Making Sense of Family Deaths in Urban Senegal: Diversities, Contexts, and Comparisons

Despite calls for cross-cultural research, Minority world perspectives still dominate death and bereavement studies, emphasizing individualized emotions and neglecting contextual diversities. In research concerned with contemporary African societies, on the other hand, death and loss are generally subsumed within concerns about AIDS or poverty, with little attention paid to the emotional and personal significance of a death. Here, we draw on interactionist sociology to present major themes from a qualitative study of family deaths in urban Senegal, theoretically framed through the duality of meanings-in-context. Such themes included family and community as support and motivation; religious beliefs and practices as frameworks for solace and (regulatory) meaning; and material circumstances as these are intrinsically bound up with emotions. Although we identify the experience of (embodied, emotional) pain as a common response across Minority and Majority worlds, we also explore significant divergencies, varying according to localized contexts and broader power dynamics

Confronting the complexities of decolonising curricula and pedagogy in higher education

Recent critiques voiced by students in both the Global South and North have turned attention to the ways in which higher education practices have been informed by, and continue to perpetuate, a series of assumptions that favour particular epistemological perspectives. Across the world, students have criticised universities for the content of their curricula, institutional cultures, and pedagogic practices that perpetuate the attainment gap and exclusion. In response, curricula and pedagogic change is being debated and promoted on campuses. This introductory article lays the theoretical groundwork for a volume that brings decolonial theory into concrete engagement with the structural, cultural, institutional, relational, and personal logics of curricula and pedagogic practice. The article examines the relationship between decolonisation as a theoretical concept, and the practices of decoloniality unfolding in pedagogical practice

Teaching African philosophy alongside Western philosophy: Some advice about topics and texts

In this article, I offer concrete suggestions about which topics, texts, positions, arguments and authors from the African philosophical tradition one could usefully put into conversation with ones from the Western, especially the Anglo-American. In particular, I focus on materials that would make for revealing and productive contrasts between the two traditions. My aim is not to argue that one should teach by creating critical dialogue between African and Western philosophers, but rather is to provide strategic advice, supposing that is a sensible goal to adopt