Producing Morality: How Youth Navigate Learning and Life-Making Amid Socio-Ecological Crisis in Ghana (Poster 21)

• In Event: AERA Promising Scholarship in Education Research: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research
  In Invited Poster Session: AERA Promising Scholarship in Education Research: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research Poster Session

Abstract

This ethnographic study examines how moral narratives about crisis are deployed, taught, and contested across educational spaces in Ghana. Drawing on fieldwork across family networks, religious spaces, and schools, the research reveals how institutions mobilize moralizing discourses to explain crisis, assign responsibility, and prescribe proper conduct. Through an African feminist ethical lens that emphasizes the contextualization of morality within power relations, agency and responsibility, the study analyzes how institutions frame crisis through different moral lenses (indigenous values, Christian frameworks, and neoliberal ideologies). The findings illuminate how moral education amid crisis reveals tensions in intergenerational relations and institutional authority, with implications for how educational spaces engage with youth perspectives on socio-ecological challenges.

Author

• Yaa Oparebea Ampofo, University of Wisconsin - Madison