Panel 115: The Politics of Religious Schooling: Christian and Muslim Engagements with Education in Africa

In recent years, religiously motivated schools have gained a new social and political visibility and presence in many African countries. While religious organizations – Christian as well as Muslim – have long played a central role in providing education in colonial and postcolonial settings, the dynamics of liberalization and privatization have opened up new opportunities for religious engagement at all levels of education. This panel asks how recently established forms of religious schooling have become embedded in shifting political, economic and social conditions, as well as in the ongoing reconfiguration of transnational funding arrangements that have come to shape Christian and Muslim involvements with education in various African countries. While the panel wishes to explore these questions particularly with respect to interreligious relations, it will also pay close attention to these issues with regard to specific religious or denominational engagements with schooling and how they are perceived by various actors (including students and teachers as well as government representatives and various religious organizations). Papers in the panel may deal with the issue of religious schooling from a historical perspective, or may focus on more recent changes in educational systems, exploring how religious actors use schooling as a means of repositioning themselves in relation to the state, market and society. In this regard, the panel addresses the multiple, often contested meanings, practices and institutional setups that have shaped, and been constituted in turn by, the field of “religious schooling” in the context of transnationally embedded reform processes and privatization.