898 research outputs found
Growing Up and Going Abroad: How Ghanaian Children Imagine Transnational Migration
No full textMigration scholars should pay attention to migration as seen through children’s eyes for at least two reasons. For one, children’s perspectives help us understand whether children are being socialized into their community’s culture of migration, a culture which shapes migration patterns and flows. Secondly, given that some children migrate and some children are left behind by migrant parents or relatives, children’s imaginings of whether they as children ought to migrate affects where the responsibility and costs for their care will be located, between family members, countries, and states. This paper examines how children aged 10-18 in a town in southern Ghana imagine life abroad, conceptualize the timing of migration in their lifecourse, and articulate their goals in migrating as a case study for exploring these larger issues.Peer reviewe
How Debt Became Care: Child Pawning and Its Transformations in Akuapem, the Gold Coast, 1874-1929
No full textStudies of slavery in Africa have noted the persistence of those relations in different forms, such as through pawning, allowing social changes in power, status, and wealth to be weathered more gradually. As pawning itself became less frequent, did other kinds of relationships take its place? Some scholars have argued that pawning was folded into marriage and fatherhood, others that there are continuities with fosterage and domestic servant arrangements today. This paper examines the question of pawning’s transformations in Akuapem, a region in southeastern Ghana involved in forms of commercial agriculture that were heavily dependent on slave labour and the capital raised by pawning. Ultimately, it argues that debt became key to fatherhood and fosterage relations between children and adults, changing from a short-term exchange to more lifelong reciprocal relations of care.Peer reviewe
Mediating death: the unsung skills of home care workers
No full textRecorded May 29, 2019 in Montgomery County, Maryland
The Education of the Folk: Peasant Schools and Folklore Scholarship
No full textThe history of intellectual interaction in the 19th and early 20th centuries between scholars of vernacular culture and educational reformers remains a lacuna in the discipline of folklore. This examination of educational reforms brought on by the introduction and spread of schooling for peasant children raises issues of how folklorists should intervene and how to judge the complicated effects of those interventions.Published as Coe, Cati. "The education of the folk: peasant schools and folklore scholarship." Journal of American Folklore, Winter 2000, Vol. 113, Issue 447, p. 20-43. © 2000 by the American Folklore Society.Peer reviewe
Cultural Capital and Transnational Parenting: The Case of Ghanaian Migrants in the United States
No full textWhat does cultural capital mean in a transnational context? In this article, Cati Coe and Serah Shani illustrate through the case of Ghanaian immigrants to the United States that the concept of cultural capital offers many insights into immigrants' parenting strategies, but that it also needs to be refined in several ways to account for the transnational context in which migrants and their children operate. The authors argue that, for many immigrants, the folk model of success means that they seek for their children skills, knowledge, and ways of being in the world that are widely valued in the multiple contexts in which they operate. For Ghanaian migrants, parenting includes using social and institutional resources from Ghana as well as the United States. The multiplicity and contradictions in cultural capital across different social fields complicate their parenting “projects” and raise questions about the reproduction of social class through the intergenerational transmission of cultural capital.Peer reviewe
Oral History Interview, Merton Barry (514)
No full textIn his 1997 interview, Merton Barry recounts his time as a student during the 1940s, and also his time as a professor of general engineering and director of international engineering programs spanning 1955-1988. To learn more about this oral history, download & review the index first (or transcript if available). It will help determine which audio file(s) to download & listen to.In his 1997 interview, Merton Barry recounts his time as a student during the 1940s, and also his time as a professor of general engineering and director of international engineering programs spanning 1955-1988. Barry initially attended UW-Wausau but transferred to UW-Madison into the college of engineering. He mentions how taking an art class helped him with his engineering drawings, and earned him his position as a drawing instructor. He describes his transfer out of the COE and into the School of Education’s applied art program. He served in WWII, and the GI bill paid for his art education in Zurich. Upon returning to the UW, he graduated with an MS in applied arts. He speaks about his receiving of the Fulbright Scholarship after finishing his master’s degree, and his position teaching descriptive drawing in the COE a few years after finishing his PhD. He discusses UW’s experimentation with distance learning, his appointment as a part time administrator of the AID Engineering Educational Development program in India, and his later acceptance of the position as the COE’s international programs director. He details the Monterey tech program in Mexico, the Adian Development Bank project in Surabaya, the experiences of Indonesian exchange students at UW, the Indonesian General Participant Training 2 Program, and engineering programs in Egypt and Brazil. He also speaks about his time on an advisory committee to UNESCO. This interview was conducted for the College of Engineering Series of the UW-Madison Archives and Records Management Oral History Collection
The enchantment of neoliberal education: a healthcare certificate, youth aspirations, and an elusive adulthood in Ghana
No full textIt is well-known that contemporary African youth struggle to attain adulthood, associated with a middle-class status. However, less often discussed are the mechanisms by which that marginality is produced. In particular, I argue that the changing role of the state in relation to the middle class affects young people’s precarity. I explore a healthcare certificate offered by private schools in Accra, Ghana as an example of those changing relations. Based on ethnographic research in a healthcare assistant school and the private healthcare market, and longitudinal research with the graduates of the school, I use Bourdieu to analyse the contradictory, confusing role that education plays in contemporary Accra in generating enchantment among young people for an adulthood that proves elusive.Peer reviewe
Translations in Kinscripts: Child Circulation Among Ghanaians Abroad
No full textThe regulation of African migration by states has important implications for the family life of migrants and their children. Poor working conditions and restrictive immigration regimes in Fortress Europe promote migrants’ reliance on fosterage and the circulation of their children into other households.
