Dr. Mouhamed Abdallah Ly

Visited the IAS from June to July 2023

Dr. Mouhamed Abdallah Ly is Senior Research Fellow in Language Sciences at the Institut Fondamental d'Afrique noire (Cheikh Anta Diop University, Dakar). He is currently Head of the Social Studies Laboratory and Editor-in-Chief of the Bulletin de l'IFAN Ch. A. Diop, série B: Sciences Humaines. Although he did his doctoral thesis in Language Sciences (Montpellier III), the fields of knowledge he draws on in his work are sociolinguistics, discourse analysis and ecolinguistics. Using words, discourses and languages as a starting point, he attempts to grasp linguistic attitudes, conflicts of meaning and representation, and discursive positions in relation to religion, migration, decolonial thought, ecolinguistic approaches and new digital speech spaces. The common thread running through his varied research interests is the desire to understand language through the social, and the social through language.

Thanks to BIGSAS, he spent ten days at the University of Bayreuth in the summer of 2023, doing research and giving a lecture. He described his stay as “scientifically fruitful”. He said he was “fascinated” by BIGSAS's multi-disciplinary and inter-sectoral approach, which brings together specialists from several social science disciplines and several African fields, and who speak several African languages, while welcoming a number of African researchers, including many doctoral students. In his view, BIGSAS has created a “knowledge ecosystem” on Africa, enabling us to study complex issues that require a concerted, cross-disciplinary approach from a variety of humanities and social sciences perspectives.