About the Journal

African Film Studies (Media/Arts) is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal under the Pan African Research Journals (PARJ) platform. It is positioned as a dedicated venue for scholarship in the humanities, culture, and interpretive scholarship, with particular attention to Media/Arts.

Aims and Scope

African Film Studies welcomes manuscripts that make a clear scholarly contribution, engage meaningfully with prior literature, and present findings or arguments in a form suitable for long-term academic use. The editorial direction of the journal prioritises historical depth, interpretive rigor, conceptual clarity, and thoughtful engagement with texts, ideas, and cultural practice.

The journal is especially interested in work that speaks to African contexts without becoming parochial: submissions should be locally grounded where appropriate, but analytically strong enough to travel across institutions, disciplines, and regions.

Editorial Priorities

The journal publishes work connected to Film. Suitable submissions may include theoretical papers, review essays, comparative studies, commentary, book reviews, and original interpretive scholarship. Across these formats, the editorial office expects coherent framing, an explicit contribution, and methods or reasoning that are inspectable by readers and reviewers.

Contributors should explain how their study or argument extends current knowledge, resolves a recognised problem, tests an approach, or provides a sharper synthesis of existing evidence.

Methodological Orientation

Although the journal is open to different study designs and intellectual traditions, it expects submissions to use methods appropriate to the research question. Typical methodological expectations include critical reading, archival engagement, discourse analysis, and theoretically informed interpretation.

Who the Journal Serves

African Film Studies (Media/Arts) serves academics interested in history, philosophy, culture, literature, religion, and the arts. The journal is therefore edited for both subject-matter specialists and well-informed adjacent readers. Articles should remain technically sound while also explaining why the work matters, who may use it, and what limitations shape the interpretation of findings.

Publishing Model

The journal operates a structured editorial screening and peer-review process designed to support discoverability, indexing, and long-term knowledge access. Submissions are checked for scope fit, metadata completeness, similarity concerns, ethical compliance, and presentation quality before they move to external review or editorial decision.

Accepted content is prepared for stable online publication, archival access, citation visibility, and indexing support across the PARJ network.

Editorial Standards

Authors are expected to submit work written in clear UK English, supported by accurate references, transparent declarations, and a level of reporting proportionate to the claims being made. In this journal, high-quality reporting means intellectual coherence, historical sensitivity, and clearly supported scholarly claims.

Where applicable, manuscripts should also address ethics approval, participant protections, consent, funding, conflicts of interest, and data or materials availability.