Director
About
Les Ateliers de la Pensée is an initiative of Achille Mbembe and Felwine Sarr. They bring together researchers, writers, philosophers, politicians, professors, etc. These ones are invited to come together to take up the theoretical initiative and to take a pluralistic look at the realities of the African continent and the futures it gives itself from a place: Africa.
These guests are first gathered in workshops to reflect, debate, test their respective proposals, try to bring about a reflection enriched by the contributions of one another in a space of debate for this purpose. Thereafter, public meetings are organized, where dialogue allows us to grasp its concerns, but also the great request for social intelligence emanating from it. Les Ateliers de la Pensée are a free platform to promote the enunciation of plural speech. They allow to revive the project of a critical thought which would draw its strength and originality from humanities meetings, disciplines of the imagination and arts of life.
Les Ateliers de la Pensée first edition was held in October 2016 in Dakar and Saint-Louis, and brought together some thirty speakers. The second edition will take place from 1 to 4 November 2017 in Dakar, and will bring together some fifty speakers. The 2017 edition of Ateliers de la Pensée has as general theme: Planetary condition, plastic writing and logic of circulation. The thematic axes will be: decolonization and circulation of knowledge; the purposes of the Economy; employment, work and value; writing and plastic thinking; Africa in the air of the Anthropocene; Afro-feminism and decolonial thinking; culture and renewal imagination; borders, nationalism and migration; digital worlds; mental infrastructure; planetary condition; Afro-declinations (Afrotopia, Afropolitanism, Afropeism, Afrofuturism, Afropessimism); the universal, the specific and the common; democracy crisis and pre-colonial political models; rationality figures and endogenous knowledge; urban futures; new afro-diasporic flows; demography and strength of numbers; race, minorities, Islam.