Anneke Newman is an anthropologist interested in the nexus between religion and development, and policies relating to education, gender, and health.

She is passionate about decolonial theory, and is therefore committed to critiquing conceptual frameworks and power hierarchies in knowledge production that underpin the reproduction of colonialist hierarchies, and asserting alternative standpoints and ways of knowing which reflect the perspectives of people on the receiving end of these hierarchies.

Her monograph ‘Decolonising education in Islamic West Africa: Secular erasure, school preference and social inequality’ (Routledge, 2025) explores such questions and time to develop the book’s theoretical argument was generously supported by an INSBS Early Career Mentoring Grant. Anneke shows how colonialist stereotypes about religion, Islam and Islamic education are reproduced within academic scholarship and development policy. Instead, she proposes a set of decolonial principles for informing research, policy-making and programme design to enable educational pluralism in ontologically diverse contexts.

Anneke is a Senior Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Conflict and Development Studies at the University of Ghent, and has held research and teaching posts at the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie des Mondes Contemporains at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sussex where she received her PhD in 2016.

Recent work supported by INSBS grant

Book Publication: https://www.routledge.com/Decolonising-Education-in-Islamic-West-Africa-Secular-Erasure-School-Preference-and-Social-Inequality/Newman/p/book/9781032000442?srsltid=AfmBOopuYvx0KQxUJEW96OfH_OSiAUF0bt6yY_l3P0woJITZyEQt2MVB

Presentations at Seminars:

Seminar on Anthropology of the Sahel at the Institut des Mondes Africains in Paris, France.

Seminar on Race-religion research at the University of Radbout Nijmegen, Netherlands.