Children’s (Im)mobilities: The Effects of Transnational Migration on Children’s Circulation in Ghanaian Households
The Center for Mobilities Research and Policy will host a lecture by Dr. Cati Coe as part of the Mobilities Visiting Speaker Series, on Monday, November 8, 2010 from 6 to 8 p.m. in the Paul Peck Alumni Center (32nd and Market Streets).
In Ghana, children, like adults, are often mobile, visiting a variety of different households and changing their residence often. As in the Caribbean, many children live with adults other than their parents, such as with a grandmother, uncle or family friend. Often, children move from poorer to richer households in situations sometimes seen as mutually beneficial and at other times as exploitative. International migration of parents and other relatives, however, changes children’s patterns of mobility. Despite their wealth relative to their relations back in Ghana, international migrants are more likely to leave behind or send back their children to live with relatives than to bring their relatives’ children to live with them, as would be expected. This lecture explores the residential mobility of children vis-a-vis adults; how their residential mobility is linked to their relative status, power and relationships and what such mobility or immobility means in how the joys and costs of raising children are distributed between households and across the globe.
Cati Coe, associate professor of anthropology at Rutgers University-Camden, has written on children and Ghana and examined how children understand nationalist projects, as presented in school. She has also published The Dilemmas of Culture in African Schools, Nationalism, Youth and the Transformation of Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 2005). Her latest project, supported by the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, explores the effects of international migration on Ghanaian family life. Coe has been involved in editing two collections on the topic of children, youth and international migration to be coming out this year.
The Mobilities Visiting Speaker Series is a forum for leading scholars invited by the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy to present new research in the fields of mobilities research, tourism studies, migration and border studies, mobile communications, new mobile media and related interdisciplinary areas.This lecture is open to the entire Drexel community and invited guests from the region. Refreshments will be served. For more information, email Dr. Mimi Sheller at mimi.sheller@drexel.edu.
