C Coe
Biographic Data
| ID | 30400 |
|---|---|
| NAME | C Coe |
| GIVEN NAMES | C |
| FAMILY NAME | Coe |
| SIGNATURE | COE C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2556-9781 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 59 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 374 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 59 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Perfecting Exit
Quitting tends to be overlooked in studies of resistance and labor because of its individual and private character, its ineffectiveness in changing conditions of labor, and the difficulty of studying it, in favor of more organized and public protests and strikes. This paper examines why quitting is so popular among African immigrant home care workers in the United States, arguing that exit was attuned to the diffuse power relations of fissured wo…
Can Canadians Retire Abroad? The History of Pension Portability in Canada
The initiation of social welfare constructed a particular imaginary of the national public. At its inception in 1927, the Canadian pension included both a (British) citizenship requirement and a residency requirement that precluded the portability of the pension, should the pension recipient move outside of Canada. Over the course of the twentieth century, parliamentary debates succeeded in incrementally rolling back both requirements, reimaginin…
The economics of care
What is the value of care? This paper examines economic repertoires used to measure and evaluate care and by extension, the value of human life, social relations, and labour. Drawing on our respective ethnographic research on health insurance in Brazil and elder care in Ghana and the United States, we analyse economic repertoires of zero-sum thinking, sacrifice and obligations, and rights-in-people, all of which posit that there is a commensurabi…
Sharing Debt and Houses
The appropriation of commodities, or decommodification, occurs alongside processes of commodification as part of the diverse economies coexisting with capitalism. Drawing on research among aging Ghanaian immigrants living in Canada, I examine their attempts to decommodify housing within unaffordable housing markets as part of cultural projects to maintain family unity. This research reveals that the instruments of financial capital used to commod…
The Politics of the Entrepreneurial Middle Class
The history of liberalism in the West has linked political and economic transformation to the rise of the bourgeoisie. The prominence of the new middle class in Africa has raised questions as to whether it would similarly lead to the rule of law, democratization, and investment in public goods. This article examines this question through the political actions of mainly female entrepreneurs providing eldercare services in Accra. It argues that the…
An Aging World Relies on Migrant Care Workers
Around the world, societies are aging. Most governments have not prepared well for this demographic change, which requires a recalibration of existing social support programs like state pension and health care systems. Piecemeal state solutions have generated a reliance on migrant workers in elder care. This has worsened global inequalities in health care, subjected migrants to poor working conditions and exploitation, and revived racialized form…
Age enterprising
Images of care
Roundtable discussion
In 2011, the International Labor Organization (ILO) adopted the Domestic Worker Convention (no. 189), which established labor standards for household workers, including protection from abuse, provisions to ensure freedom of movement for migrant domestic workers, coverage under national minimum wage, overtime, child labor, and human rights laws, and access to contact information of private employers and appropriate legal resources, among others. D…
Introduction to the special issue
In 2011, the International Labour Organization adopted a new Domestic Workers Convention, a change that generated struggles internationally around recognizing domestic labor as a form of work. Recognition as a worker is meant to redress the particularities that render the exploitation of domestic workers so intimate, painful, and naturalized. A decade after the Convention's passage is a reasonable period in which to assess its impact, as the pape…
The commodification of care
What are the changes in social life that paid care generates, in a context where kin have been expected to provide elder care? This question opens up key questions about the exploitation of women, who often provide domestic labor and care to their kin without pay; and about the spread of capitalism, in which goods and services required for human survival are exchanged through markets. This paper explores how paid elder care in Ghana is made possi…
The commodification of social reproduction
What does Aging Mean? Repertoires and Embodied Sensoria in Person-Making
Imagining Institutional Care, Practicing Domestic Care
