Research

Our research program PRAM analyses the politization of religion with a comparative focus on West Africa and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). It tackles a crucial research question: how does religion shape the behaviour of social and political actors?  Our three lines of research are : transnational religious dynamics, competition between social and political actors, and the use of media in religious competition. This research programme is the outcome of the collaboration between the Centre Interdisciplinaire de Recherche sur l’Afrique et le Moyen Orient (CIRAM – Université Laval), the Centre d’Études et de Recherches Internationales (CÉRIUM – Université de Montréal) et the Centre de recherche Société, Droit et Religions (SoDRUS – Université de Sherbrooke).

Project FamilEA seeks to understand the dynamics of family transformation in East Africa by combining four strategies: building a common interdisciplinary conceptual foundation; combining a range of methods from across the social sciences and the humanities to build a common core dataset; implementing, in two neighbouring countries with distinct family patterns, a comparative study design involving men and women, younger and middle-aged adults, capital cities and countryside, and various socio-economic groups and trajectories; including discipline-specific individual projects that will stand in close dialogue with one another and with the core theory and data sets.

In particular, the project focuses on Kenya and Uganda, neighbouring countries where demographic changes show a mixed picture of similarities and differences. Using the countries’ two capitals as our starting point, we develop the concept of “family archipelago”, which challenges the image of the static household unit to trace the dynamic nature of family networks as circulating between multiple centres. We will trace those networks using an interdisciplinary practice-based approach that considers “doing families” as made of dense networks of exchange and support (care as well as economic) and constraints, inspired by Bourdieu’s practice theory and his conception of social capital. Such networks of exchange will be explored using multiple disciplines woven together through an interdisciplinary research design. The project enjoys a demographic/anthropological core consolidated by contributions from geography, history, and political science. The disciplines are represented through a team of 20 researchers, many of whom have a long collaboration history, and with due attention given to questions of representation (senior/junior, European/African, gender, etc.).

Enregistrement Pélerins Hajj, Dakar

While the serious dynamics generated by armed groups proclaiming adherence to Islam, in West Africa and the Sahel, should not be minimized, it is important to avoid analytical shortcuts. The political and social transformations of Muslim societies are protean and complex. New dynamics are erupting which touch significant numbers of people in West Africa.

Our project aims to shed light on one of these developments, namely the appearance of new Islamic sociopolitical entrepreneurs, true “figures de la réussite” (“success icons”) emerging from the margins of the social hierarchies that normally determine who dominates (and who is dominated) in these Muslim societies. They can be women, young people, or individuals from the lower “castes” of West African communities (“ex-captives”; “castes”), who manage to circumvent the dominant structures through involvement in social and political Islam. From three countries where Islam either clearly dominates (Senegal), holds a slight majority (Burkina Faso), or is in the minority (Cameroon), we analyze the journey of these religious entrepreneurs from three vantage points that configure the heart of Islamic renewal: the agencies set up to organize the Mecca pilgrimage (Hajj); the newly built mosque-school complexes; and the creation of Islamist political parties.

Daara, St-Louis, Senegal ©Raphaëlle Hayot

This project focused on the understanding of schooling models and practices in West Africa (Senegal and Benin). We examined how the educational reality of West African countries is far less homogeneous than international education policies suggest and shed light on the factors and variables that hold the key to explaining the diversity of the educational situations and practices we observed.

I contributed to this project with a study on the internationalization of Arab-Islamic education in Senegal. I showed how the ability of Arabic literates to move between West Africa, the Sahel and the countries of North Africa and the Middle East facilitates the transnational circulation of models and practices that have proved vital for developing Arab-Islamic education in Senegal. It also led me to identifying the ways in which language and education are increasingly being politicized in the debates on the postcolonial course of the Senegalese state in a context of regional tensions linked to the Sahelian crisis.