Producing Morality: How Ghanaian Youth Navigate Learning and Life-Making Amid Socio-Ecological Crisis

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 9:50 am Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Meaning-Making and Purpose in Youth Development (Table 1)

Abstract

As youth across Sub-Saharan Africa grapple with ongoing and intensifying socio-ecological and geo-political crises, this paper considers how ‘crisis’—as reality and as discourse—is moralized across core educational spaces that Ghanaian youth participate in. Drawing on 2 years of ethnographic research across schools, churches, and family systems, the paper examines the moral discourses that frame youth lives, such as narratives of laziness versus entrepreneurial spirit. It discusses how youth navigate these spaces and the moral philosophies—neo-liberal, Judeo-Christian, indigenous—they uphold.

A study of youth as they experience and learn about crisis across diverse learning spaces offers a critical, interdisciplinary analysis of the logics of knowledge production, teaching and learning, and new ways of understanding youth sense-making, experience, and action amid precarity and crisis.

Author

• Yaa Oparebea Ampofo, University of Wisconsin - Madison