Elder care has become a significant national conversation in Ghana due to urban and international migration, lower birth rates, family nuclearization, and longer life spans. In the rural towns of Ghana's Eastern Region, new elder care practices and discourses are emerging. These age-inscriptions signal the agency of older persons, which is often neglected and overlooked. Discursively, older adults express curiosity about Western care facilities, …
Disposable kin
As is well discussed in the literature, paid domestic workers become like kin through living with and caring for their employers. Exploring two disparate cases, aging Asian domestic workers in Singapore and African eldercare workers in the United States, the article focuses on two critical junctures when these kin relations are disavowed: the care worker's retirement and the death of a patient. We argue that the flexible registers of kinship that…
Different Kinds of Storytelling
This paper compares and contrasts ethnographic writing to ethnographic film-making as different ways of crafting a narrative. Films have the ability to reach larger audiences, including our own informants, and to make audiences feel connected to the central participants who seem to speak directly to them, but are less conducive to providing the broader context for those stories or showcasing stories that are less visually interesting. Film also s…
R obin P hylisia C hapdelaine . The Persistence of Slavery
The Persistence of Slavery: An Economic History of Child Trafficking in Nigeria charts the historical antecedents to contemporary child trafficking in southeastern Nigeria, focusing on the colonial era from the 1910s to the 1930s. The book not only expands the growing historical literature on children and childhood in Africa, but it also illuminates the diverse kinds of unfreedom that can coexist, contiguous and overlapping with slavery, such as …
The enchantment of neoliberal education
It is well-known that contemporary African youth struggle to attain adulthood, associated with a middle-class status. A healthcare certificate offered by private schools in Accra, Ghana provides an example of how youth marginality is produced. Two models of middle classness co-exist in Ghana: a developmentalist one, linked to the state bureaucracy, education, and national progress; and a neoliberal one, associated with entrepreneurship, global ca…
The Fixer
Reviewed by: The Fixer: Visa Lottery Chronicles by Charles Piot and Kodjo Nicolas Batema Cati Coe Charles Piot with Kodjo Nicolas Batema, The Fixer: Visa Lottery Chronicles. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. 224 pp. The Fixer tells a dramatic story of creative and innovative forms of trickery generated by US immigration policy. Its overt focus is a single charismatic and thoughtful Togolese broker, Kodjo Nicolas Batema, who carefully studies t…
Meaningful Deaths
After several generations in the United States in which medicalized deaths have become normal, more people are seeking to die at home. However, home deaths lead to emotional uncertainty and practical confusion, in which kin lack a cultural script. In this article I draw on interviews with patients' kin and their African immigrant home health workers, and show that the care workers helped create a more meaningful death through their knowledge of d…
The New American Servitude
Shoko Yamada. “Dignity of Labour” for African Leaders
How and why do ideas travel? What kinds of changes are made to those ideas as they are picked up and implemented in a new context? These are the broad questions with which “Dignity of Labour” for African Leaders: The Formation of Education Policy in the British Colonial Office and Achimota School on the Gold Coast is engaged. Shoko Yamada is an expert in comparative education who has written a historical examination of colonial educational policy…
Political belonging through elderly care
In this article, we examine the ways that elderly care generates political belonging. Our approach builds on studies which argue that nurture and care create kinship, but takes that argument further by suggesting that care generates membership in numerous social formations, across scales. We suggest that elderly care helps illuminate key aspects of political belonging, particularly the temporality of political membership, because elderly care ent…
Age-Inscriptions and Social Change
This special issue introduces the concept of age-inscription. It accounts for the ways that transitions, expectations and markers around age and life-course stages are modified in interplay with social change. This new concept is necessary, we argue, because age-inscriptions correspond to more indeterminate and transitional levels of changes in aging trajectories and life stages than the concept of norms. Inscriptions lie between rules, laws, and…
Transnational migration and the commodification of eldercare in urban Ghana
