Louise De La Gorgendière

Biography

Louise de la Gorgendière, Associate Professor in Anthropology, arrived at Carleton University in July 2001. Immediately after graduating from Cambridge University in 1993 with her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology, she held a dual academic-consultancy post in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, where she was based until 2001. Her teaching and research have focused on development and underdevelopment, HIV/AIDS in Africa and women’s rights, the social anthropology of Asante, contemporary ethnopolitics in sub-Saharan Africa, education and development, and more recently, on the Ghanaian diaspora in Canada. During the period of 1993-2001 in Edinburgh, Louise served as a Social Development Adviser for the U.K. Department for International Development (DFID). She also has carried out consultancies for the International Labour Organization and United Nations Development Program (ILO/UNDP) – (in Cote d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Uganda, Zambia, Cameroon, Nigeria, Mali, Burkina Faso), and in 2000, she was appointed by DFID (UK) and the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MAE, Paris) to serve as their social development-gender specialist for a final evaluation of the French Project to Support Basic Education in Burkina Faso. She is currently conducting research with members of the Ghanaian diaspora in Canada, and their links to development in Ghana. She has supervised a number of M.Sc., M.A. and Ph.D. theses on Africa.

Research Interest

Research and Teaching Interests: Diaspora; transnationalism; development and underdevelopment; Sub-Saharan Africa; Ghana; education; HIV/AIDS; ethnopolitics.