Dieynaba Ndiaye

Dr. Dieynaba Gabrielle Ndiaye is an Assistant Professor of Social Psychology in the Department of Psychology at Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar, Senegal. Her research focuses on meaning-making, social representations, community life, social solidarity, collectivism and individualism, consumerism, social exclusion, and well-being. Her work examines how social and cultural contexts shape human relationships, poverty, and experiences of inclusion and exclusion, with particular emphasis on Senegalese society and African communities. She has published on solidarity networks, consumerism and the dehumanization of poverty, wealth and social relationships, and the psychology of meaning-making. Alongside her research, she teaches social psychology, community psychology, research methods, and statistics, and contributes to academic and professional development in Senegal. She holds a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Virginia, USA.

Overall, my research has been on meaning-making. My graduate work focused on the cognitive processes involved in meaning-making and on the consequences of meaning-making for emotion regulation. 

When I moved back to Senegal after graduate school, three observations contributed to reshaping my research: (1) economic pressures (poverty, neoliberalism, consumerism, materialism) were impacting values, relationships, and lifestyles in Senegal. (2) Traditional collectivist values still enabled people to rely on one another to face those economic pressures, as captured in the Wolof saying nit, nit ay garabam (man is man’s remedy). (3) Nonetheless, social safety nets are increasingly under strain: there are fewer resources to go around and changes in meaning (the meaning of relationships, of consumer goods, of the “good life”, of happiness), are encouraging more individualistic and consumeristic behaviors. 

Since I began working at the University of Dakar, I have been interested in the interplay between meaning, practices, economic context and culture. On the one hand, I have researched examples of collective practices that ease the burden of economic pressures such as women’s savings groups, fab labs, commoning initiatives. On the other hand, I have examined how neoliberalism and the consumer society can threaten human-centeredness in collectivist countries such as Senegal. For instance, I have conducted research showing that dating relationships are often portrayed as transactional and not based on care in contemporary Senegalese TV series. In a review article, I have 1explored how in consumer society, the poor are systematically dehumanized because social esteem may depend on conspicuous consumption. 

Currently, my research focuses on social representations (theory, processes, methods, impact on economic and cultural practices). According to Jodelet (1993, p. 36)1, social representations are a form of knowledge that is socially created and shared, that serves a practical purpose (meaningmaking, shaping of practices and behaviors, strengthening of group identity), and that contributes to the construction of a shared reality for a social group. Although social representations theory has not garnered much interest in American social psychology, it has gained a strong footing in European social psychology and, to some extent, in francophone African social psychology. 

This theory is appealing for several reasons. (1) Social representations provide a powerful window into the thinking system of a social group, when approaches to meaning that I have studied under American social psychology tend to be more individualistic or focus on inter-individual processes. (2) Social representations provide a more integrated account of meaning when other approaches (attitudes, prototypes, stereotypes, etc.) tell us about meaning but in a more fragmented way. (3) There have been great methodological developments in the study of social representations which includes textual statistics, ethnography, experimental methods, similarity analysis, dictionary analysis, discourse analysis, etc. (4) Social representations provide a flexible framework which can be applied to different areas of interest. This has practical advantages for the training of master’s students in African universities where social psychologists are rare. (5) There is an existing network of African psychologists who prioritize this approach, which has encouraged fruitful collaborations.