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Understanding students’ cynicism and engagement in a Ghanaian university
Get PDFStudents’ expectations about university life and the impact of their unmetexpectations on the university experience are exceedingly complex phenomena inmuch of today’s higher education enterprise. Given the enormous challengesuniversities face as the number of students increases, university management andadministrators require information to shape students' expectations about variousaspects of their university's education experience. This study explored StudentCynicism (SC) and its relationship with Student Engagement (SE) at the Universityfor Development Studies (UDS). We collected valid data from 435 undergraduatestudents enrolled in health science and non-health science programmes andanalysed them using non-parametric test techniques. The results indicate that SCand SE are inversely related. Also, students studying health science-relatedprogrammes were found to be more cynical than their non-health sciencecounterparts. Furthermore, overall cynicism was higher among students in Level300 than in other year groups. The practical implications of the study, its limitations,and directions for future research are discusse
“Food before pressure”: Food and food culture in Muslim inner-city in Maamobi-Accra since the 1980s
Get PDFThe goal of this paper is to analyse the cultural eating patterns and values, health beliefs, and nutritional practices and how Muslims review their dietary practices shape social relations in a Muslim inner-city of Maamobi, Accra-Ghana since the 1980s. I choose the 1980s as timeframe because the period marked the economic and political morasses in Ghana that came along with local and global religious resurgence. This necessitated the residents’ incorporation of food for social cohesion and expression of we-feeling as coping strategies. The paper argues the function of food is because food is not just a substance that is eaten for its nutritional values, but a culturally nuanced substance that communicates deeply embedded socio-cultural and political issues. Thus, attention is paid to how men and women deploy food as a negotiating tool to formulate identity, destabilise unequal gender norms, press home their needs, and express conjugal love. More importantly, I explore how food serves as a means of forging religious ecumenism in a community that is increasingly becoming religiously plural. The paper also discusses the effect of globalisation in enhancing the mutability of food cultures in the Maamobi community. In all this, deploying the tools of ethnographic research techniques of in-depth interviews with residents in the community, my own immersion as a resident of the community for more than three decades, and cultural idioms of food pathways, the paper contributes to the growing literature on food cultures in Africa and across the world
National security implications of the Ghanaian basic school timetable
Get PDFThis paper used data from ethnographic school–based research to discuss the national security implications of the school timetable as a regulatory device. The data were collected from interviews with a critical case sample of 15 students, school–based non–participant observations and document analyses. The data were analysed using critical discourse analysis. The main arguments developed shows the social regulatory effects of the timetable inheres national security risks, including decontextualising citizens and traducing the developmental externalities of formal education. The violent enforcement of the timetable creates two groups of citizens: a) an authoritarian group of national leaders and; b) a docile group of followers, who are unable to support a culture of participatory democracy. The regulation of knowledge production results in: a) the disparagement of Indigeneity by privileging the use of foreign language to the consistent disadvantage of local language; b) the devaluation of citizenship education resulting in the development of citizens with no proper sense of civic commitment and identity as well as social cohesion and national trust. These serious risks require that the Ghanaian nation takes a more critical look at education policy making and curriculum reform
GHANA’S REBELLIOUS CIVIL SOCIETY AND DEMOCRATIC CONSOLIDATION: A CRITICAL ASSESSMENT OF #FIXTHECOUNTRY MOVEMENT
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Just as many countries in Africa and the developing world, Ghana’s response to the “third wave” of global democratization process in the late 1980s resulted in the 1990s political liberalization, democratic transition, and the current efforts towards democratic consolidation. Along all these chains of democratic processes spanning three decades (1992 to 2022), various civil society organizations have played instrumental roles within the nation’s public sphere. Using #FixTheCountry movement as a case study, this paper explores the role of civil society in Ghana’s efforts towards democratic consolidation. In highlighting the impact of civil society on Ghana’s democratic processes, the study relies mainly on secondary information from the official website of #FixTheCountry movement, media publications, and government reports, among others. The study concludes that despite their radical posture, particularly the constant attack on Ghana’s 1992 constitution, #FixTheCountry movement has expanded the frontiers for youth activists and other dissident groups within the political system to demand democratic accountability from members of the political class.
Women and the Christian Missionary Encounter in the Jos Plateau Area of British Nigeria: Nil
Get PDFWomen were assigned domestic duties within the European Christian enterprise, of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in Africa. As such, Christian women were trained in the art of ‘domestic science’ and ‘devout domesticity’. European Christian women who conveyed this gendered role to Africa were expected, not only to fulfil this mandate by being good Christian wives and mothers but, to impart the knowledge and skills that they possessed on African Christian women converts. Despite the gendered roles assigned to women, in the Christian missionary enterprise of the late period of European rule in Africa, a dominant perspective in the scholarship of the encounter argues that women participants did not restrict themselves to the domestic functions that were given to them. This perspective further argues that Christian women surpassed their gendered social expectations, of being good wives and mothers, by selectively deploying their agency in ways that both made sense to them and gave them a sense of fulfilment as individuals and as groups.2 This work supports this assertion by drawing on examples, from the functions that different categories of Christian women participants carried out, in the Christian missionary encounter that occurred in sub-Saharan Africa as a whole and the Jos Plateau area in particular during the period of British rule in Nigeria