publications

2025

1. ECOLIT

   The art of conquering without being right: Agency, education, and learning by doing in Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure

   Paul-Aarons Ngomo, Shourya Sen, and Leonard Wantchekon

   In Economics and Literature, 2025

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   We use Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s novel Ambiguous Adventure to engage literature in political economy on education and development in Sub-Saharan Africa. We contextualize the novel in terms of the broader historical literature on colonial education in Africa. In light of this, we argue for theorizing formal education as a supportive factor in processes of learning by doing. Such processes can promote innovation and facilitate local agency. We read the novel as a testament to Africans’ quest for self-assertion in adverse circumstances. At the same time, we problematize clear-cut distinctions between “African tradition” and the “modern West,” instead arguing that, learning by doing, Africans created uniquely African modernities. At the heart of our account is an understanding of agency as grounded in intersubjective environmental engagement. Building on these themes, we also argue that deliberative governance is another practice, with deep roots in some African communities as suggested by the novel, that speaks to intersubjective environmental engagement and learning by doing.

   @incollection{kane,
     title = {The art of conquering without being right: Agency, education, and learning by doing in Cheikh Hamidou Kane's Ambiguous Adventure },
     author = {Ngomo, Paul-Aarons and Sen, Shourya and Wantchekon, Leonard},
     editor = {Bourguignon, François and Dixit, Avinash K. and Leruth, Luc and Platteau, Jean-Philippe},
     booktitle = {Economics and Literature},
     year = {2025},
     publisher = {Routledge},
     doi = {https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003534358-5}
   }

2023

1. CER

   Education for control and liberation in Africa and among the Black diaspora

   Guilherme Lambais, Dozie Okoye, Shourya Sen, and 1 more author

   Comparative Education Review, 2023

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   We review research on the history of education policy in colonial sub-Saharan Africa and among the African Diaspora in the United States and Brazil through a political economy lens. While the supply of education was severely constricted in all of these cases, demand for education remained strong. Thus, even as authoritarian states have attempted to restrict educational supply for social control, the strength of the demand—and the accompanying pedagogical, organizational, and political innovations—illustrates the power of education to empower marginalized communities. Through reviewing work in economics, history, and political science, we highlight the transformative effects of formal education in Black communities as well as the centrality of Black people in demanding access to higher education and innovating new political ideas and pedagogies that saw education as a force for liberation. Governments and citizens must continue to work to correct the inherited distortions in the supply of education in Black communities in Africa as well as in the diaspora.

   @article{educa,
     title = {Education for control and liberation in Africa and among the Black diaspora},
     author = {Lambais, Guilherme and Okoye, Dozie and Sen, Shourya and Wantchekon, Leonard},
     journal = {Comparative Education Review},
     volume = {67},
     number = {4},
     pages = {861--883},
     year = {2023},
     publisher = {The University of Chicago Press Press},
     doi = {https://doi.org/10.1086/726617}
   }

2021

1. CJE

   Fishing rights and colonial government: institutional development in the Bengal Presidency

   Shourya Sen, and Richard Adelstein

   Cambridge Journal of Economics, 2021

   Abs DOI Bib

   We examine the evolution of fishing rights in colonial Bengal through a series of cases heard at the Calcutta High Court in the 1880s and culminating in the passage of legislation in 1889.We posit an implicit relational contract between the colonizing British and the landowning class in colonial Bengal as a way to understand the concurrent evolution of fishing rights and institutions of governance in the region.The system of incentives created by this contract determined the development of fishing rights at a crucial moment in the history of colonial Bengal and, more broadly, became a primary mechanism of institutional change in the region.The analysis also shows the High Court to have acted, albeit in vain, as a truly independent judiciary; had its resolution of the cases prevailed, the institutional development of the region might have been substantially different than it was.

   @article{senadelstein,
     title = {Fishing rights and colonial government: institutional development in the Bengal Presidency},
     author = {Sen, Shourya and Adelstein, Richard},
     journal = {Cambridge Journal of Economics},
     volume = {45},
     pages = {313--331},
     year = {2021},
     publisher = {Oxford University Press},
     doi = {10.1093/cje/beaa053}
   }