James Esson
Biographic Data
| ID | 249060 |
|---|---|
| NAME | James Esson |
| GIVEN NAMES | James |
| FAMILY NAME | Esson |
| SIGNATURE | ESSON J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Loughborough University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7076-5119 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 450 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Reimagining the Politics of Citation Through Critical Curation
This paper examines citational politics as a site through which erasure and silencing are reproduced in academic publishing. Bringing together insights from art curation and geography, it reimagines academic citation as a form of critical curation that fosters more deliberate, generous and grounded citational practice. To this end, the paper outlines six curatorial principles for reorienting approaches to citation and offers role‐specific prompts…
It Is a Team Game: Safeguarding Leads’ Experiences of Implementation Within Football Member Associations
Interpersonal violence is now widely acknowledged as a key concern throughout sport. In response, governing bodies have started to introduce safeguarding strategies. One such example is the FIFA Guardians programme, which aims to introduce stronger safeguarding measures throughout global football. The programme includes nominated learners from FIFA’s 211 Member Associations completing the FIFA Guardians Safeguarding in Football Diploma. There is …
Citational Politics in Transactions
Short Abstract From now on, authors writing in Transactions will no longer be expected to count their reference lists within the 10,000‐word limit. In this editorial, we take the opportunity to lay out the reasons behind this decision, encouraging prospective authors to critically reflect on how they cite, and highlighting the role of journals, reviewers, and editors in moving towards more inclusive citational practices
Later life mobilities at the margins of urban geography
The projected increase in older people within the African population, alongside rapid urbanisation, points to the growing importance of understanding how older people navigate towns and cities across the continent. This aligns with wider concerns that geographical scholarship needs to pay more sustained attention to ageing in Global South contexts. Rather than treating these developments as problems or absences, we approach them as opportunities …
Informal waste pickers in Africa: Social reproduction, marginalisation and sustainability
Africa’s rapid urbanisation is overwhelming formal waste management systems, necessitating reliance on informal systems to manage growing volumes of municipal solid waste. This paper explores the contributions, challenges, and lived experiences of informal waste pickers in African cities across four themes: sustainable communities, systemic marginalisation, social reproduction, and occupational hazards. It examines how waste pickers, through thei…
Visualising an undergraduate geography field class using generative AI: Intent, expectations and surprises about the racial depiction of students
This commentary reflects on an attempt to use ChatGPT to generate an image for a geography textbook. We explore why the image that was produced provoked surprise and intrigue and think through how our reactions revealed ingrained assumptions about educational spaces. Our discussion highlights the importance of intentionality in prompt design and offers a reminder of how seemingly neutral prompts can reproduce dominant narratives. We conclude by p…
Critical geographies of professional careers: Contributions to the Spatial Turn in the Social Sciences
This article discusses research on critical geographies of professional careers to contextualise and introduce the special issue contributions that develop this emerging field from different geographical, sectoral, and sociocultural perspectives. Aiming to expand on the spatial turn in the social sciences, we focus on the spatially sensitive themes of career mobilities and networks and career structures and environments. These themes are analysed…
Obligatory return migration and the career aspirations of Nigerian Commonwealth Scholars
This paper examines the experiences of Nigerian Commonwealth Scholars, in the context of post-colonial migration management regimes, to enliven scholarship on the migration-development nexus. It does so by adopting an approach that integrates debates over ‘brain gain’ and ‘brain drain’ with theoretical discussions concerning the migration aspiration-ability continuum. Findings from our qualitative dataset extend these debates by introducing the c…
Israel’s war on Gaza and the violation of children’s rights
The current intensification of Israel’s on-going war on Gaza has killed over 25,000 people in less than four months; half of them children. Nearly 60,000 people have been injured, almost all civilians, and many of them children (UNICEF). Many more thousands are missing beneath the rubble caused by the 25,000 tonnes of explosives that have been dropped on Gaza since October 7, equivalent to two nuclear bombs. The IPC has reported that the entire p…
Gaza: A decolonial geography
This commentary addresses three objectives: (1) to situate and contextualise the ongoing military assault on Gaza within longer colonial histories in Palestine; (2) to collate resources that can equip geographers—specialist and non‐specialist, academic and non‐academic—with resources to build decolonial politics on Palestine–Israel; and (3) to contribute to discussions on what we, as geographers, can do to support Palestinian calls for liberation…
