D. O’Kane “Dynamic Systems Theory, the Anthropology of Policy and their Application in Sierra Leone”

In this talk I discuss certain aspects of the anthropology of policy, the subdiscipline of anthropology that deals with policy as a culturally and socially embedded phenomenon, and also about the ways in which dynamic systems theory may be relevant to its concerns. In recent years, I have worked on the development of Sierra Leone’s first private university, the University of Makeni. This is the Sierra Leonean contribution to the wave of private universities that has swept across Africa since the 1990s, and it represents both continuity and discontinuity between Sierra Leone’s past and today. I have published on this university from a number of perspectives, including those of ‘audit culture’, and ‘social entrepreneurship’, and I discuss these in this talk: I also talk about my most recent publication and current publication and research plans. The former dealt with language policy at the University of Makeni, which I used as a means of discussing the possible applications of dynamic systems theory to theories