Anneke Newman
I am an anthropologist of development working on questions of education (school preference, educational aspirations, Islamic education, the education-migration nexus) and gender ("child" marriage, FGM/C, premature school-leaving) in Islamic West Africa (Senegal and Mali). I am mainly interested in the potential (or not?) of development to embrace ontological, epistemological and cultural diversity, drawing on postcolonial and decolonial theoretical frameworks as well as practical insights from community development and action research approaches.
I currently teach courses on anthropological theory and gender and sexuality at the Laboratoire de l'Anthropologie des Mondes Contemporains (LAMC), Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). I recently completed two postdocs at the LAMC, one funded by the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS) (2018-2022) and the other an international mobility fellowship funded by the ULB (2017-2018). I also undertook a visiting fellowship at the Centre for Migration and Intercultural Studies (CeMIS) at the University of Antwerp funded by the Universitair Centrum Sint-Ignatius Antwerpen (UCSIA) in 2017.
Before coming to Belgium, I taught full-time as a Teaching Fellow at the University of Sussex (2016-2017) on the Global Studies Foundation Year programme, where I completed my ESRC-funded PhD in Social Anthropology (2016). My thesis explored educational decision-making at secondary school level among the Muslim Haalpulaar'en in the Futa Tooro region of northern Senegal. In particular it looked at how socioeconomic status and constructions of gender, caste and being Muslim fed into people's evaluations of the value of secular and Islamic schools.
Previously I completed an MSc in Cross-Cultural Research Methods at Sussex (2010), an MA in Gender and International Development at IDS (2007), and a BA in Human Sciences at the University of Oxford (2006).
I have also worked for several years for NGOs concerned with education and gender and development themes in London, Brussels, Senegal and the Comores archipelago in East Africa. Following these experiences, I was attracted more and more by the potential of social anthropology to critically appraise development practice.
From 2015-2018 I was the Secretary of the British Association of International and Comparative Education (BAICE). From 2018 I sit on the bureau and editorial board of l'Association pour l'anthropologie du changement social et du développement (APAD).
I currently teach courses on anthropological theory and gender and sexuality at the Laboratoire de l'Anthropologie des Mondes Contemporains (LAMC), Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). I recently completed two postdocs at the LAMC, one funded by the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS) (2018-2022) and the other an international mobility fellowship funded by the ULB (2017-2018). I also undertook a visiting fellowship at the Centre for Migration and Intercultural Studies (CeMIS) at the University of Antwerp funded by the Universitair Centrum Sint-Ignatius Antwerpen (UCSIA) in 2017.
Before coming to Belgium, I taught full-time as a Teaching Fellow at the University of Sussex (2016-2017) on the Global Studies Foundation Year programme, where I completed my ESRC-funded PhD in Social Anthropology (2016). My thesis explored educational decision-making at secondary school level among the Muslim Haalpulaar'en in the Futa Tooro region of northern Senegal. In particular it looked at how socioeconomic status and constructions of gender, caste and being Muslim fed into people's evaluations of the value of secular and Islamic schools.
Previously I completed an MSc in Cross-Cultural Research Methods at Sussex (2010), an MA in Gender and International Development at IDS (2007), and a BA in Human Sciences at the University of Oxford (2006).
I have also worked for several years for NGOs concerned with education and gender and development themes in London, Brussels, Senegal and the Comores archipelago in East Africa. Following these experiences, I was attracted more and more by the potential of social anthropology to critically appraise development practice.
From 2015-2018 I was the Secretary of the British Association of International and Comparative Education (BAICE). From 2018 I sit on the bureau and editorial board of l'Association pour l'anthropologie du changement social et du développement (APAD).
less
InterestsView All (35)
Uploads
Papers by Anneke Newman
Global South which draw on the common conceptual umbrella of the
‘identity of the educated person’ to unpack novel intersections between
mobility, migration and education in the context of globalisation.
Overarching themes include how definitions of the educated person are
shaped by diverse identity constructions and axes of difference, notions
of discipline and hardship, and global discourses and concepts which
travel across international space. Definitions of the educated person are
contested through migration processes, and young people’s agency
within and beyond schools, through consumption practices and
appropriation of popular culture.
females in the Global South is a major preoccupation within the
field of international development and education, yet theoreticallygrounded
qualitative scholarship unpacking this relationship
remains scarce. This paper uses models developed to conceptualise
female agency in constrained circumstances, combined with theory
on youth’s educational aspirations, to analyse several ethnographic
case studies of the ways female pupils in northern Senegal
attempted to ‘get the best of both worlds’, namely fulfiling the
competing ideals of marrying and finishing secondary school.
Findings are used to inform recommendations to guide future
research, policy and programming on marriage and premature
school-leaving in the Global South more widely.
by exposing how coloniality in knowledge production informs dominant
approaches to shifting social norms underpinning female genital
mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) and child marriage. Major organisations in
this field demonstrate systemic grandmother-exclusionary bias, namely
sidelining grandmothers as change agents compared to adolescent
girls, women of reproductive age, men and boys, and religious leaders.
Grandmother-exclusionary bias stems from two assumptions: grandmothers
do not influence FGM/C or child marriage; grandmothers only
exert harmful influence and cannot change their views. These assumptions
reflect Eurocentric constructions of modernity, and limited understanding
of cultural contexts where seniority confers authority on
female elders in relation to sexual and reproductive health (SRH).
Grandmother-exclusionary bias goes against evidence that grandmothers
wield authority over these practices; insights from meta-evaluations
and systems/socioecological approaches that social norms
change requires engaging people who wield authority over those
norms; and proof that grandmothers can lead change if engaged
respectfully. Instead, I present the ‘grandmother-inclusive’ Girls Holistic
Development programme in Senegal, developed by the non-governmental
organisation The Grandmother Project, as a decolonial option.