Producing international students: Migration management and the making of population categories
International student mobilities (ISM) is an important but increasingly complex and controversial topic. Politically, the contested nature of international student mobilities is driven by the confluence of immigration policies, increasing demand for global education, and new higher education funding imperatives. Academically, international student mobilities is a key field of study which intersects with three subdisciplines of geography: politica…
AI literacy in geographic education and research: Capabilities, caveats, and criticality
Concerns about runaway artificial intelligence (AI) - including large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT - are at the forefront of contemporary political, social, and scientific discourse. This commentary provides a first look at ChatGPT's capabilities and limitations in supporting geographic research, critical thinking, learning, and curriculum development. We assessed ChatGPT's geographic knowledge, synthesising abilities, and potential for ex…
Women's transnational migration through football: Possibilities, responsibilities, and respectability in Ghana
The growth of girls' and women's football in Africa, coupled with increased professionalisation in Europe and the United States, has led to rising international migration of African female players. This trend reflects the longer standing culture of independent, transnational migration among African women since the late 1980s and of enlarged possibilities and responsibilities triggered by neoliberal reform across the continent. This article explor…
Care for Transactions
In this editorial we ask key questions about what it means to publish ‘a journal’ in a world of publishing which is driven by individual article metrics and online access. Seeing the value of journals as venues for intellectual debate, we therefore set out a renewed vision as to how the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers can provide space for more collective and collaborative approaches to geographical debate. This approach revo…
Way‐finding agendas through Transactions
This is the first in a series of occasional editorials in which we guide our readers through groups of papers that we consider to be ‘way‐finding’ contributions to geographical debates. Our emphasis on ‘way‐finding’ and navigating through scholarly work engages a tension we identified around Transactions ' remit of publishing so‐called ‘landmark’ papers which are likely to stimulate and shape research agendas in Geography. We use this editorial a…
African football migration: Aspirations, experiences and trajectories
Playing the victim? Human trafficking, African youth, and geographies of structural inequality
This article explores the role of agency in determining who is and is not considered to be a legitimate victim of human trafficking. It draws on critical human trafficking scholarship and research on the life chances of West African youth. This is complemented by qualitative data from youth embroiled in football‐related human trafficking. The insights from these analyses are brought into conversation with theoretical work on the geographies of co…
Navigating old age and the urban terrain: Geographies of ageing from Africa
This paper extends research on geographies of ageing in relation to urban academic and policy debates. We illustrate how older people in urban African contexts deploy their agency through social and spatial (im)mobilities, intergenerational relations and (inter)dependencies. Through doing so, we reveal how urban contexts shape, and are shaped by, older people’s tactics for seizing opportunities and navigating the urban terrain. Our analysis demon…
Boys are tired! Youth, urban struggles, and retaliatory patriarchy
Research in geography and allied disciplines on gendered experiences in Africa have struggled to comprehend the nuances that make up young men's lifeworlds. Influenced by theoretical orientations in urban studies, which demonstrate how music offers a way to explore social dynamics in Africa, we examine the thoughts, actions, and experiences of male youth in Ghana using Guru's popular song “Boys abrƐ [Boys are tired].” Drawing on interviews and fo…
Anti‐racist learning and teaching in British geography
This special section illustrates how learning and teaching in UK higher education reinforces, but can potentially also help to counteract, racism. This introduction provides some context for this intervention and provides an outline of key themes that emerge from the collection of papers. We use these themes to sketch out three guiding principles for the incorporation of explicitly anti‐racist praxis in our learning and teaching within British Ge…
The why and the white”: Racism and curriculum reform in British geography
This article intervenes in recent debates over the whiteness of the higher education geography curriculum. Focusing on UK‐based universities, I examine the why and the white in the question “Why is our geography curriculum so white?” It is argued that the answer is coloniality‐induced institutional racism. I propose that engaging with insights from critical race theory, social justice and decolonial scholarship could help British geography to mor…
