Visiting researcher
January to June 2026
Ma-Woury CISSE is a citizen researcher and filmmaker. Born in Nantes to parents from Senegal, she grew up in the working-class neighborhood of Malakoff, at the heart of multicultural commons shaped in everyday life primarily by women, particularly those from Nantes “who came from elsewhere.”
Her involvement in community work began in 2007 as vice-president of the association Les Chibanis, which supports aging migrants and isolated elderly people, and advocates for the de-freezing of pensions for former soldiers from ex-colonies. In 2011, during the food crisis affecting the Horn of Africa, she founded the Association for the Fight Against Hunger in Africa (ALFA), which organized a roundtable in 2012 on food security issues in collaboration with the Lascaux program, then in residence at the IEA. That same year, she co-founded, in her neighborhood, the association Ambitions Jeunesses, dedicated to educational success, development, and access to culture for children, as well as supporting families in their parenting. Since then, she has mentored many young people individually in their academic and professional paths.
From 2014 to 2017, she served as a municipal councillor in Nantes, responsible for international cooperation, human rights, and the monitoring of community life. In this role, she notably welcomed figures such as Nicéphore Soglo, Frankétienne, Angela Davis, Maryse Condé, Doudou Diène, and Ali Moussa Iye as part of the commemorations of the abolition of slavery. It was in the course of this position that she became aware of the lack of archives on the history of African diasporas in Nantes, and of the need to document these trajectories before the first generation disappears.
Her professional career, pursued alongside this work, combines international cooperation, CSR, and diversity management. She holds a Master’s-level degree in strategic marketing from Rennes School of Business and a Master’s degree in international development cooperation from the Faculty of Law and Political Science at the University of Montpellier.
She currently leads a hybrid production company, closely linked to her research-creation work.
Diaspo'Roots, or Diasporic Intangible Commons: Memory, Transmission, and Working-Class Territories
This research-creation project explores and documents the intangible commons created and sustained by African diasporas—shared resources made up of narratives, knowledge, relationships, and practices that migrant communities build, maintain, and pass on across generations.
Taking as its starting point the experiences of members of the Senegalese diaspora in Nantes since the 1970s, the project aims to expand to other African diasporas and, in a second phase, to develop a transcultural approach rooted in the Malakoff neighborhood of Nantes. This area, marked by significant diversity, has long been a space where, prior to urban renewal projects, forms of neighborhood solidarity were woven among families of diverse backgrounds—solidarities that themselves constitute a common.
The project is structured around several interconnected questions. How have women of the Senegalese diaspora created, maintained, and transmitted cultural and social commons in Nantes? How have these practices, in interaction with those of other actors, shaped the diasporic experience across generations?
More broadly, the project seeks to examine the ways in which these shared resources are constructed, maintained, and resisted, particularly in the face of processes of erasure accompanying socio-economic and urban transformations.
Diaspo'Roots proposes a dialogue between contemporary theories of the commons, African philosophies, and grassroots experiences, in order to conceptualize diasporic commons not as an imported model, but as practices already at work in the lived trajectories of the women and men concerned.
The methodology combines a qualitative research approach—based on the collection of narratives and archives—with a transmedia form of writing that brings together theoretical production and sensitive, experiential restitution.
Particular attention is given to women’s voices. The project embraces a consciously grassroots perspective: giving the microphone to those who have never had it, and developing modes of transmission suited to future generations.
