Routledge

Call for book chapter contributions:

Schools and national identities in French-speaking Africa: political choices, means of transmission, and appropriation

Editors:

Linda Gardelle, ENSTA Bretagne (FR)

Camile Jacob, University of Portsmouth (UK)

Please send a one-page outline of your proposal for a 5,000-6,000 words contribution to the volume by 4 May to linda.gardelle@ensta-bretagne.fr and camille.jacob@port.ac.uk.

Authors will be notified by 20 May, and full chapters will be due on 18 August 2019.

The volume will be published by Routledge in the Series “Perspectives on Education in Africa” in 2020.

The aim of this volume is to provide an in-depth and transdisciplinary understanding of the role of schools in the various processes of identity-building, and to showcase research from and about countries outside the former British empire, either as individual case studies or through a comparative framework within or beyond the continent. It will include contributions focusing on the multiple and changing role of schools in the construction of collective identities and the (re)production of national imaginings in francophone Africa. It will also consider how different actors (media, diasporas, social networks, religious communities) shape the appropriation, formulation and implementation of curriculums and discourses about education. Chapters can be empirical or theoretical, based on one case study or on comparative work, and should reflect critically and reflexively on the data, methodologies or conceptual frameworks used. While the term “Francophone Africa” is problematic, erasing the multilingual and translingual realities and reproducing a Euro-centric lens, there is comparatively little published in English on countries which were not formerly colonised by Britain, and the particularities of French and Belgian colonial rules and continued French influence is helpful in providing an initial focus. This volume which will be published in the Routledge series “Perspectives on Education in Africa” and aims to foreground research from countries often overlooked in Anglophone publications. Chapters questioning the relevance of this colonial frame of dividing the continent, whether through comparative or single case studies, are encouraged.