Paper Short Abstract:

I reflect on the process of doing an ethnography of educational decision-making in a Muslim community in Senegal. I attempt to communicate and theorise the experience of reverting to Islam during fieldwork – and its implications for my study - using decolonial theory, metaphors and visual art.

Paper Abstract:

In this paper, I reflect on the process of doing an ethnography of educational decision-making in a Muslim community in Senegal, and the challenges of communicating this experience in my forthcoming monograph, given that I reverted to Islam during fieldwork. First I unpack how the Euro-North-American social sciences deny scholars who subscribe to other-than-secular worldviews the possibility to theorise from their perspectives - whether by dismissing their approach as ‘theology’, ‘unscientific’, ‘going native’ etc. I theorise this dynamic using the concepts of ‘coloniality of secularity’ and ‘secular erasure’. Second, I share the challenges of communicating my onto-epistemological transformation - and implications for my relationships with research participants and theorizing about educational decision-making – in a monograph. A metaphor that I have found useful is that proposed by philosopher of education Barbara Thayer-Bacon, who proposes that we make sense of the vast ocean of human experience using nets woven with weft threads (ontologies) and warp threads (epistemologies). I like this metaphor as it is organic – we are constantly (re)-weaving our nets – and encourages epistemic humility, namely an appreciation that much of the world’s mysteries will slip through our inevitably partial nets. I also show how I try to convey some aspects of my Islamic worldview through visual art. Descriptions using words - even when metaphorical rather than literal - attempt to make apparent what are profound, affective, embodied experiences. Art provides a medium where these hidden things stay beneath the surface, challenging the reader through their silence and ambiguity.