Newman is an anthropologist of development. Her work focuses on critiquing colonialist assumptions and biases in development theory, policy, and practice, and proposing decolonial alternatives based on the worldviews, values, and struggles of people on the receiving end of colonialist hierarchies. Her areas of interest are policies relating to education, health, gender, migration, and the nexus between religion and development. Her geographic expertise is in Islamic West This paper contributes to decolonizing global health and development by exposing how coloniality in knowledge production informs dominant approaches to shifting social norms underpinning Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C) and child marriage. Major organisations in this field demonstrate systemic grandmother-exclusionary bias, namely side-lining grandmothers as change agents compared to adolescent girls, women of reproductive age, men and boys, and religious leaders. Grandmotherexclusionary bias stems from two assumptions: grandmothers do not influence FGM/C and child marriage; grandmothers only exert harmful influence and cannot change their views. These assumptions reflect Eurocentric constructions of modernity, and limited understanding of cultural contexts where seniority and dual-sex institutions confer authority on grandmothers in relation to sexual and reproductive health (SRH). Grandmother-exclusionary bias goes against evidence that grandmothers wield authority over these practices; insights from meta-evaluations and systems/socioecological approaches that social norms change requires engaging people who wield authority over those norms; and proof that grandmothers can lead change if engaged respectfully. Instead, I present the decolonial 'grandmother-inclusive' Girls Holistic Development programme in Senegal, developed by NGO The Grandmother Project. It uses cultural renewal and participatory intergenerational dialogue to both support grandmothers in shifting SRH-related norms and heal the damage Western modernity has inflicted on their communities.

Constructions of the 'educated person' in the context of mobility, migration and globalisationThis special issue showcases ethnographies with young people in the Global South which draw on the common conceptual umbrella of the 'identity of the educated person' to unpack novel intersections between mobility, migration and education in the context of globalisation. Overarching themes include how definitions of the educated person are shaped by diverse identity constructions and axes of difference, notions of discipline and hardship, and global discourses and concepts which travel across international space. Definitions of the educated person are contested through migration processes, and young people's agency within and beyond schools, through consumption practices and appropriation of popular culture.

No abstract

No abstract

Research on the effects of mass schooling on social cleavages in Africa ignores descent-based hierarchies despite their affecting 218 million people on the continent. In contrast, I show how pursuit of social mobility and honor to overcome descent-based discrimination underpinned Haalpulaar parents' and youths' engagement with secondary school in Senegal. This included youth developing a counter-culture oppositional to school values through appropriation of popular culture, a rarely documented outcome of EFA in the Global South. [secondary schooling, descent-based hierarchies, Senegal, identity, youth culture]School has done a lot to level these issues of caste. Anyone can be intelligent, even from an inferior caste. On the one hand, someone might think to himself, "Why, that person has succeeded, but he is supposed to be inferior to me!" While the person he is referring to says, "Well, why shouldn't I succeed?!" We also teach human rights, so that pupils know that they are equal.