Over the past 20 years, organizations to provide commercial nursing services, mainly to the sick and debilitated elderly, have sprung up in Accra, Ghana. This article assesses the degree to which transnational migration has generated social changes in ageing at the level of everyday practices. It argues that a range of social actors differently involved in transnational migration has created and sustained a market for home nursing agencies in Gha…
Orchestrating Care in Time
People in southern Ghana provide care by attending to and synchronizing their and others' life courses. Women, in particular, synchronize their life courses with the developmental and aging pathways of others. Since the 1970s, younger women in southern Ghana have migrated to urban or rural areas to earn money, leaving their children in the care of their mothers, whom they support with their remittances. As migrant women grow older, they return to…
What is the impact of transnational migration on family life? Women's comparisons of internal and international migration in a small town in Ghana
Most scholarship on the effects of transnational migration on family life has argued that such migration results in profound shifts and dislocations in family practices and gender ideologies. Much of this work, however, has overlooked processes of internal migration: How different is transnational migration from internal migration in its impact on family life? By comparing families of transnational migrants with those of internal migrants in a sm…
What is Love? The Materiality of Care in Ghanaian Transnational Families
In the West, economics and intimacy are assumed to occupy separate – even antithetical – domains. In Ghanaian family life, however, affection is understood to be expressed through the distribution of material resources across generations and a person’s life cycle. Such an understanding of love means that migrant parents who leave their children behind in Ghana can continue to be good parents by sending remittances, and, in fact, may be considered…
The Structuring of Feeling in Ghanaian Transnational Families
Studies exploring the emotional experiences of members of transnational families have often highlighted the emotional suffering of mothers and children separated from one another as a result of transnational migration. Taking Ghana as a case example, this paper complicates this picture by showing how parents and children in Ghanaian transnational families have different emotional responses to their separation, in which the parents express less su…
Men, masculine identities and childbirth
In recent years, fathers' experiences during childbirth have attracted much research and policy interest. However, little of this work has been grounded in the first-hand accounts of men and there is a lack of theory-based research to help understand men's thoughts and practices around childbirth. This paper is based on qualitative research undertaken with first-time fathers and healthcare professionals. It draws on Connell's (1995) conceptualisa…
Negotiating eldercare in Akuapem, Ghana
In contemporary Ghana, adult children are considered responsible for the care of aged parents. Within this idealized framework, two aspects of eldercare are overlooked. Firstly, such a narrative obscures the role of non-kin and extended kin in providing eldercare in southern Ghana historically and in the present. Secondly, it hides the negotiations over obligations and commitments between those who manage eldercare and those who help with an agei…
Disposable kin
As is well discussed in the literature, paid domestic workers become like kin through living with and caring for their employers. Exploring two disparate cases, aging Asian domestic workers in Singapore and African eldercare workers in the United States, the article focuses on two critical junctures when these kin relations are disavowed: the care worker's retirement and the death of a patient. We argue that the flexible registers of kinship that…
Political belonging through elderly care
In this article, we examine the ways that elderly care generates political belonging. Our approach builds on studies which argue that nurture and care create kinship, but takes that argument further by suggesting that care generates membership in numerous social formations, across scales. We suggest that elderly care helps illuminate key aspects of political belonging, particularly the temporality of political membership, because elderly care ent…
Educating an African Leadership
Founded by the British colonial government in the Gold Coast in the 1920s, Achimota was an elite school that signaled the colonial government's commitment to the provision of education and the concomitant belief in the role of education in managing the future of the nation. This study explores the contradictions of the school, in which African culture was used to substitute for anglicized activities, lessons, and entertainments within the school'…
Growing Up and Going Abroad
