Social Science Research Council

"Senegalese 'Making Do': Islamic Knowledge, National Schooling, and Opportunity in Dakar"

In Senegal, global capitalism, urbanization, and economic instability have profoundly affected Islamic and secular schools and the experience of students who attend them. Faced with a disjuncture between their education, the stringent demands of urban living, and their ambitions for the future, young men and women increasingly adopt lifestyles of managing and making do (expressed as se debrouiller in French and goorgoorlu in Wolof, respectively). My project examines how Senegalese schools shape young men and women's lives in this context of economic constraint and profound social change. Fined-grained ethnographic research conducted in a public junior high school, an Islamic day-school/Franco-Arabe school, and an all-male Koranic boarding school (daara)--all located in the same densely-populated suburban neighborhood of Dakar--and with students, their families, and former students will constitute a major part of the work. My research is designed to integrate both macro and micro-level perspectives by working up and down ethnographic sites of the school, the household, the city neighborhood, and larger spheres of national and international economic and cultural flows. This work aims to help deepen our understanding of education as a site of contestation and change and to refine models of the relationship between education, class reproduction, and identity. My hope is that it will also provide practical recommendations for improving Senegalese schools as they struggle with contrasting models of knowledge within a context of limited resources. Finally, given our highly fraught world political climate, I hope that this project will shed important light on concerns regarding Islam, education, youth, and development through informed ethnographic data.