Decolonising Education in Islamic West Africa is grounded in an ethnography of educational decision-making in northern Senegal which shows how young people struggled to obtain an Islamic education – due to a policy landscape shaped by Eurocentric and secular biases on the one hand, and local inequalities based on gender, caste and socioeconomic status on the other.

However, this case study also serves as a springboard to expose the epistemic hierarchies within academic and development spaces concerned with educational engagement. Decolonial theory is mobilised to combine the strengths of African studies with the more applied disciplines of comparative education/development studies - but also provides a critical frame for challenging epistemic biases in both of these fields.