Geographies of youth, mobile phones, and the urban hustle
Geographers have shown how mobile phones are transforming urban economies in Africa by altering the temporal and spatial nature of commercial transactions. Less well documented is how young people in Africa are using mobile phones to navigate the interplay between personal hopes, social expectations, and financial uncertainty associated with urban life. Drawing on qualitative data from youth in two Ghanaian cities, and insights from literature on…
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 Internationa…
Rights, Risks and Responsibilities in the Recruitment of Children within the Global Football Industry
This paper examines children’s engagement with the increasingly global and commercialised football industry. By combining a Global Production Network approach and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child it is argued that, for children’s rights and best interests to be better upheld and realised within the football industry, regulatory conditions need to account for geographical contextuality and incorporate scope for children to …
Migration, housing and attachment in urban gold mining settlements
Mining settlements are typically portrayed as either consisting of purpose-built housing constructed by mining companies to house their workers, or as temporary makeshift shelters built by miners working informally and inhabited by male migrants who live dangerously and develop little attachment to these places. This paper contributes to these debates on the social and material dynamics occurring in mining settlements, focusing on those with urba…
The 2017 RGS‐IBG chair's theme: Decolonising Geographical Knowledges, or Reproducing Coloniality
The theme for the chair's plenaries at the 2017 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) ( RGS ‐ IBG ) Annual Conference is ‘Decolonising geographical knowledges: opening geography out to the world’. This commentary explains why this pursuit of critical consciousness via decolonial thinking could do more harm than good. We show how the emphasis on decolonising geographical knowledges rather than structures, instituti…
A body and a dream at a vital conjuncture: Ghanaian youth, uncertainty and the allure of football
This article investigates the rationale leading growing numbers of West African males to pursue a career in professional football, by taking the particular case of male youth in Accra and exploring how and why they are drawn into the football industry. Football is used as a lens to extend contemporary geographical debates over the agency, resourcefulness and entrepreneurialism of young people residing in the Global South. The transition from juni…
Gaza: A decolonial geography
This commentary addresses three objectives: (1) to situate and contextualise the ongoing military assault on Gaza within longer colonial histories in Palestine; (2) to collate resources that can equip geographers—specialist and non‐specialist, academic and non‐academic—with resources to build decolonial politics on Palestine–Israel; and (3) to contribute to discussions on what we, as geographers, can do to support Palestinian calls for liberation…
Better Off at Home? Rethinking Responses to Trafficked West African Footballers in Europe
This is an Open Access article published by Taylor & Francis distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http:// \ncreativecommons.org/Licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, \nprovided the original work is properly cited
Escape to victory: Development, youth entrepreneurship and the migration of Ghanaian footballers
This article contributes to contemporary debates over the resourcefulness and entrepreneurialism of young people in the Global South by exploring the relationship between development and the migration of male youth within the football industry. Drawing on fieldwork in Accra, the paper reveals how young Ghanaians attempt to enact development as freedom through spatial mobility. Significantly, this is coupled with an awareness that their desired sp…
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 …
Livelihoods in motion: Linking transport, mobility and income-generating activities
Relational geographies of human trafficking: Inequality, manoeuvring and im/mobility across space and time
This paper demonstrates why and how a fuller geographical perspective extends contemporary scholarship on human trafficking within and beyond the discipline. We employ a relational approach and draw on in‐depth qualitative research with trafficked persons and a range of stakeholders in Slovakia and the United Kingdom ( UK ), to depict how the processes underpinning human trafficking are non‐linear and operate instantaneously at multiple intersect…
The why and the white”: Racism and curriculum reform in British geography
This article intervenes in recent debates over the whiteness of the higher education geography curriculum. Focusing on UK‐based universities, I examine the why and the white in the question “Why is our geography curriculum so white?” It is argued that the answer is coloniality‐induced institutional racism. I propose that engaging with insights from critical race theory, social justice and decolonial scholarship could help British geography to mor…
