Yaa Oparebea Ampofo

YAA AMPOFO, then a graduate student at University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, was granted funding in April 2022 to aid research on “An Exploration of Ghanaian Youth’s Experiences of Human-Earth Relations, Ecological Knowledge and Environmental Change,” supervised by Dr. Nancy Kendall. Amidst intensifying crises marked by climate change, socio-ecological degradation, pandemics, economic instability, and geopolitical disruptions, and guided by the experiences of youth navigating these rapid changes, this ethnographic study explores how Ghanaian youth experience and learn about crisis, socio-ecological change, and human-planetary wellbeing as they move across the institutions and learning spaces that make up daily life; and how they situate their needs, responsibilities, and future livelihoods within these understandings. Through community and institutional mappings, extensive interviews, participant-observations, and focus group discussions with 15 focal youth participants, this study examines: 1) how core institutions associated with youth education (family, schools, religious institutions, and workplaces) socialize youth about crisis, socio-ecological change, and human-planetary wellbeing; 2) how youth make sense of and respond to these efforts in relation to their daily experiences; and 3) how youth generate knowledges and actions that may offer new hope to their survival and thriving. A study of how youth learn across diverse spaces offers a critical, interdisciplinary analysis of knowledge production, teaching, and learning, and new ways of understanding sense-making, experience, and action. The project challenges pervasive colonialist approaches that overdetermine the importance of schooling and overlook youth agency in knowledge generation. It informs how we might imagine radically different and decolonizing pedagogies and policies that support youth in generating alternative, hopeful livelihoods and futures, for themselves and the planet.