Short Abstract

This panel explores everyday counselling in African Muslim lifeworlds, examining how professional and vernacular practices intersect and generate new forms of knowledge, expertise, ethical citizenship, healing, and repair. It welcomes ethnographic, historical, and theoretical contributions.

Long Abstract

Since the early 2000s, the Movement for Global Mental Health and related World Health Organization initiatives have promoted the expansion of psychiatric services in African countries and raised critical awareness of mental health. While these interventions emphasized biomedical and psychiatric approaches, they have also contributed to raising awareness of psychotherapy and popularizing professional forms of counselling. Some even speak of a “counselling revolution” in Africa (Vaughan 2016) marked by the emergence of professional and diverse “informal” and self-appointed counsellors including religious leaders, healers, teachers, peers, mentors, and community leaders who blend formal techniques with vernacular approaches. This panel explores counselling as everyday relational practice in contexts that are increasingly shaped by insecurity due to structural inequality, violence, and global crises. We ask: how are professional and vernacular forms of counselling entangled? What kinds of knowledges and expertise emerge in these encounters? What is considered counselling and by whom? What possibilities and new forms of ethical citizenship, healing and repair are generated? What kind of online and offline techniques do everyday counsellors deploy (e.g. listening, group interventions, prayer, storytelling; online platforms and telephone counselling)? Despite growing scholarship in secular and Christian settings, developments in African Muslim lifeworlds remain comparatively underexplored. This panel brings together researchers from different disciplines working in various African contexts to explore how counselling is understood, practiced, negotiated and transformed within Muslim communities. We welcome ethnographic, empirical, historical, and theoretical contributions including reflections on researchers’ own involvement in counselling processes.

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