We built this city’: Mobilities, urban livelihoods and social infrastructure in the lives of elderly Ghanaians
Spatial and social transformations in a secondary city: The role of mobility in Sekondi-Takoradi, Ghana
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 …
Geographies of youth, mobile phones, and the urban hustle
Geographers have shown how mobile phones are transforming urban economies in Africa by altering the temporal and spatial nature of commercial transactions. Less well documented is how young people in Africa are using mobile phones to navigate the interplay between personal hopes, social expectations, and financial uncertainty associated with urban life. Drawing on qualitative data from youth in two Ghanaian cities, and insights from literature on…
Navigating old age and the urban terrain: Geographies of ageing from Africa
This paper extends research on geographies of ageing in relation to urban academic and policy debates. We illustrate how older people in urban African contexts deploy their agency through social and spatial (im)mobilities, intergenerational relations and (inter)dependencies. Through doing so, we reveal how urban contexts shape, and are shaped by, older people’s tactics for seizing opportunities and navigating the urban terrain. Our analysis demon…
The divergence between acceptability of municipal services and urbanization in developing countries: Insights from Accra and Sekondi-Takoradi, Ghana
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 c…
Care for Transactions
In this editorial we ask key questions about what it means to publish ‘a journal’ in a world of publishing which is driven by individual article metrics and online access. Seeing the value of journals as venues for intellectual debate, we therefore set out a renewed vision as to how the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers can provide space for more collective and collaborative approaches to geographical debate. This approach revo…
Playing the victim? Human trafficking, African youth, and geographies of structural inequality
This article explores the role of agency in determining who is and is not considered to be a legitimate victim of human trafficking. It draws on critical human trafficking scholarship and research on the life chances of West African youth. This is complemented by qualitative data from youth embroiled in football‐related human trafficking. The insights from these analyses are brought into conversation with theoretical work on the geographies of co…
Anti‐racist learning and teaching in British geography
This special section illustrates how learning and teaching in UK higher education reinforces, but can potentially also help to counteract, racism. This introduction provides some context for this intervention and provides an outline of key themes that emerge from the collection of papers. We use these themes to sketch out three guiding principles for the incorporation of explicitly anti‐racist praxis in our learning and teaching within British Ge…
Migration, housing and attachment in urban gold mining settlements
Mining settlements are typically portrayed as either consisting of purpose-built housing constructed by mining companies to house their workers, or as temporary makeshift shelters built by miners working informally and inhabited by male migrants who live dangerously and develop little attachment to these places. This paper contributes to these debates on the social and material dynamics occurring in mining settlements, focusing on those with urba…
Reforming a university during political transformation: A case study of Yangon University in Myanmar
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 contr…
No point worrying? Potential undergraduates, study-related debt, and the financial allure of higher education
As of September 2012, the undergraduate tuition fee cap at English universities was raised from £3375 to £9000 per annum. This article explores the rationales underpinning prospective students' decision whether or not to apply to higher education following the fee increase, specifically, how this decision is influenced by perceptions of study-related debt and expected earnings. The article draws on data obtained from prospective undergraduates in…
Boys are tired! Youth, urban struggles, and retaliatory patriarchy
Research in geography and allied disciplines on gendered experiences in Africa have struggled to comprehend the nuances that make up young men's lifeworlds. Influenced by theoretical orientations in urban studies, which demonstrate how music offers a way to explore social dynamics in Africa, we examine the thoughts, actions, and experiences of male youth in Ghana using Guru's popular song “Boys abrƐ [Boys are tired].” Drawing on interviews and fo…
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 Internationa…
Youth in motion: Spatialising youth movement(s) in the social sciences
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Children's Geographies on 26th March 2013, available online: http://wwww.tandfonline.com/10.1080/14733285.2013.779840
Israel’s war on Gaza and the violation of children’s rights
The current intensification of Israel’s on-going war on Gaza has killed over 25,000 people in less than four months; half of them children. Nearly 60,000 people have been injured, almost all civilians, and many of them children (UNICEF). Many more thousands are missing beneath the rubble caused by the 25,000 tonnes of explosives that have been dropped on Gaza since October 7, equivalent to two nuclear bombs. The IPC has reported that the entire p…
