Project aim: AN will draft a chapter titled “The prayer economy and situated perceptions of economic utility: understanding preference for Qur’anic schools” as part of a monograph titled “Decolonising education in Islamic West Africa: Cultural politics of religion, gender, and school preference”. Research questions: According to development actors in Senegal, versus parents and youth, what is the economic utility of secular education compared to that of Qur’anic schooling? What factors explain the differences in perceptions between these two groups? What are the implications of these divergent logics for theories of school preference and education policy? Need for the project: This chapter responds to calls from postcolonial scholars that we uncover and challenge Euro/American-centric biases in scientific models of religious behaviour. This chapter addresses this in relation to preference for religious education, using the example of Islamic schools in Senegal. Throughout the Islamic world, Qur’anic schools – teaching memorization of the

Summary: Life in contemporary African settings involves negotiating personal and religious values, which may influence attitudes towards science. Using a subset of yet-to-be-determined African countries, this study will investigate: How values vary across and within countries and regions (e,g, West, East and South) in sub-Saharan Africa How these values may be influenced by religious beliefs The relationship between values and religion and concerns about/attitudes towards Our World versus My World (self) The analysis will be informed by social and cultural psychological perspectives about science and belief. We will use data from the World Values Survey (WVS) – a multi-country database that explores people’s values and beliefs, their stability or change over time and their impact on social and political development of the societies in different countries of the world for our empirical Investigation. This project will contribute to the literature on science and belief in the African context. Project deliverables

Summary: Knowing and believing in contemporary African settings involves negotiating traditional, religious, and scientific influences. This study will investigate narratives about knowing and believing inherent in proverbs of the Akan of Ghana (West Africa). The analysis will be informed by psychological perspectives about knowledge and belief. Using a compendium of 7015 Akan proverbs- the largest collection of Akan proverbs to date, I will conduct a thematic analysis of the proverbs to identity narratives and/or patterns of knowledge-seeking and believing inherent (both implicitly and explicitly) in Akan proverbs. Some of the questions that will be used to drive this exploratory analysis are: what forms of knowing, believing, etc are inherent in Akan proverbs? Given the importance of communal values, to what extent are social ways of knowing addressed in Akan proverbs? What psychological principles related to knowledge and cognition are highlighted in Akan proverbs? This project will contribute to the literature