CRG BOOK LAUNCHES 15
Decolonising Education in Islamic West Africa
Author: Dr. Anneke Newman.
Date: MARCH 18 (Tuesday)
Time: 11:00 – 12:30
Venue: John Vincke Room, Technicum 1
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.
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