Dr. Isaie Dougnon

Short Bio

Isaie Dougnon (PhD) is an Academy Fellow at the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence, University of Bayreuth. Isaie Dougnon is an Associate Professor of Francophone Humanitarian Studies at Fordham University, New York and Professor of anthropology at Yambo Ouologuem University of Bamako, Mali. In both universities, his teaching focuses on anthropology of development, rural migration, climate change, cultures and societies in Francophone Africa. After publishing his first book, Travail de Blanc, Travail de Noir (Karthala 2007), Dr. Dougnon has contributed through several articles to current debates on local concept of work in Africa. He articulated a historical and anthropological approach to offer a local perspective on labor and migration in the colonial and post-colonial West Africa.

Since 2010, in addition to the study of local lifecycle pattern among migrants, he approaches the study of the institutionalized life cycle pattern among the educated elite. His forthcoming book, Karthala 2025, Crises of Passage: Life Cycle, Careers and Rituals in Malian Public Service provides a new perspective on postcolonial African state building by examining the career paths of civil servants as they confront moral crises through ritual mediation. Currently, he is completing his second manuscript, The Crisis of the University Before and After Democracy: Student and professor resistance, syndicalism and radicalism in Malian higher education. Dr. Dougnon has contributed to the debate about unprecedented Malian political and humanitarian crisis of 2012, by publishing essays in local and international newspaper and journals. He coordinates the Water and Migration in the Sahel Research and Training initiative. Mr. Dougnon has held several fellowships, including Nantes Institute for Advanced Studies, the Humboldt Foundation Fellowship, Re:Work, and the Fulbright Foundation.

Selected Publications

• "In a time of crisis, why are academics so quiet?" University World News (http://www.universityworldnews.com/article)
• "Migrant’s Work: An Anthropological Perspective from West Africa." In Lisa Herzog and Bénédicte Zimmermann (Ed.), Shifting Categories of Work: Unsettling the Ways We Think about Jobs; London: Routledge, pp 134-145, 2022
• "Migration as Coping with Risk: African Migrants 'Conception of Being far from Home and States' Policy of Barriers." In Todd Leedy & Abdoulaye Kane, African Migrations Today: Patterns and Perspectives, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013
• "Child Trafficking or Labor Migration? An Historical Perspective from Dogon Country.” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development. 2(1):85-105, 2011.
• "Être chez soi à Bamako ou la vie après la mort ". Cahiers d’études africaines. Vol. 237, 115-140, 2020.

Project Description

In 1968, less than a decade after Malian independence, the government of Modibo Keita, a primary school teacher by profession, was overthrown by a military junta. For the intellectual class, the euphoria of their newly acquired freedom, combined with pan-africanist ideals and the awakening of political consciousness among the general population, quickly dissipated, ceding place to constant rivalries between academics and the junta. The political resistance of intellectuals penetrated secondary and higher education. Both Habermas (1980) and Chomsky (2015) have stated that the structural relations between university and politics provide a way of understanding the struggle of students and professors for their civic and political rights both in society and at the university.

Within this perspective, this study aims to understand the dynamics of the crisis of the university in Mali during a pivotal period in the country’s history, namely the transition from a dictatorship to a democracy, and the effects that it has had and continues to have on intellectual life in Mali. After the collapse of the military dictatorship in 1991, most of those who led an intellectual life have deserted the faculties for politics. Could the man of science and art claim to defend and enjoy academic freedom if he runs for a lucrative political position? In Mali, multiparty democracy has got into the university and has created political networks, syndicalism and radical movements. I investigate why higher education in Mali become a space for consensus politics instead of lively intellectual debate. Why did the fall of dictatorship and the installation of democratic rule in the 1990s paradoxically lead to the erosion of academic freedom instead of its flourishing?