Mats Utas (PI), Emy Lindberg and Luisa Enria
Funded bytheSwedish Research Council
This project intended to pick up where many other studies on African youth have left off: at war’s end. Where demographic studies use abstract statistics to identify youth bulges and give woeful predictions of renewed conflicts driven by armies of disenfranchised youth, this study wanted to investigate youth resilience and how young people make a living through labour migrations in the post-war countries of Liberia and Sierra Leone. The project, however, coincided with the Ebola epidemic that ravaged the two countries and could not be carried out according to plan. Luisa Enria, who was supposed to conduct the long-term field study in Sierra Leone, moved on to other work. Emy Lindberg, who had just started her PhD programme at my department, had to swap fieldwork in Liberia for work in Ghana and ended up researching the lives of Ghanaian football migrants playing in Sweden doing multi-sited fieldwork in both countries. For my part, the plan was to focus on labour brokering agents in Liberia and Sierra Leone, which, in the end, made little sense without having material for the migrant labourers.
The outcome of this project would have been a catastrophe without Emy’s lovely PhD dissertation Dream Machine: An Ethnography of Football Migration between Ghana and Sweden.