Overview

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.

Towards this end, Anneke is working on a monograph to be published with Routledge in which she critiques secular bias in social scientific theories of preference for faith-based schooling. Instead, thanks to an INSBS Early Career Mentoring Grant, she is developing a decolonial theoretical framework for understanding educational decision-making in ontologically plural contexts. Anneke is a Senior Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Conflict and Development Studies at the University of Gent, 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.