The objective of this seminar is to explore culture as a space for generating significance and meaning, but also as an agent for social transformation. Through the several possibilities for information and reconfiguration of the imaginary that it provides, culture has an impact on reality, its perception and therefore on social practices. In its broadest sense, culture is approached here as a space for renegotiating social consensus, social norms, but also a place for a disconnection, reshaping and renewal.

The concept of the imaginary will be explored as well as its relation with artistic practice. If culture can be seen as a set of sociological and anthropological features that define a given social group, it will also be tackled in this seminar as a set of products of the intellect which require creativity; it can also be linked to the training of the mind and the production of symbolical meanings: scientific, artistic and literary culture, arts and various ways of filling time…

About Felwine Sarr

Felwine Sarr is a Senegalese scholar and writer born the 11th of September 1972 in Niodior, in the Saloum islands. After studying Economics at the University of Orléans, he taught at the University Gaston Berger of Saint-Louis from 2007 onwards. In 2009 he obtained the agregation in Economics. In 2010, he was awarded the prize Abdoulaye Fadiga for research in Economics. In 2011, he became dean of the Economics and Management faculty of the University Gaston Berger of Saint-Louis, and head of the new faculty of Civilizations, Religions, Arts and Communication (CRAC) of the same university and for which he was in charge of the implementation. His lectures and academic research focus on economic policies, development economy, econometrics, epistemology and the history of religious ideas. He is also a writer and has published to date Dahij (Gallimard 2009), 105 Rue Carnot (Mémoire d’Encrier 2011), Méditations Africaines (Mémoire d’Encrier 2012) and Afrotopia (Philippe Rey 2016) which is an essay wherein he appeals to a conceptual decolonization and a reappropriation of the metaphors of their future by Africans. As a musician, he has published three musical pieces thus far: Civilisation ou Barbarie (2000), Les Mots du Récits (2005) and Bassai (2007).