Point Sud, in cooperation with Northern universities and research centers, educates African graduate students predominantly in social anthropology, while graduate students from the Global North are provided access to a top-level international research setting. Besides the regular courses and fieldwork training for African scholarship holders, Point Sud organises a field school in Mali every two years in collaboration with the Goethe-University in Frankfurt/Main. This fieldwork training brings together graduate students from Frankfurt with their Malian counterparts from the University of Bamako who then conduct joint field research. Furthermore, the institute hosts the Point Sud Annual Institute (PSAI), an international summer school for young researchers, that is organised collaboration with its academic and financial partner institutions.
Regular Training for African Scholarship Holders
The general objective of the regular training is academic capacity building on the side of the African scholarship holders. The aims of the training are:
- to study the theory and practice of socio-scientific research methods,
- to analyse and write academic texts,
- to conceptualise and formulate individual research programs,
- to ameliorate their linguistic proficiency in English.
The training is open not only to Point Sud scholarship holders but also to graduate students of the department of social and human sciences at the University of Bamako and to other Malian institutions.
The lecturers are researchers of Point Sud and the University of Bamako, as well as highly renowned visiting scholars from abroad. Over the years, these have included Anil K Gupta (Indian Institute of Management, Vastrapur, Ahmedabad), Peter Mark (Wesleyan University), Carola Lentz (University of Mainz), Dolores Koenig (American University, Washington, DC), Kassim Koné (State University of New York), Katja Werthmann (University of Mainz), Tilo Graetz (Free University of Berlin), Dr Jan Jansen (University of Leiden), and many others.