Aminata Diaw

Aminata Diaw Cissé (24 May 1959 – 14 April 2017) was a Senegalese lecturer and political philosopher who taught at the Cheikh Anta Diop University (UCAD). Influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and her academia background, she wrote about citizenship, civil society, democracy, development, ethnicity, gender, globalisation, human rights, identity, nationality and the state in an African and Senegalese context by using a political insight. Diaw worked for the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), Bellagio Study and Conference Center of the Rockfeller Foundation, National UNESCO Sub-Commission on Social Sciences and Humanities, West African Research Association, the National UNESCO Sub-Commission on Social Sciences and Humanities and the Philosophical and Epistemological Research Center of the Doctoral School Studies.

Biography Diaw was born on 24 May 1959 in Saint-Louis, Senegal, the former capital of the country, and attended the local Lyceé Amet Fall school. She passed her baccalaureate with the highest honours of Mention Bien aged 19 in 1977 and left Senegal to study in France. Diaw enrolled at the Lycée Paul Cézanne preparatory school in Aix-en-Provence and earned a diplôme d'études universitaires générales in philosophy. Diaw finished her studying with a postgraduate diploma and dissertation on the theory of conflicts of the political thinking of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which earned her the Très Bien distinction from the jury by a unanimous decision. She was one of the first Senegalese women to teach philosophy at the university. In 1988, Diaw authored Rousseau et la Révolution française: â propos de la théorie de I'État and L'autorité du Souverain ou le pari de la liberté chez Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Du refus du modéle á l'invocation d'autorité: Rousseau et Montaigne two years later. a Pan-African academic research organisation, which was published by Feminist Press in New York. Diaw supported women's rights through being secretary general of the National UNESCO Sub-Commission on Social Sciences and Humanities (COSEF), and was a member of the Senegalese Women Association of University Graduates and African Women Workers Network. On 3 May 2018, a second tribute for Diaw was hosted by three faculty members at a conference room in UCAD organised by its rectorate, the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences, its Department of Philosophy, the Directorate of Cultural and Scientific Animation and the UCAD Foundation.