Resume

• 2012

  Elizabeth

  Cooper

  School for International Studies

  Simon Fraser University

  Vancouver

  Canada Area

  Elizabeth Cooper is a social anthropologist interested in poverty

  international development

  HIV/AIDS

  citizenship

  popular protests

  and political economy. She has been conducting research in East Africa

  and primarily Kenya

  since 2003. Most of her research focuses predominantly on the experiences of children and young people. \n\nSince 2007

  Elizabeth has been engaged in an ongoing study about how the lives of young people orphaned due to HIV/AIDS in western Kenya have been affected. For nearly two years she lived in an agricultural village in which one of every three children had been orphaned due to HIV/AIDS. Her ongoing study has allowed Elizabeth to consider how the AIDS epidemic

  combined with chronic poverty

  has affected local ideas and practices of sociality

  and specifically people’s kinship and caring relations

  intergenerational relations

  and relations with the state and non-governmental actors. \n\nElizabeth is also conducting ongoing research concerning Kenyan students’ protest actions and their experiences of education and citizenship.\n\nElizabeth has previously conducted research concerning the lives of children and young people in refugee camps in Kenya and Uganda for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and CARE International

  as well as research about women’s poverty and inheritance rights in Ghana

  Mozambique

  Rwanda

  Uganda

  and Kenya for the Overseas Development Institute. In her early career

  Elizabeth worked as a political assistant to Canada’s Minister of the Environment and as the public affairs officer for the Canadian Embassy and Canadian International Development Agency in Hanoi

  Vietnam.\n\nAs a professor at SFU's School for International Studies

  Elizabeth teaches graduate and undergraduate courses focusing on international development and social and political issues in Sub-Saharan Africa. Elizabeth also currently serves as the Book Reviews Editor for the Canadian Journal of Development Studies.

  Assistant Professor

  School for International Studies

  Simon Fraser University

• 2005

  Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

  Master of Philosophy (M.Phil.)

  Anthropology

  University of Oxford

• 2002

  CARE

  CARE

  English

  French

  Dholuo

  Master of Arts (M.A.)

  Planning (International Development)

  The University of British Columbia

• This chapter analyses how uncertainty is generated

  understood

  and engaged with as a by- product of a political economy of charity in western Kenya. The study traces how the lack of transparency and accountability in child sponsorship schemes has informed local notions of socially contingent opportunity as well as arbitrarily idiosyncratic luck. In particular

  the extremely limited

  purposefully inaccessible

  and apparently uninformed charitable decisions by international sponsors are locally interpreted in terms of pure chance. The manufacture of uncertainty in the distribution of the charities’ chances not only undermines trust in external interventions but also confidence in aspects of local people’s individual and collective efficacy. The analysis demonstrates how the purposeful and extended study of uncertainty - what we might think of as the institutional ethnography of uncertainty - can offer far more than an account of what people are uncertain about

  and why; it can also be the means by which we account for how particular inequalities are structured and maintained

  and the differentiated consequences of this.

  Charity and chance: The manufacture of uncertainty through child sponsorship in Kenya

  Jo Boyden

  This chapter addresses the question of whether studies of resilience are useful for research and practice concerning children's poverty and the life course and intergenerational transmission of poverty. Based on a review of the increasing exercise of the resilience concept in various fields of research

  it is argued that resilience has not yet been demonstrated as a valid analytical tool for poverty research. So far resilience has achieved neither a sufficiently functional definition nor a credible theory by which to identify its existence.

  Questioning the power of resilience: Are children up to the task of disrupting the transmission of poverty?

  This paper reports on an initiative that took the strategy of youth consultation in programme planning one step further by putting a research project's design

  data collection

  analysis and presentation of findings in the hands of young women and men who have experienced education and discontinuity of education in a long‐term refugee camp. The participatory action research (PAR) process is described and assessed with attention to how PAR may serve as a practical

  credible and ethical methodology for research with refugee youths about refugee youths. This case study reflects that PAR can yield new insights for developing youth‐focused initiatives and positive personal experiences for youth participants

  including limited forms of empowerment. Ultimately

  however

  the structural inequalities imposed by refugee status require redress if the goal is the long‐term empowerment of youths in camps.

  What do we know about out-of-school youths? How Participatory Action Research can work for young refugees in camps

  Given the uniquely disempowering context of the refugee camp

  and particularly the limitations on young refugees’ opportunities for realizing self-determination and self-sufficiency

  it cannot be assumed that participatory action research (PAR) is an applicable methodology. This paper analyzes whether a PAR project conducted with youth in a long-term refugee camp in northeastern Kenya contributed to the empowerment of participants. An account of the experiences and outcomes of the PAR project is provided from the perspectives of the visiting facilitator and the youth participants. These accounts demonstrate the important psychological gains and capacity-building that PAR can support

  but also reflect the inherent tensions of applying PAR in situations where participants are not expected to gain enough power to significantly change their disempowering circumstances.

