Description

 CRG Book Launch 15: "Decolonising Education in Islamic West Africa" by Anneke Newman

Date: MARCH 18 (Tuesday)

Time: 11:00 – 12:30
Venue: 3rd Floor,  Rm. John Vincke, Technicum 1, UFO Campus, Ghent University

ABOUT THE BOOK

     Why do colonial stereotypes about Islam and Qur’anic schools in West Africa persist within education and development scholarship, not to mention policy discourse - despite a wealth of contrary empirical evidence? Why do secular biases continue to underpin the theoretical frameworks that we use to understand educational decision-making – despite evidence from the Pew Research Center that 80% of the world’s population professes a religious faith? How do Euro-North American academic cultures silence the perspectives of people of faith, thereby foreclosing the possibility that they analyse these dynamics on the basis of their own experiences?

     Decolonising Education in Islamic West Africa is grounded in an ethnography of educational decision-making in northern Senegal which shows how young people struggled to obtain an Islamic education – due to a policy landscape shaped by Eurocentric and secular biases on the one hand, and local inequalities based on gender, caste and socioeconomic status on the other. However, this case study also serves as a springboard to expose the epistemic hierarchies within academic and development spaces concerned with educational engagement. Decolonial theory is mobilised to combine the strengths of African studies with the more applied disciplines of comparative education/development studies - but also provides a critical frame for challenging epistemic biases in both of these fields. Ultimately, the book makes a powerful argument for greater inclusion of people versed in West African and Islamic knowledge traditions within academic and development spaces.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Anneke Newman is an anthropologist interested in the nexus between religion and development, and policies relating to education, gender, and health.

She is committed to critiquing conceptual frameworks and power hierarchies in knowledge production that underpin the reproduction of colonialist hierarchies, and asserting alternative standpoints and ways of knowing which reflect the perspectives of people on the receiving end of these hierarchies.

Anneke is a Senior Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Conflict and Development Studies at the University of Ghent, and has held research and teaching posts at the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie des Mondes Contemporains at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sussex where she received her PhD in 2016.