Migration scholars should give attention to migration as seen through children's eyes for at least two reasons. Firstly, children's perspectives help us to understand whether or not children are being socialised into their community's culture of migration, a culture which shapes migration patterns and flows. Secondly, given that some children migrate and some children are left behind by migrant parents or relatives, children's imaginings of wheth…
Folklore, Heritage Politics and Ethnic Diversity
Folklore, Heritage Politics and Ethnic Diversity:. Festschrift for Barbro Klein. Pertti J. Antonnen. ed. in collaboration with Anna-Leena Siikala, Stein R. Mathisen, and Leif Magnusson. Botkryka, Sweden: Multicultural Centre, 2000. 278pp., photographs
How Debt Became Care
Studies of slavery in Africa have noted the persistence of those relations in different forms, such as pawning, that allow social changes in power, status and wealth to be weathered more gradually. As pawning itself became less frequent, did other kinds of relationship take its place? Some scholars have argued that pawning was folded into marriage and fatherhood; others that there are continuities with fosterage and domestic servant arrangements …
Smoking behaviour change among fathers of new infants
Learning How to Find Out
In Learning How to Ask , Charles Briggs argues that asking questions follows cultural conventions. Field workers carry assumptions about the nature of talk and knowledge, and their questions may elicit different kinds of information and relationships than expected. This article looks ethnographically at theories of knowledge in Akuapem, Ghana, and how they interacted with the author's own native theories in interviews. Learning local conventions …
The commodification of social reproduction
Imagining Institutional Care, Practicing Domestic Care
Elder care has become a significant national conversation in Ghana due to urban and international migration, lower birth rates, family nuclearization, and longer life spans. In the rural towns of Ghana's Eastern Region, new elder care practices and discourses are emerging. These age-inscriptions signal the agency of older persons, which is often neglected and overlooked. Discursively, older adults express curiosity about Western care facilities, …
Culture and the Senses
The Education of the Folk
The history of intellectual interaction in the 19th and early 20th centuries between scholars of vernacular culture and educational reformers remains a lacuna in the discipline of folklore. This examination of educational reforms brought on by the introduction and spread of schooling for peasant children raises issues of how folklorists should intervene and how to judge the complicated effects of those interventions
Roundtable discussion
In 2011, the International Labor Organization (ILO) adopted the Domestic Worker Convention (no. 189), which established labor standards for household workers, including protection from abuse, provisions to ensure freedom of movement for migrant domestic workers, coverage under national minimum wage, overtime, child labor, and human rights laws, and access to contact information of private employers and appropriate legal resources, among others. D…
Meaningful Deaths
After several generations in the United States in which medicalized deaths have become normal, more people are seeking to die at home. However, home deaths lead to emotional uncertainty and practical confusion, in which kin lack a cultural script. In this article I draw on interviews with patients' kin and their African immigrant home health workers, and show that the care workers helped create a more meaningful death through their knowledge of d…
Longing for a House in Ghana
Home health care is a growing occupation in the United States which calls for significant emotional labor. On the basis of interviews and participant observation with home health workers from Ghana, this article argues that home health work is different from other kinds of emotional labor in that living and working in the client's house are central to the conditions of work and the dignity assaults of workers’ experience. Among their strategies f…
Introduction to the special issue
In 2011, the International Labour Organization adopted a new Domestic Workers Convention, a change that generated struggles internationally around recognizing domestic labor as a form of work. Recognition as a worker is meant to redress the particularities that render the exploitation of domestic workers so intimate, painful, and naturalized. A decade after the Convention's passage is a reasonable period in which to assess its impact, as the pape…
The commodification of care
What are the changes in social life that paid care generates, in a context where kin have been expected to provide elder care? This question opens up key questions about the exploitation of women, who often provide domestic labor and care to their kin without pay; and about the spread of capitalism, in which goods and services required for human survival are exchanged through markets. This paper explores how paid elder care in Ghana is made possi…
The enchantment of neoliberal education