  Praxis in a refugee camp? A case study of Participatory Action Research with refugee youths

  This paper explores how an ostensibly child-centred system can fail to protect children. In some policy arenas

  the Kenyan state is recognised as a leader in Africa for the care and protection of children at risk. Yet a case study of children's experiences illuminates how

  despite adherence to a legislated framework and series of protocols

  the Kenyan state proves unable or unwilling to ensure children's care and protection. The deployment of child-focused discourse and practice through bureaucratic documentation and judicial rulings camouflages (poorly) the state's neglect of children's perspectives and the fundamental risks to children

  families

  and communities.

  Following the law

  but losing the spirit of child protection in Kenya

  There is widespread apprehension about the resilience of the ‘traditional African’ model of the extended family in maintaining norms and practices of inter-group cooperation and care in conditions of demographic

  social and economic change. In Nyanza Province

  Kenya

  where one of every five children is currently orphaned

  and HIV/AIDS and wide-scale poverty continue to render lives and livelihoods insecure

  many people are not able to take their families' care for granted. Ideas and practices of kinship have been challenged profoundly by questions regarding who is responsible for the care of orphaned children. This article looks at two complementary practices among Luo families in western Kenya that address such dilemmas: the communal initiative of ‘sitting’ as a family to discuss and resolve issues in a cooperative and consensual manner; and the individualistic initiative of ‘standing’ to represent the interests of another individual. I suggest that while the immediate purposes of sitting and standing are pragmatic in assigning caring responsibilities for specific children

  their eventfulness also actualizes something greater: trust

  reciprocity and solidarity among extended families.

  Sitting and standing: How families are fixing trust in uncertain times

  This article analyses how inheritance is being addressed to enhance socio-economic equity and opportunities in five sub-Saharan African countries: Ghana

  Kenya

  Mozambique

  Rwanda and Uganda. Based on interviews with governmental and non-governmental actors

  as well as policy analysis and reviews of the literature

  it considers how inheritance is understood as a public policy issue

  and focuses attention on three areas that offer opportunities for safeguarding women's inheritance: marriage; customary land governance; and local arbitration. Initiatives to change policies and practices related to these areas are discussed

  together with the lessons that can be learned.

  Women and inheritance in sub-Saharan Africa: What can change?

  Nearly every week there are stories of destructive fires in Kenyan secondary schools. Most of these are suspected arson cases

  and the usual suspects are the schools' current students. This article provides the first analysis of the recent spate of school-based fire incidents

  based on a comprehensive survey of media

  government

  and court reports

  as well as primary data collected through interviews with students

  educators

  and administrators. This evidence clearly demonstrates that school-based arson is a phenomenon that spans regions in Kenya

  and occurs in boys'

  girls'

  and mixed schools

  private and public schools

  and across school calendars. Current and former students explain this trend in terms of arson's effectiveness as a tactic in protest politics. Based on these findings

  I argue that school-based arson is indicative of more than the contested conditions of education in Kenya today. The use of arson by students reflects what this generation has learned about how protest and politics work in Kenya. Students' recognition that destructive collective actions are efficacious in winning a response from authorities highlights that learning and feeds a reactionary mode of governance in which citizens' initiatives tend to be neglected until they pose direct threats to public peace and financing.

  Students

  arson

  and protest politics in Kenya: School fires as political action

  David Pratten

  This collection explores the productive potential of uncertainty for people living in Africa as well as for scholars of Africa. The relevance of the focus on uncertainty in Africa is not only that contemporary life is objectively risky and unpredictable (since it is so everywhere and in every period)

  but that uncertainty has become a dominant trope in the subjective experience of life in contemporary African societies. The contributors investigate how uncertainty animates people's ways of knowing and being across the continent. An introduction and eight ethnographic studies examine uncertainty as a social resource that can be used to negotiate insecurity

  conduct and create relationships

  and act as a source for imagining the future. These in-depth accounts demonstrate that uncertainty does not exist as an autonomous

  external condition. Rather

  uncertainty is entwined with social relations and shapes people's relationship between the present and the future. By foregrounding uncertainty

  this volume advances our understandings of the contingency of practice

  both socially and temporally.

  Ethnographies of Uncertainty in Africa