Current research on transnational families considers information communication technologies (ICTs or new media) central to sustaining familial ties but also highlights that abilities to stay connected are not the same for all members of transnational families. Previous studies have focused mainly on how migrant parents communicate with their children at origin or on adult migrant children interacting with their parents at ‘home’; hence, the perspectives of youth are missing. Young people take an active part in transnational communications and thereby co-shape transnational relations. Moreover, studies have focused mostly on ‘old’ ICTs such as phone calls, and most recently, Facebook and Skype. As ICTs continually change, we also need to look at new technologies that enable long-distance sociability, giving young people more room for manoeuvre. We address these gaps by investigating how young people who live in Ghana employ WhatsApp to engage with their migrant parents. We show that youth are agentic herein and devise various strategies to experience a sense of being together across geographical distance.
Literature on the effects of parental migration on the education of children who stay at origin, what we call 'stayer' youth, mainly focuses on educational outcomes without looking at the process leading to such outcomes. This article addresses this gap by showing how the educational trajectories of stayer youth unfold. Stayer youth may encounter a range of obstacles and interruptions to their education when their parents move overseas, and we explore the agency these youth exert and the support networks they activate to try to overcome them. We employ a youth-centric methodology, based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in three cities in Ghana, with young people whose parents migrated internationally. We find that frequent changes in residence, limited financial means, and lack of academic support cause interruptions in educational trajectories. In response, the young people mobilize support from local social networks to compensate for what they lack from their transnational connections.
Many youth in Global South countries, whose parents have migrated abroad while they have stayed, i.e., “stayer youth,” also aspire to migrate. While the current literature depicts stayer youth as “waiting” to emigrate, connoting passivity, recent critical youth studies suggest the importance of centring young people’s agency when focusing on their aspirations and experiences. This article investigates how stayer youth in Ghana “pace” their migration aspirations while “waiting.” By observing how youth change their aspirations over time, we first distinguish between different aspirations according to when youth first aim to migrate. Second, we “follow” stayer youth after their secondary school graduation to understand how they seek to fulfil their migration aspirations and the strategies they adopt therein. We use ethnographic data from 38 Ghanaian “stayer” young people. Our analyses show that stayer youth adapt their decision‐making when they realise some misalignment between their migration aspirations and capabilities. By analysing their adaptation strategies, we emphasise stayer youth’s agency despite structural forces confining them to what has been called “waithood.”
IntroductionWith the emergence of transnational migration studies in the 1990's, migration studies became involved in showing how migrants maintain transnational connections through money and non-monetary philanthropic contributions in their origin countries. However, there is little evidence about the interconnections between different forms of migrants' philanthropy and how they are developed and sustained over time across international borders.MethodsThis work investigates individual and groups transnational philanthropy and shows how migrants become involved in these forms of philanthropy, highlighting some changes therein over time. We relied on fifty semistructured interviews and six focus group discussions conducted with Ghanaians in the Netherlands, Italy and Germany.Results and discussionOur thematic analyses confirm that transnational migrant philanthropy is about fulfilling certain “moral obligations,” to derive a sense of belonging “here” (destinations) and “there” (origins). In performing the self, religious or culturally imposed sense of responsibility for human welfare and institutional development in the home country, Ghana, involved migrants overcome some challenges. For transnational migrant philanthropy to sustain itself, studied migrants think origin country governments must take necessary steps to remove structural obstacles like tedious procedures for clearing philanthropic goods at the ports and harbors. Involved migrants also suggested a need for a more organized platform to collect relevant information on potential beneficiary needs for their preparations to “give back” to their homeland.
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