In Ghana, fosterage has been significant historically in enabling women’s urban migration and in broadly distributing the benefits, tasks, and costs of parenting among kin and non-kin (namely educated, urban residents). Some transnational migrants were fostered in their childhoods by older siblings, their parents’ siblings, teachers, or grandparents for the purposes of their education or to assist in household work, or because a parent had died. Transnational migrants draw on these practices and understandings of fosterage to balance family responsibilities and their labor migration when they go abroad.
Western governments have a different understanding of parenting as a singular (not distributed) relationship and as primarily biological, although legal substitutions of biological parents are possible in cases of abuse, neglect, orphanhood, or parental desire to give up the child. These understandings of parent-child relationships are encoded in legal mechanisms governing immigration, welfare, and social protection. Ghanaian practices of fosterage are not recognized by European states, nor are relationships with adult siblings or the children of siblings seen as significant. Western states thus short-circuit some of affective circuits that fosterage enables. These different understandings of family result in transformations in how migrants participate in their familial affective circuits. Furthermore, they generate tensions in the emotional and political belonging of migrants’ children.
This chapter explores three examples of the ways that Western familial models and legal arrangements impinge on Ghanaian practices of fosterage, the attempts by Ghanaian migrants to translate fosterage to Western parenting institutions in response, and the emotional outcomes of these translations. The first case concerns Mario Balotelli, Italian soccer star and child of Ghanaian immigrants. His parents’ poor living conditions resulted in his fosterage and ultimate adoption by an Italian family. I examine the conflicting understandings of parenting and fosterage presented in newspaper accounts in light of my ethnographic research in Ghana. Secondly, I examine the case of a girl left behind by migrant parents to Italy who stayed with her grandmother and was emotionally connected to her. When she joined her parents in Italy, in her own words, she forced herself to love them because they were her parents, undergoing a more wrenching experience than those fostered with grandmothers in Ghana who later join their parents. Finally, I examine the case of a Ghanaian immigrant who tried to adopt (through international adoption procedures) her nephews, first in the U.S. and then in the U.K., after her mother’s death.
These cases reveal how the state regulation of African migration deeply affects Ghanaian migrants’ relationships with their children and with the children of their siblings. As a result, their children’s sense of political belonging, familial obligation, and emotional connection is also affected. In the conclusion, I will explore the larger implications—-for citizenship and rights--of these blockages in affective circuits.Peer reviewe
Turning an Event into Fieldnotes: A Ghanaian Example
No full textThis video uses the author's own field recordings from Ghana to instruct undergraduate and graduate students how to write ethnographic fieldnotes.File is a zipped .RM (RealMedia) video file, and may not play on all devices. File must be downloaded, unzipped, and used on a compatible media player
What is Love? The Materiality of Care in Ghanaian Transnational Families
No full textIn the West, economics and intimacy are assumed to occupy separate – even antithetical – domains. In Ghanaian family life, however, affection is understood to be expressed through the distribution of material resources across generations and a person’s life cycle. Such an understanding of love means that migrant parents who leave their children behind in Ghana can continue to be good parents by sending remittances, and, in fact, may be considered better parents than caregivers who stay and are poorer. This construction of love also means that children tend to attach themselves to more financially secure caregivers over those with fewer economic opportunities — to men in favour of women, to those abroad over those in Ghana. It is precisely because love is signaled through material exchanges that children long to be with parental migrants far away who support them and feel abandoned by those parents who do not. The intertwining of economic and emotional ties in Ghanaian transnational families has significant implications for policy, as discussed in the conclusion.Peer reviewe
- …
