Having a multidisciplinary education, Jean-Baptiste SOUROU is professor of Social Communications, researcher in Anthropology and African Cultures, and author of several analytic books and articles. He teaches in Europe, at the Gregorian University in Rome, and in Africa, at St Augustine University of Tanzania.
He is founder and president of “Cedres” NGO whose mission is the promotion of African cultures and societies through research, study, publications and training. He is currently working for the creation of a modern research and documentation center for this purpose: the CeDReS Project.
His research fields are rites, music, dance, corporeality, popular cultures, the influence of modern media on rituals. He also studies the relationship between media, culture and religion and the connection between theology and popular cultures.
He has also been working on the immigration field, especially the African immigrants who try to come to Europe: Italy and Spain through the Mediterranean Sea. Thousands of them die every year in their attempt to reach European coasts. His research concerns as well immigrant’s life and insertion in Italian society and the African Diaspora. He wrote among others an analityc book on this issue and it won the 2013 Award of Solidarity with Refugees at the International Media and Journalism Awards and the 2013 Best Writer Award at the Africa-Italy Excellence Awards.
Dr. Sourou is conducting fieldwork and studies on African cultures through East Africa, South Africa and West Africa. His last fieldwork has been done in Ghana, Togo and Benin. The project concerned rituals and music in African urban areas and it has been sponsored by the African Humanities Program (AHP) of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).
These researches earned him international awards.
He is a member of the International Society on Media, Religion and Culture and of the media, religion and culture study group of the International Association of Media, Religion and Culture. He is also a consultant for the Observatory on Media and Religion in Canada, and a member of the Steering Committee of the African Consortium for Law and Religion Studies (ACLARS).
After his studies in philosophy and theology in Assisi and Padua, he obtained his Master in theology at the Saint Bonaventure University in Rome.
He specialized in radio and newspaper journalism at the Gregorian University, and also received the prestigeous “Porticus” fellowship for research in Media, Religion and Culture which permitted him to obtain his PhD in Social Sciences discussing his thesis on the interface between the entertainment (story telling, music, dance, etc) in the oral African culture and its articulation into mediated, public mass communication: the interface of the religious oral language and religious media; how media pick up, articulate and “extend” the oral.
The AHP post-doctoral fellowship has enabled him to deepen his research. He continued his studies at Rhodes University in South Africa, extending his research to the University of Cape Town, the Western Cape University and to the University of Accra-Legon in Ghana.
He is an international media practitioner.
He speaks French, English, Italian, Spanish, Fon, Mina and Sahouè, and knows also Latin
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