SANKOFA (RE)SEARCH MODEL
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Sankofa Research Model Training -
Become a Sankofic Researcher
Who Should Attend:
All educators, researchers, and graduate students, as well as writers and anyone working directly with Black boys and men.
Liberate your mind and your practice by centering both on pure Black/African epistemologies and approaches. Discover the African purpose of research and learn how it can serve as the foundation and driving force of your work. Participants will learn how to collect and analyze data using both qualitative and quantitative methods, write a powerful literature review, construct conceptual and theoretical frameworks, and use tables and figures grounded in African paradigms.
Join us to reclaim research as a sacred and liberatory practice rooted in African ways of knowing.
Dec 11, 2025, 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM PSTSankofa Research Model Training Zoom
About the Sankofa (Re)search Model
Under the Sankofa (Re)search Model, to (re)search is to be relentless and indefatigable, to go back and search again and again for the truth. This kind of pursuit or search may push the researcher beyond the boundaries of Westernized training and quantitative and qualitative empirical measurement tools because studying Black people is a complex, multifaceted, multidimensional, and cosmic and in motion phenomenon. This framework has the following three overlapping, nonlinear, and bidirectional yet distinctive components that the researcher of Black people must embody and employ, which are to (re)member, (re)store, and (re)birth.
(Re)member
To (re)member is the act of gathering the dismembered. Black people, in the context and environment of white hegemony, exist in a dismembered state well beyond love. Researchers must gather the fragmented parts of the data, history, and body of literature, looking past the dominant pejorative narratives of Black people to make them/us whole again as a process of (re)membering.
(Re)store
To (re)store is to resurrect Black people. After (re)membering, it is the power of the researcher’s words; this is the view that researchers aim to produce scripture, divine words, through positioning, analyzing, and theorizing in ways that breathes life and (re)stores.
(Re)birth
To (re)birth is to use the Sankofa (re)search approach, the act of looking and going back again and again as a guide to create or recreate or to birth or (re)birth new and free paradigms, language, and meaning as an act of worldmaking.
Dr. Nana Lawson Bush, V
Nana Lawson Bush, V, Ph.D. is the Chair of Pan-African Studies department at Cal State LA.
Rooted in Pan-Africanism, Nana Dr. Bush employs a pentecostal-revolutionary pedagogy – teaching from and to the spirit to foster a liberatory praxis. His approach to teaching is reflected in his research as he aims to contemporaneously disrupt power relations and to build programs, institutions, and states on the best of African philosophies and practices. He has published 5 books, including The Plan: A Guide for Women Raising African American Boys from Conception to College and The Plan Workbook, and 36 academic articles. Most notably, he published the first-ever comprehensive theory concerning Black boys and men called African American Male Theory (AAMT). Nana is a traditional Akan priest and healer. He is the father or baba of many children, but he has 3 biological – two daughters, one a medical doctor, one in medical school, and a son in his second year at Howard University.
Dr. Edward C. Bush
Dr. Edward C. Bush is the President of Cosumnes River College in Sacramento, with a career in higher education since 1995 and extensive experience in the California Community College System. He holds a Ph.D. in Urban Educational Leadership from Claremont Graduate University Dr. Bush is recognized for his innovative leadership, focusing on student success, equity, diversity, and access. Dr. Bush is a co-founder A²MEND, a non-profit improving educational outcomes for men of color, and serves as the Chairperson for the All African Diaspora Educational Summit.
Dr. Amiri Mahnzili
Dr. Amiri Mahnzili is an author and theorist whose work and research centers on a Pan-Afrikan theoretical approach to pedagogy. Obtaining his PhD from Claremont Graduate University in Cultural Studies with an emphasis on Africana Studies, Dr. Mahnzili’s dissertation Reshaping Black Brilliance: Toward the Development and Implementation of a Pan-Afrikan Pedagogy explores a multitude of themes concerning the lived experiences of the Afrikan Diaspora including but not limited to: Afrofuturism, Ante-Modernity, Anti-Colonial Movements, and pre-colonial Afrikan epistemology. Dr. Mahnzili also conducts Rites-of-Passage manhood training programs for young men throughout Southern California, which proved an instrumental resource for his theorizations for this text. Dr. Mahnzili’s love and passion for Afrikan/Black people is exuded in his works and theorizations, his desire for Afrikan people to think beyond the confines and limitations of oppression and anti-Blackness in order to imagine a world and existence beyond these restricting ideations of the Black experience. Dr. Mahnzili is a loving father to his two children, Aynalem and Adonai, and a committed husband to his wife, Elilta.
The Sankofa (Re)searcher Oath
I am a Sankofic (Re)searcher of Black boys and men, which makes me a healer above all things. I do this healing work because I have an enduring and everlasting love of Afrikan people worldwide. In fact, Love is my introduction and background, Love is my goals and objectives, Love is my conceptual and theoretical frames, Love is my positionality,
Love is my (re)search questions and my hypothesis,
Love is my ontology, epistemology, and axiology, Love is my (re)search paradigm, approach, model, methodology, and method, Love is my analysis, codes, and themes, Love is my findings and results, Love is my discussion, recommendations, and conclusions. Because of Love, I commit to freeing myself and my work from reproducing deficit paradigms, colonized approaches, and plantation and caged scholarship as I thrive to
move from a space of pure, free, and decolonized Black thought.
Moreover, I am, and the (re)search I cypher, the mouthpiece of God. I am led by the Holy Ghosts and our Ancestors to write scripture, mdw ntr, and divine words. The spirit of Sankofa propels me on a relentless pursuit, to go back again and again, to (re)search and (re)search, for our knowledge, cultural ways, practice, rituals, and good ethics, which drives me to be like Auset finding fragmented pieces of our story and our bodies in order to (Re)member, (Re)store, and (Re)birth new Suns, new Herus, new Christs, or
new Black Boys and Men who reach their highest level of Divinity.
I willingly accept the responsibility and weight of my charge as a Sankofic (Re)searcher,
yet, I have no realistic alternative: My fate and entrance into a peaceful eternity are contingent on my ability to fulfill my commitment and oath.
0 have taken the Oath
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