized and Acephalous States in Africa
6. Ancient African Civilizations
Trade and State Building
7. Trans-Saharan Trade and State Building in Northern and Western Africa
8. Indian Ocean Trade and State Building in Eastern and Central Africa
Slavery and Slave Trade
9. European and Islamic Slave Trade in Perspective
10. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
11. Slavery in Practice: Rebellions and Abolition
Post-Slavery Encounters and the Aftermath
12. The New European Imperialism and its impact on the Africana People
13. Colonial Africa and the Jim Crow System in the United States
14. Pan-Africanism and its Impact on Africana People
15. The Cold War and the Africana World
16. Post-Colonial Africa and Post-Civil Rights United States: A Comparative Evaluation
17. Continental Africans and African Americans: Nature of the Relationship
Religion in the Africana World
18. Indigenous African Religions
19. Christianity in the Africana World
20. Islam in the Africana World
Africana Culture and Achievement
21. Education and the Black Experience
22. Gender Rights and Achievements by Africana Women
23. The Commanding Heights of Sports: Achievements by Africana People
24. Africana Excellence in Art, Music, and Literature
25. Africana Excellence in Innovation, Economics, and Politics
Editors
Dr. Michael Mwenda Kithinji
Associate Professor of African History
Co-director of the African & African American Studies Program
University of Central Arkansas
Dr. Ogechi Emmanuel Anyanwu
Professor of African History
Eastern Kentucky University