It uses cultural renewal and participatory intergenerational dialogue to
support grandmothers in shifting SRH-related norms and healing the
damage Western modernity has inflicted on their communities.
This chapter makes a tentative contribution to this challenge by reclaiming and promoting the concept of ‘eduscape’, a contraction of 'education' and 'landscape' coined by Heikki Kynäslahti. The term was originally inspired by the work of anthropologist Arjun Appadurai who first used the metaphor of scapes to refer to the movement, in the context of globalisation, of people (ethnoscapes), capital (finanscapes), things or material culture (technoscapes), information disseminated through the media (mediascapes) and specific Enlightenment ideas such as ‘democracy’ (ideoscapes) which some have referred to as 'policyscapes'.
I propose that 'eduscape' is still a useful concept, but existing literature using it exhibits two main flaws. First, it tends to focus on migration flows which privilege the Global North as a site of destination, namely the migration of students from the Global South to attend university in the North. This focus eclipses other far more common forms of migration for educational purposes, or flows which destabilise this narrative which privileges the North, ie South-South or North-South migration flows. The second flaw in the existing eduscape literature is that ‘education’ is framed as formal schooling or university on the Western model, totally ignoring other non-Western or indigenous forms of education whether formal or informal - such as Islamic schools in the Senegalese context.
I suggest that we can still use eduscape for capturing a range of aspects of the education-migration-development exus, but only if we use it in a postcolonial or decolonial way that recentres the experiences, concerns, epistemologies and ontologies of people in what have traditionally been framed as global ‘peripheries’. In this chapter, I present my ethnographic data and case study on Senegal to illustrate what I think this kind of analysis could look like in practice.
Book Reviews by Anneke Newman
Reports by Anneke Newman
Global South which draw on the common conceptual umbrella of the
‘identity of the educated person’ to unpack novel intersections between
mobility, migration and education in the context of globalisation.
Overarching themes include how definitions of the educated person are
shaped by diverse identity constructions and axes of difference, notions
of discipline and hardship, and global discourses and concepts which
travel across international space. Definitions of the educated person are
contested through migration processes, and young people’s agency
within and beyond schools, through consumption practices and
appropriation of popular culture.
females in the Global South is a major preoccupation within the
field of international development and education, yet theoreticallygrounded
qualitative scholarship unpacking this relationship
remains scarce. This paper uses models developed to conceptualise
female agency in constrained circumstances, combined with theory
on youth’s educational aspirations, to analyse several ethnographic
case studies of the ways female pupils in northern Senegal
attempted to ‘get the best of both worlds’, namely fulfiling the
competing ideals of marrying and finishing secondary school.
Findings are used to inform recommendations to guide future
research, policy and programming on marriage and premature
school-leaving in the Global South more widely.
by exposing how coloniality in knowledge production informs dominant
approaches to shifting social norms underpinning female genital
mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) and child marriage. Major organisations in
this field demonstrate systemic grandmother-exclusionary bias, namely
sidelining grandmothers as change agents compared to adolescent
girls, women of reproductive age, men and boys, and religious leaders.
Grandmother-exclusionary bias stems from two assumptions: grandmothers
do not influence FGM/C or child marriage; grandmothers only
exert harmful influence and cannot change their views. These assumptions
reflect Eurocentric constructions of modernity, and limited understanding
of cultural contexts where seniority confers authority on
female elders in relation to sexual and reproductive health (SRH).
Grandmother-exclusionary bias goes against evidence that grandmothers
wield authority over these practices; insights from meta-evaluations
and systems/socioecological approaches that social norms
change requires engaging people who wield authority over those
norms; and proof that grandmothers can lead change if engaged
respectfully. Instead, I present the ‘grandmother-inclusive’ Girls Holistic
Development programme in Senegal, developed by the non-governmental
organisation The Grandmother Project, as a decolonial option.
It uses cultural renewal and participatory intergenerational dialogue to
support grandmothers in shifting SRH-related norms and healing the
damage Western modernity has inflicted on their communities.
This chapter makes a tentative contribution to this challenge by reclaiming and promoting the concept of ‘eduscape’, a contraction of 'education' and 'landscape' coined by Heikki Kynäslahti. The term was originally inspired by the work of anthropologist Arjun Appadurai who first used the metaphor of scapes to refer to the movement, in the context of globalisation, of people (ethnoscapes), capital (finanscapes), things or material culture (technoscapes), information disseminated through the media (mediascapes) and specific Enlightenment ideas such as ‘democracy’ (ideoscapes) which some have referred to as 'policyscapes'.
I propose that 'eduscape' is still a useful concept, but existing literature using it exhibits two main flaws. First, it tends to focus on migration flows which privilege the Global North as a site of destination, namely the migration of students from the Global South to attend university in the North. This focus eclipses other far more common forms of migration for educational purposes, or flows which destabilise this narrative which privileges the North, ie South-South or North-South migration flows. The second flaw in the existing eduscape literature is that ‘education’ is framed as formal schooling or university on the Western model, totally ignoring other non-Western or indigenous forms of education whether formal or informal - such as Islamic schools in the Senegalese context.
I suggest that we can still use eduscape for capturing a range of aspects of the education-migration-development exus, but only if we use it in a postcolonial or decolonial way that recentres the experiences, concerns, epistemologies and ontologies of people in what have traditionally been framed as global ‘peripheries’. In this chapter, I present my ethnographic data and case study on Senegal to illustrate what I think this kind of analysis could look like in practice.