Events & Issues
A copy of a recently published Arabic book entitled الاشراف التربوي و دوره في تطوير العملية التعليمية (باتطبيق على السودان)
[Educational Supervision and its Role in the Development of the Educational System (A Case Study of the Sudan)] is available in the RA link above.
RA is thankful to the author, professor Abdulmageed Ahmad, assistant professor of Education & Literature at the International University of Africa, Khartoum. He has generously offered to share this soft copy with RA readers.
– What a New University in Africa is Doing to Decolonise Social Sciences
May 13, 2017 6.22am EDT
It’s not often that you get to create a new university from scratch: space, staff – and curriculum. But that’s exactly what we’re doing in Mauritius, at one of Africa’s newest higher education institutions. And decoloniality is central to our work.
I am a member of the Social Science Faculty at the African Leadership University. Part of our task is to build a canon, knowledge, and a way of knowing. This is happening against the backdrop of a movement by South African students to decolonise their universities; Black Lives Matter protests in the United States; and in the context of a much deeper history of national reimagination across Africa and the world.
With this history in mind our faculty is working towards what we consider a decolonial social science curriculum. We’ve adopted seven commitments to help us meet this goal, and which we hope will shift educational discourse in a more equitable and representative direction.
Read the story in this link: http://theconversation.com/what-a-new-university-in-africa-is-doing-to-decolonise-social-sciences-77181
– ‘We are Iranians’: Rediscovering the History of African Slavery in Iran
By Jillian D’Amours
Monday 9 May 2016 10:13 UTC
ST CATHARINES, Canada – Behnaz Mirzai’s students often say her office is like a museum.
With shards of ancient pottery recovered from the mountains of Iran’s Sistan and Baluchistan province, colourful vases from Isfahan, and tribal masks from Zanzibar adorning the shelves, it is easy to see why.
Mirzai has spent nearly 20 years studying the origins of the African diaspora in Iran, including the history and eventual abolition of slavery in her native country.
It was a topic that few knew about in the late 1990s when she began her research, and one that remains unfamiliar to many today.
“Living in Iran for all my life, we had never heard about slavery in Iran,” Mirzai told Middle East Eye from Brock University, where she now works as an associate professor of Middle Eastern history.
Read more in this link: http://www.middleeasteye.net/in-depth/features/they-are-iranian-discovering-african-history-and-slavery-iran-970665328
– NBA Africa Academy Opened in Senegal in Push for International Recruits
By Nellie Peyton | DAKAR
The National Basketball Association opened its first training academy in Africa on Thursday in a push to expand its presence on the continent and prepare more African players to enter the league, its vice-president for Africa said. The academy is based in the seaside West African nation of Senegal, where a sports development program in partnership with the NBA has already produced professional players including Minnesota Timberwolves centre-forward Gorgui Dieng. “The goal of the NBA Academy Africa is to create a more direct path for young people who have talent so that their future is not determined by chance,” Amadou Gallo Fall told reporters in Senegal’s capital Dakar. The academy is part of a push to expand recruitment worldwide and follows three academies which were launched in China last year. Two more are slated to open in India and Australia. The number of international players in the NBA has been increasing, with a record 113 on opening night rosters for the 2016-17 season. But most are European, with only 14 from Africa. Basketball has long been eclipsed by soccer on the continent, where even former superstars such as Nigeria’s Hakeem Olajuwon did not learn to play until their late teens.
Read more on the story in this link:
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-basketball-nba-africa-idUSKBN1802G5?feedType=RSS&feedName=sportsNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+reuters%2FsportsNews+%28Reuters+Sports+News%29
NEW BOOKS كتب جديدة
– The Colonial Fortune in Contemporary Fiction in French
[ثروة الاستعمار في ادب الرواية الفرنسية المعاصرة]
Author: Oana Panaïté
This book highlights the features of a paracolonial aesthetics emanating from a significant body of contemporary Hexagonal and non-metropolitan texts. Authored by writers who are either directly involved in the debate about the colonial past and its remanence (J. M. G. Le Clézio, Paule Constant, Édouard Glissant, Tierno Monénembo, Marie NDiaye, and Leïla Sebbar) or who do not overtly manifest such concerns (Stéphane Audeguy, Marie Darrieussecq, Régis Jauffret, Pierre Michon, and Claude Simon), these works create a shared imaginary space permeated by the symbolic, rhetorical, and conceptual presence colonialism in our postcolonial era. The paracolonial describes the phenomena of revival, resurgence, remanence, and residue – in other words, the permanence of the colonial in contemporary imagination. It also addresses the re-imagining, revisiting, and recasting of the colonial in current works of literature (fiction, autobiography, and essay). The idea of the colonial fortune emerges as an interface between our era’s concerns with issues of fate, economics, legacy, and debt stemming from the understudied persistence of the colonial in today’s political and cultural conversation, and literature’s ways of making sense of them both sensorially and sensibly.
Publisher: Liverpool University Press, 2017
– Arab Patriotism:The Ideology and Culture of Power in Late Ottoman Egypt
[القومية العربية: الأيدولوجية وثقافة السلطة في أواخر الحكم العثماني في مصر]
Author: Adam Mestyan
Arab Patriotism presents the essential backstory to the formation of the modern nation-state and mass nationalism in the Middle East. While standard histories claim that the roots of Arab nationalism emerged in opposition to the Ottoman milieu, Adam Mestyan points to the patriotic sentiment that grew in the Egyptian province of the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century, arguing that it served as a pivotal way station on the path to the birth of Arab nationhood.
Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2017
– Sheikh Ahmadu Bamba: Selected Poems (Islamic Literatures: Texts and Studies)
[الشيخ أحمدو بامبا: مختارات شعرية]
Author: Sana Camara
While in exile in Gabon (1895-1902), Sheikh Ahmadu Bamba marked a historic moment with his poetry of resilience, pivotal to the cultural and religious transformation of the Murīds of Senegal. The qaṣāʾid (poems) included in this annotated edition, most of them hymns of praise to the qualities of Allāh and the Prophet Muḥammad, and professions of faith that demonstrate how to realize the precepts found in the Qur’ān, display the underlying elements of Sheikh Ahmadu Bamba’s imaginative energy and poetic vision. They reveal a unifying poetic purpose and exemplify Ṣūfī literary traditions in subject matter, form, and versification and aim to explore the deepest regions of mysticism in search of the divine truth.
Publisher: Brill Academic Pub, 2017
– Higher Education in Africa: Challenges for Development, Mobility, and Cooperation
Authors: Anne Goujon, Max Haller, Bernadette Müller Kmet
The idea that developing all sectors of the educational palette is influential for socio-economic development was adopted later in Sub-Saharan Africa than in other world regions. Most efforts went primarily into developing the first stages of education, and rightly so, for many children could not access education at all. Today, all African governments recognize the importance of higher education and increasingly invest in it. They are facing two major, interlinked challenges: rapid population growth and decline in the quality of education. Indeed, despite fertility decline, the region has been confronted with substantial population growth, which will continue for many decades; as such, there is a necessity to increase investment in education. This, in a situation of limited resources, has been at the expense of the quality and the burgeoning of private institutions of higher education. The contributions here discuss the development, quality, and outcomes of higher education in Africa, with a specific focus on relations between Africa and Europe. Issues related to the mobility of African students and scholars are discussed in several national and international case studies.
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