College Recruitment and Coloniality at an Elite Bilingual Senegalese Secondary School

• In Event: Sunday Roundtable Session 1:15 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Coloniality, Geopolitics of Knowledge and Subjectivities (Table 3)

Abstract

This presentation focuses on visits by two college recruiters (one American, one Senegalese) to a private bilingual school in Dakar, Senegal. Drawing on de/coloniality, anthropology of white supremacy, and the education-migration nexus, it locates these visits at the intersection of students’ global aspirations and universities’ campaigns to recruit particular kinds of students to compete on a global scale. These encounters between students and recruiters are set against the historical legacy of colonization and white supremacy to examine how coloniality operates in regard to both spatial and social mobility and racialized global neoliberal and capitalist discourses that place a specific kind of higher education in western/northern spaces as a requisite step to upward social mobility.

Author

• Teresa Speciale, Trinity College