It is well-known that contemporary African youth struggle to attain adulthood, associated with a middle-class status. A healthcare certificate offered by private schools in Accra, Ghana provides an example of how youth marginality is produced. Two models of middle classness co-exist in Ghana: a developmentalist one, linked to the state bureaucracy, education, and national progress; and a neoliberal one, associated with entrepreneurship, global ca…
Not a Nurse, Not Househelp
As Ghana goes through a demographic transition, in which people are living longer and with long-term, chronic diseases ([de-Graft Aikins et al., 2012][1]), families are experiencing a growing strain in caring for their elderly and frail members. Reciprocities across the generations are changing ([
Defending community
Users of electronic forums often invest quite seriously in their on-line creations and communications because they see them as places to fulfil utopian dreams. However, because people have different notions of 'the good life', conflict inevitably ensues about the particular form the community should take. I examine this phenomenon as it manifested in two political debates on LambdaMOO, an electronic community accessible through the Internet. The …
Symposium Synopsis
s of Papers for 1999 Annual Meeting: Symposium: PNI and Aging: Immune Functions Interact with Stress, Vulnerability and Resources in Older Populations
Ethnicity and Nationalism in Africa
Reviewed by: Ethnicity and Nationalism in Africa: Constructivist Reflections and Contemporary Politics Cati Coe Yeros, Paris , ed. 1999. Ethnicity and Nationalism in Africa: Constructivist Reflections and Contemporary Politics. New York: St. Martin's Press. 144 pp. Perhaps no subject has involved the interaction between scholarly and popular models as much as ethnicity and nationalism; academic theories of ethnicity and nationalism, and their pol…
The Education of the Folk
The history of intellectual interaction in the 19th and early 20th centuries between scholars of vernacular culture and educational reformers remains a lacuna in the discipline of folklore. This examination of educational reforms brought on by the introduction and spread of schooling for peasant children raises issues of how folklorists should intervene and how to judge the complicated effects of those interventions
Folklore, Heritage Politics and Ethnic Diversity
Folklore, Heritage Politics and Ethnic Diversity:. Festschrift for Barbro Klein. Pertti J. Antonnen. ed. in collaboration with Anna-Leena Siikala, Stein R. Mathisen, and Leif Magnusson. Botkryka, Sweden: Multicultural Centre, 2000. 278pp., photographs
Learning How to Find Out
In Learning How to Ask , Charles Briggs argues that asking questions follows cultural conventions. Field workers carry assumptions about the nature of talk and knowledge, and their questions may elicit different kinds of information and relationships than expected. This article looks ethnographically at theories of knowledge in Akuapem, Ghana, and how they interacted with the author's own native theories in interviews. Learning local conventions …
Recuperating Tradition while Expanding Schooling
Educating an African Leadership
Founded by the British colonial government in the Gold Coast in the 1920s, Achimota was an elite school that signaled the colonial government's commitment to the provision of education and the concomitant belief in the role of education in managing the future of the nation. This study explores the contradictions of the school, in which African culture was used to substitute for anglicized activities, lessons, and entertainments within the school'…
Speaking with Vampires
The subject of this book is a corpus of stories from Central and East Africa about Europeans who sucked African blood and about the Africans who worked for them: firemen, policemen, mine foremen, and game wardens. Vampire stories show how Africans imagined the colonial world in all its contradictions. In seven chapters, Luise White reads both oral and written sources to understand colonial medicine and skilled labor in East and Central Africa aft…
The Additive Effects of Household Smoking and Housing Tenure on Birthweight Distribution in a Birth Cohort
Objective:to study the additive effects of smoking and housing tenure on birthweight distribution and risk of birthweight <2500g, <3000g and <3500g Setting:Coventry Study design:whole year birth cohort Outcomes: birthweight normal distribution curves with medians (50th centile), 10th and 90th centiles; birthweight <2500g, <3000g and <3500g Participants:2600 infants enrolled into the CoventryCohort Study by the Family Health Visitor at the birth v…
The Additive Effects of Household Smoking and Housing Tenure on Birthweight Distribution in a Birth Cohort
Objective:to study the additive effects of smoking and housing tenure on birthweight distribution and risk of birthweight <2500g, <3000g and <3500g Setting:Coventry Study design:whole year birth cohort Outcomes: birthweight normal distribution curves with medians (50th centile), 10th and 90th centiles; birthweight <2500g, <3000g and <3500g Participants:2600 infants enrolled into the CoventryCohort Study by the Family Health Visitor at the birth v…
