1,726,742 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
Frutas vermelhas: implantação das culturas de amora-preta, framboesa e mirtilo no estado de São Paulo.
No full textO cultivo de frutas vermelhas – como a amora-preta, a framboesa e o mirtilo – tem se destacado entre os agricultores de diversas regiões do Brasil, estando em expansão no estado de São Paulo, onde o Projeto Frutas Vermelhas SP, executado pela CATI, oferece suporte e orientação técnica aos produtores, bem como mudas com garantia de qualidade pelo seu departamento CATI Sementes e Mudas
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
Transnational Migration and the Commodification of Elder Care in Urban Ghana
No full textOver the past twenty years, organizations to provide commercial nursing services, mainly to the sick and debilitated elderly, have sprung up in Accra, Ghana. This article assesses the degree to which transnational migration has generated social changes in aging at the level of everyday practices. It argues that a range of social actors differently involved in transnational migration has created and sustained a market for home nursing agencies in Ghana through diverse processes involving the imagination of care work abroad, complex negotiations between the elderly at home and their anxious children abroad, increased financial resources among the middle class, and the evaluations of Western elder care services by return and current migrants. These dynamics illustrate the complexity of the role of transnational migration in generating social change and highlight the significance of the needs of local families and the role of the imagination in shaping social remittances from abroad.Peer reviewed
Not a Nurse, Not Househelp: The New Occupation of Elder Carer in Urban Ghana
No full textAs Ghana goes through a demographic transition, in which people are living longer and with long-term, chronic diseases (de-Graft Aikins et al 2012), families are experiencing a growing strain in caring for their elderly and frail members. Reciprocities across the generations are changing (Aboderin 2006, Apt 1996, Dsane 2013). There is a growing demand for elder care providers to supplement the direct care of kin busy with work and school in Ghana and abroad. Middle-class households in urban and peri-urban areas tend to use the labor of househelp and fostered adolescents for this purpose, while wealthier households and middle-class urban households with access to migrant remittances increasingly turn to carers hired through commercial nursing agencies, who supplement the work of househelp and fostered adolescents and work alongside them in households. Thus, changes in ageing in Ghana have generated a new, emergent occupation: the elder carer. Although the occupation is modeled after its counterpart in the United Kingdom and other Western countries, I argue that it is understood in relation and opposition to recognized social roles in Ghana, in particular those of daughter, househelp, and nurse.Peer reviewe
Educating an African Leadership: Achimota and the Teaching of African Culture in the Gold Coast
No full textFounded by the British colonial government in the Gold Coast in the 1920s, Achimota was an elite school which signaled the commitment of the colonial government to the provision of education and the concomitant belief in education’s role in managing the future of the nation. This study explores the contradictions of the school in which “African culture” was used to substitute for anglicized activities, lessons, and entertainments. Within the dominant western frame of Achimota, “African culture” had to be transformed and reified. The practices of the school were the result of interaction between the differing expectations of colonial officials, “traditional experts” brought in to teach customs and arts, local intelligentsia, expatriate and African teachers, and the students themselves. Achimota therefore provides a lens on the nuances and tensions within the colonial enterprise in Africa.Peer reviewe
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