2134/24181
Christian Ungruhe
Christian
Ungruhe
James Esson
James
Esson
A social negotiation of hope: male West African youth, ‘waithood’ and the pursuit of social becoming through football
Loughborough University
2017
Football
Ghana
Masculinity
Social mobility
Youth transitions
Waithood
Earth Sciences not elsewhere classified
2017-02-20 14:13:26
Journal contribution
https://repository.lboro.ac.uk/articles/journal_contribution/A_social_negotiation_of_hope_male_West_African_youth_waithood_and_the_pursuit_of_social_becoming_through_football/9481241
This paper examines the present-day perception among boys and young men in
West Africa that migration through football offers a way to achieve social standing
and improve one’s life chances. More specifically, we use the case of aspirant young
Ghanaian footballers as a lens to qualify recent conceptualizations of African youth,
such as ‘waithood’, which have a tendency to overlook the multifarious attempts and
visions of young people on the continent to overcome social immobility. Drawing on
various and long-term ethnographic fieldwork among footballers in urban southern
Ghana between 2010 and 2016, we argue that young people’s efforts to make it
abroad and ‘become a somebody’ through football is not merely an individual
fantasy; it is rather a social negotiation of hope. It is this collective practice among a
large cohort of young males – realistic or not – which qualifies conceptualizations of
youth transitions such as ‘waithood’. By this, we highlight how examining the
contemporary fusion of sport with a desire to migrate furthers our understandings of
social mobility for West African youth, and extends literature on the strategies used
by young people in the region as they try to bypass the structural barriers blocking
their path to ‘becoming a somebody’.