Speaking with Vampires
Book Review| April 01 2003 Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa, Luise White. Cati Coe Cati Coe Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Folklore (2003) 116 (460): 233–234. https://doi.org/10.2307/4137904 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Cati Coe; Speaking with …
Culture and the Senses
Smoking behaviour change among fathers of new infants
The Afterlife Is Where We Come From
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Stories and Selves
This study examines how a curriculum that aimed to instill in students a way of solving their everyday social problems instead became a site for replaying students' understandings of solutions approved by teachers and thus was limited in shaping their subjectivities. We draw on research in the ethnography of speaking, particularly in school settings, to refine current anthropological interest in the Foucauldian notion of technologies of the self.…
From temple to table
This paper describes the early development of a health and lifestyle initiative, the Apnee Sehat project, located at the heart of a South Asian community and developed in partnership with them. The project aims were to promote behaviour change in a sensitive and culturally acceptable manner and had a Sikh temple in the United Kingdom (UK) as its focus. Working in partnership with the community was implemented and sustained by key enthusiastic ‘he…
The Structuring of Feeling in Ghanaian Transnational Families
Studies exploring the emotional experiences of members of transnational families have often highlighted the emotional suffering of mothers and children separated from one another as a result of transnational migration. Taking Ghana as a case example, this paper complicates this picture by showing how parents and children in Ghanaian transnational families have different emotional responses to their separation, in which the parents express less su…
What is Love? The Materiality of Care in Ghanaian Transnational Families
In the West, economics and intimacy are assumed to occupy separate – even antithetical – domains. In Ghanaian family life, however, affection is understood to be expressed through the distribution of material resources across generations and a person’s life cycle. Such an understanding of love means that migrant parents who leave their children behind in Ghana can continue to be good parents by sending remittances, and, in fact, may be considered…
What is the impact of transnational migration on family life? Women's comparisons of internal and international migration in a small town in Ghana
Most scholarship on the effects of transnational migration on family life has argued that such migration results in profound shifts and dislocations in family practices and gender ideologies. Much of this work, however, has overlooked processes of internal migration: How different is transnational migration from internal migration in its impact on family life? By comparing families of transnational migrants with those of internal migrants in a sm…
Men, masculine identities and childbirth
In recent years, fathers' experiences during childbirth have attracted much research and policy interest. However, little of this work has been grounded in the first-hand accounts of men and there is a lack of theory-based research to help understand men's thoughts and practices around childbirth. This paper is based on qualitative research undertaken with first-time fathers and healthcare professionals. It draws on Connell's (1995) conceptualisa…
Diasporic Homecomings
Growing Up and Going Abroad
Migration scholars should give attention to migration as seen through children's eyes for at least two reasons. Firstly, children's perspectives help us to understand whether or not children are being socialised into their community's culture of migration, a culture which shapes migration patterns and flows. Secondly, given that some children migrate and some children are left behind by migrant parents or relatives, children's imaginings of wheth…
Transnational Families, Migration, and Gender
How Debt Became Care
Studies of slavery in Africa have noted the persistence of those relations in different forms, such as pawning, that allow social changes in power, status and wealth to be weathered more gradually. As pawning itself became less frequent, did other kinds of relationship take its place? Some scholars have argued that pawning was folded into marriage and fatherhood; others that there are continuities with fosterage and domestic servant arrangements …
Sociology (40 works) · Political science (30 works) · Psychology (20 works) · Law (19 works) · History (15 works) · Gender Studies (14 works) · Economics (13 works) · Migration and Labor Dynamics (12 works) · Social science (12 works) · Anthropology (11 works)