James Esson

You have to try your luck: male Ghanaian youth and the uncertainty of football migration

The migration of male African youth within the football industry—particularly cases involving human trafficking—has become a subject of academic and political interest. This paper contributes to work on this topic and to literature on the agency of youth in the urban Global South by turning the academic gaze away from European actors and settings, and towards their African counterparts. Drawing upon research conducted in Ghana, the paper reveals how youth perceive migration through football as a solution to the socioeconomic uncertainty and life constraints facing them in neoliberal Accra. This perception is tied to broader representations of spatial mobility as a precursor for social mobility. Youth attempt to achieve spatial mobility through football by ‘trying their luck’, a form of social navigation that is used to mediate the uncertainty associated with this strategy for realizing spatial change. Through illustrating why youth want to be spatially mobile and how they attempt to do so through football, this paper demonstrates why studies of African football migration need to engage better with how conditions inside the football industry interact with those beyond it.

Youth in motion: spatialising youth movement(s) in the social sciences

‘Youth in Motion: Spatialising Youth Movement(s) in the Social Sciences’ was a one-day interdisciplinary workshop convened by the University College London (UCL) Youth Geographies Research Group on Thursday 16 June 2011. The workshop attracted an international audience with participants from institutions in France, Finland, Italy, Canada and Australia, as well as around the UK. Although all attendees worked with youth in an academic context, many were also experienced youth work practitioners. Our primary objective was to provide an opportunity for social scientists working with youth in a diverse range of disciplinary contexts to consider how research accommodates the notion of movement(s) when exploring the spaces, places and everyday experiences of young lives. In this brief report, we aim to present some of the key themes that emerged over the course of the workshop and connect these with recent work asking ‘where next?’ for geographical research with youth...

Reforming a university during political transformation: a case study of Yangon University in Myanmar

ABSTRACT Since 2010, Myanmar has been transitioning from an authoritarian military regime towards a parliamentary democracy. Several education policies have been launched as part of this political transformation process, including the reform of Myanmar’s flagship higher education institution, Yangon University. This article investigates the reform of Yangon University. Through so doing, we examine a key node in Myanmar’s higher education system, and contribute to academic debates over higher education reforms in countries undergoing political transformations. The article draws on qualitative data obtained from stakeholders involved in the reform of Yangon University, and uses Arnhold et al.’s ‘educational reconstruction framework’ to conceptualize the reform process. It is argued that while improvements have been made to the physical infrastructure, there has been a failure to consider the ideological and psychological reconstruction of the university, which staff and students alike deem essential to transforming long standing authoritarian practices, and creating a constructive learning environment.

The divergence between acceptability of municipal services and urbanization in developing countries: insights from Accra and Sekondi-Takoradi, Ghana

Abstract In most developing countries, the provision of municipal services and infrastructure invariably fails to match the pace and demands of urbanization. The outcome is often increased informality due to improper planning, official bureaucratic barriers and perhaps insufficient and shrinking public resources, which then makes leveraging private capital for public service provision imperative. Drawing on in-depth qualitative fieldwork in two Ghanaian cities, this paper aims to extend literature on the divergence between service provision and urbanization in developing countries. More specifically, it attempts to qualify recent macro-level data indicating that access to water, sanitation and electricity services in Accra and Sekondi-Takoradi is improving substantively. Contrary to dominant policy narratives circulating in Ghana, we illustrate how the acceptability of key municipal services within urban settings is often inadequate, and how acceptability is tied to spatial and temporal factors. We then identify and examine the reasons underpinning these variations. Through exploring residents’ perceptions of key services, and examining critically the possibility and feasibility of meeting urban service needs through leveraging private resources, this paper contributes to broader academic debates over urban service provision, while also feeding into contemporary policy discussions concerning how to achieve several of the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.

Spatial and social transformations in a secondary city: the role of mobility in Sekondi-Takoradi, Ghana

Abstract Existing research on urban Ghana mainly focuses on processes occurring within the country’s major cities, thereby reproducing a trend within the social sciences to overlook the role of intermediate and secondary cities. This paper aims to address this shortcoming by exploring spatial and social transformations in Sekondi–Takoradi, one of Ghana’s secondary cities and the metropolitan area serving the region’s emerging rubber industries as well as the country’s oil and gas economy. Using qualitative interviews conducted with residents in five of the city’s neighbourhoods, and a modified version of Kaufmann’s typology of mobility, we examine migration into Sekondi–Takoradi, residential mobility within the city and the daily mobility of the city’s residents. The paper highlights how these diverse forms of mobility interact with processes taking place both within and outside Sekondi–Takoradi, most notably influencing and being influenced by livelihood strategies. It is argued that the city and its hinterlands can best be envisaged as a mobile networked whole, rather than consisting of disconnected and compartmentalized locales. The paper thus contributes to broader debates on how mobility shapes urbanization by providing new empirical data on events unfolding in Africa’s secondary cities, and extends existing research by providing a counter-narrative to literature that examines the city and its surrounding rural areas separately.

Children’s rights and the regulations on the transfer of young players in football:

Children who interact with football’s recruitment and transfer processes encounter a complex web of regulations and practices. Debates over how to ensure that the interests and well-being of young football players are adequately protected, and that risks to their rights and welfare are identified and addressed, have become a topic of academic, political and media concern. This commentary article provides an overview of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) regulations concerning the mobility and representation of minors in player recruitment processes, in particular the Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Players and the Regulations on Working with Intermediaries. We examine these regulations through the lens of the United Nations Children’s Rights Conventions (UNCRC). In so doing, the article demonstrates how football’s regulatory frameworks and commercial practices inadvertently yield consequences that operate against the best interests of children involved in the sport. To counteract this, it is proposed that all planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of regulations involving the recruitment and transfer of young people should be explicitly informed by globally accepted standards of children’s rights, such as the UNCRC. More specifically, it is argued that FIFA should adopt an approach that places the child at the centre of regulatory frameworks and characterises the child as a ‘rights holder’.

Football as a vehicle for development: lessons from male Ghanaian youth

This chapter uses recent interest in the challenges male African youth face as they try to become professional footballers as a way to contribute to geographical research on the agency and resourcefulness of young people in the Global South. It does so by using football as a lens, and Ghana as a case study, to explore how processes at a variety of geographical scales are understood and put to use by male Ghanaian youth as part of entrepreneurial strategies to improve their life chances through football. The overarching argument is that contrary to the socialist early independence era, the Ghanaian football industry is now a hub of financial speculation centred on the export of young players to foreign leagues. Male Ghanaian youth are shown to influence the current state of play in two key ways. Some view owning an amateur football club and trading youth players on the international transfer market as an entrepreneurial venture. Meanwhile others are joining clubs to become Foucauldian ‘entrepreneurs of self’ in the form of a professional footballer. The strategies for life making these two sets of atypical entrepreneurs employ are shown to emerge from their engagement with wider social understandings of development as achievable through the deployment of individual autonomy.