AI literacy in geographic education and research: Capabilities, caveats, and criticality
Concerns about runaway artificial intelligence (AI) - including large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT - are at the forefront of contemporary political, social, and scientific discourse. This commentary provides a first look at ChatGPT's capabilities and limitations in supporting geographic research, critical thinking, learning, and curriculum development. We assessed ChatGPT's geographic knowledge, synthesising abilities, and potential for ex…
African Soccerscapes: How a continent changed the world's game
The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) Soccer World Cup, recently held in South Africa, attained such elevated social prominence that it was not only a sporting spectacle for billions of fans. It also appeared to function as a catalyst for a plethora of publications concerning the African continent, and its complex affinity with the ‘beautiful game’. From amidst this clamour Peter Alegi's African Soccerscapes diligently emer…
Youth in motion: Spatialising youth movement(s) in the social sciences
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Children's Geographies on 26th March 2013, available online: http://wwww.tandfonline.com/10.1080/14733285.2013.779840
Securing the Future of Higher Education in England
This article reviews the IPPR commissioned report ‘Securing the Future of Higher Education in England’. It is argued that the report identifies key shortcomings in contemporary higher education policy, and develops some important recommendations for shaping the sector in the future. However, several of the proposed recommendations would create new divisions in the sector and reinforce existing ones. Moreover, the report maintains and reproduces t…
A body and a dream at a vital conjuncture: Ghanaian youth, uncertainty and the allure of football
This article investigates the rationale leading growing numbers of West African males to pursue a career in professional football, by taking the particular case of male youth in Accra and exploring how and why they are drawn into the football industry. Football is used as a lens to extend contemporary geographical debates over the agency, resourcefulness and entrepreneurialism of young people residing in the Global South. The transition from juni…
Escape to victory: Development, youth entrepreneurship and the migration of Ghanaian footballers
This article contributes to contemporary debates over the resourcefulness and entrepreneurialism of young people in the Global South by exploring the relationship between development and the migration of male youth within the football industry. Drawing on fieldwork in Accra, the paper reveals how young Ghanaians attempt to enact development as freedom through spatial mobility. Significantly, this is coupled with an awareness that their desired sp…
Better Off at Home? Rethinking Responses to Trafficked West African Footballers in Europe
This is an Open Access article published by Taylor & Francis distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http:// \ncreativecommons.org/Licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, \nprovided the original work is properly cited
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 …
Livelihoods in motion: Linking transport, mobility and income-generating activities
No point worrying? Potential undergraduates, study-related debt, and the financial allure of higher education
As of September 2012, the undergraduate tuition fee cap at English universities was raised from £3375 to £9000 per annum. This article explores the rationales underpinning prospective students' decision whether or not to apply to higher education following the fee increase, specifically, how this decision is influenced by perceptions of study-related debt and expected earnings. The article draws on data obtained from prospective undergraduates in…
Spatial and social transformations in a secondary city: The role of mobility in Sekondi-Takoradi, Ghana
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 divergence between acceptability of municipal services and urbanization in developing countries: Insights from Accra and Sekondi-Takoradi, Ghana
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 c…
The 2017 RGS‐IBG chair's theme: Decolonising Geographical Knowledges, or Reproducing Coloniality
The theme for the chair's plenaries at the 2017 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) ( RGS ‐ IBG ) Annual Conference is ‘Decolonising geographical knowledges: opening geography out to the world’. This commentary explains why this pursuit of critical consciousness via decolonial thinking could do more harm than good. We show how the emphasis on decolonising geographical knowledges rather than structures, instituti…
Relational geographies of human trafficking: Inequality, manoeuvring and im/mobility across space and time
This paper demonstrates why and how a fuller geographical perspective extends contemporary scholarship on human trafficking within and beyond the discipline. We employ a relational approach and draw on in‐depth qualitative research with trafficked persons and a range of stakeholders in Slovakia and the United Kingdom ( UK ), to depict how the processes underpinning human trafficking are non‐linear and operate instantaneously at multiple intersect…
Reforming a university during political transformation: A case study of Yangon University in Myanmar
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 contr…
Rights, Risks and Responsibilities in the Recruitment of Children within the Global Football Industry
This paper examines children’s engagement with the increasingly global and commercialised football industry. By combining a Global Production Network approach and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child it is argued that, for children’s rights and best interests to be better upheld and realised within the football industry, regulatory conditions need to account for geographical contextuality and incorporate scope for children to …
Migration, housing and attachment in urban gold mining settlements
Mining settlements are typically portrayed as either consisting of purpose-built housing constructed by mining companies to house their workers, or as temporary makeshift shelters built by miners working informally and inhabited by male migrants who live dangerously and develop little attachment to these places. This paper contributes to these debates on the social and material dynamics occurring in mining settlements, focusing on those with urba…
We built this city’: Mobilities, urban livelihoods and social infrastructure in the lives of elderly Ghanaians
The absent presence: Children's place in narratives of human trafficking
This paper uses in‐depth qualitative data, obtained as part of research examining human trafficking from Slovakia to the United Kingdom, to explore the place of children in human trafficking processes. Rather than foregrounding cases of children as direct subjects of abuse, the paper focuses on instances where children are used to control, manipulate and exploit relatives embroiled in human trafficking. We study examples when children are moved a…
Playing the victim? Human trafficking, African youth, and geographies of structural inequality
This article explores the role of agency in determining who is and is not considered to be a legitimate victim of human trafficking. It draws on critical human trafficking scholarship and research on the life chances of West African youth. This is complemented by qualitative data from youth embroiled in football‐related human trafficking. The insights from these analyses are brought into conversation with theoretical work on the geographies of co…
Navigating old age and the urban terrain: Geographies of ageing from Africa
This paper extends research on geographies of ageing in relation to urban academic and policy debates. We illustrate how older people in urban African contexts deploy their agency through social and spatial (im)mobilities, intergenerational relations and (inter)dependencies. Through doing so, we reveal how urban contexts shape, and are shaped by, older people’s tactics for seizing opportunities and navigating the urban terrain. Our analysis demon…
Boys are tired! Youth, urban struggles, and retaliatory patriarchy
Research in geography and allied disciplines on gendered experiences in Africa have struggled to comprehend the nuances that make up young men's lifeworlds. Influenced by theoretical orientations in urban studies, which demonstrate how music offers a way to explore social dynamics in Africa, we examine the thoughts, actions, and experiences of male youth in Ghana using Guru's popular song “Boys abrƐ [Boys are tired].” Drawing on interviews and fo…
Anti‐racist learning and teaching in British geography
This special section illustrates how learning and teaching in UK higher education reinforces, but can potentially also help to counteract, racism. This introduction provides some context for this intervention and provides an outline of key themes that emerge from the collection of papers. We use these themes to sketch out three guiding principles for the incorporation of explicitly anti‐racist praxis in our learning and teaching within British Ge…
The why and the white”: Racism and curriculum reform in British geography
This article intervenes in recent debates over the whiteness of the higher education geography curriculum. Focusing on UK‐based universities, I examine the why and the white in the question “Why is our geography curriculum so white?” It is argued that the answer is coloniality‐induced institutional racism. I propose that engaging with insights from critical race theory, social justice and decolonial scholarship could help British geography to mor…
Geographies of youth, mobile phones, and the urban hustle
Geographers have shown how mobile phones are transforming urban economies in Africa by altering the temporal and spatial nature of commercial transactions. Less well documented is how young people in Africa are using mobile phones to navigate the interplay between personal hopes, social expectations, and financial uncertainty associated with urban life. Drawing on qualitative data from youth in two Ghanaian cities, and insights from literature on…
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 Internationa…
Sociology (31 works) · Political science (28 works) · Law (20 works) · Social science (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Politics (14 works) · Geography (13 works) · Economic growth (10 works) · Football (10 works) · Gender Studies (10 works)