In our highly interconnected and globalized world, people often pursue their aspirations in multiple places. Yet in public and scholarly debates, aspirations are often seen as the realm of younger, mobile generations, since they are assumed to hold the greatest potential for shaping the future. This volume flips this perspective on its head by exploring how aspirations are constructed from the vantage point of later life, and shows how they are pursued across time, space, and generations. The aspirations of older people are diverse, and relate not only to aging itself but also to planning the next generation’s future, preparing an "ideal" retirement, searching for intimacy and self-realization, and confronting death and afterlives. Aspiring in Later Life brings together rich ethnographic cases from different regions of the world, offering original insights into how aspirations shift over the course of life and how they are pursued in contexts of translocal mobility. This book is also freely available online as an open-access digital edition.​

The legacies of plantation slavery continue to inhabit, animate, and haunt the diverse forms of unfreedom that mark our present. Diverse Unfreedoms charts a new way of thinking through these legacies of unfreedom via a more entangled and multidirectional model of what makes for historical change and continuity in practices and relationships of subjugation. This volume troubles the stark opposition between slavery and freedom by foregrounding the diversity of types of exploitation above and beyond the most extreme forms of dehumanization characterized by slavery. The chapters, from multiple disciplines and discussing diverse regions and historical periods, illustrate the significance of interdisciplinary and international perspectives in understanding diverse unfreedoms, and offer a nuanced account of historical change and continuity in systems that generate and perpetuate unfreedom. Through examining the frictions that mark certain key moments of legal, social, and institutional transition, the essays in this volume express the limits of liberal humanist projects and present a critique of the liberal notion of freedom as the necessary horizon of emancipatory imagination and labor.

Finalist, 2020 Elliott P. Skinner Award, given by the Association of Africanist Anthropology Examines why African care workers feel politically excluded from the United States Care for America's growing elderly population is increasingly provided by migrants, and the demand for health care labor is only expected to grow. Because of this health care crunch and the low barriers to entry, new African immigrants have adopted elder care as a niche employment sector, funneling their friends and relatives into this occupation. However, elder care puts care workers into racialized, gendered, and age hierarchies, making it difficult for them to achieve social and economic mobility. In The New American Servitude, Coe demonstrates how these workers often struggle to find a sense of political and social belonging. They are regularly subjected to racial insults and demonstrations of power-and effectively turned into servants-at the hands of other members of the care worker network, including clients and their relatives, agency staff, and even other care workers. Low pay, a lack of benefits, and a lack of stable employment, combined with a lack of appreciation for their efforts, often alienate them, so that many come to believe that they cannot lead valuable lives in the United States. While jobs are a means of acculturating new immigrants, African care workers don't tend to become involved or politically active. Many plan to leave rather than putting down roots in the US. Offering revealing insights into the dark side of a burgeoning economy, The New American Servitude carries serious implications for the future of labor and justice in the care work industry.

When people -- whether children, youth, and adults -- migrate, that migration is often perceived as a rupture, with people separated by great distances and for extended periods of time. But for migrants and those affected by migration, the everyday persists, and migration itself may be critical to the continuation of social life. Everyday Ruptures illuminates the wide-ranging continuities and disruptions in the experiences of children around the world, those who participate in and those who are affected by migration.

The book is organized around four themes:
- how children's agency is affected by institutions, families, and beliefs
- how families and individuals create and maintain kin ties in conditions of rupture
- how emotion and affect are linked to global divisions and flows
- how the actions of states create ruptures and continuities

When people -- whether children, youth, and adults -- migrate, that migration is often perceived as a rupture, with people separated by great distances and for extended periods of time. But for migrants and those affected by migration, the everyday persists, and migration itself may be critical to the continuation of social life. Everyday Ruptures illuminates the wide-ranging continuities and disruptions in the experiences of children around the world, those who participate in and those who are affected by migration.

The book is organized around four themes:
- how children's agency is affected by institutions, families, and beliefs
- how families and individuals create and maintain kin ties in conditions of rupture
- how emotion and affect are linked to global divisions and flows
- how the actions of states create ruptures and continuities

Today's unprecedented migration of people around the globe in search of work has had a widespread and troubling result: the separation of families. In The Scattered Family, Cati Coe offers a sophisticated examination of this phenomenon among Ghanaians living in Ghana and abroad. Challenging oversimplified concepts of globalization as a wholly unchecked force, she details the diverse and creative ways Ghanaian families have adapted long-standing familial practices to a contemporary, global setting. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, Coe uncovers a rich and dynamic set of familial concepts, habits, relationships, and expectations - what she calls repertories - that have developed over time, through previous encounters with global capitalism. Separated immigrant families, she demonstrates, use these repertoires to help themselves navigate immigration law, the lack of child care, and a host of other problems, as well as to help raise children and maintain relationships the best way they know how. Examining this complex interplay between the local and global, Coe ultimately argues for a rethinking of what family itself means.

In working to build a sense of nationhood, Ghana has focused on many social engineering projects, the most meaningful and fascinating of which has been the state7;s effort to create a national culture through its schools. As Cati Coe reveals in "Dilemmas of Culture in African Schools," this effort has created an unusual paradox: while Ghana encourages its educators to teach about local cultural traditions, those traditions are transformed as they are taught in school classrooms. The state version of culture now taught by educators has become objectified and nationalized2;vastly different from local traditions.
Coe identifies the state7;s limitations in teaching cultural knowledge and discusses how Ghanaians negotiate the tensions raised by the competing visions of modernity that nationalism and Christianity have created. She reveals how cultural curricula affect authority relations in local social organizations2;between teachers and students, between Christians and national elite, and between children and elders2;and raises several questions about educational processes, state-society relations, the production of knowledge, and the making of Ghana7;s citizenry.

Finalist, 2020 Elliott P. Skinner Award, given by the Association of Africanist Anthropology Examines why African care workers feel politically excluded from the United States Care for America's growing elderly population is increasingly provided by migrants, and the demand for health care labor is only expected to grow. Because of this health care crunch and the low barriers to entry, new African immigrants have adopted elder care as a niche employment sector, funneling their friends and relatives into this occupation. However, elder care puts care workers into racialized, gendered, and age hierarchies, making it difficult for them to achieve social and economic mobility. In The New American Servitude, Coe demonstrates how these workers often struggle to find a sense of political and social belonging. They are regularly subjected to racial insults and demonstrations of power-and effectively turned into servants-at the hands of other members of the care worker network, including clients and their relatives, agency staff, and even other care workers. Low pay, a lack of benefits, and a lack of stable employment, combined with a lack of appreciation for their efforts, often alienate them, so that many come to believe that they cannot lead valuable lives in the United States. While jobs are a means of acculturating new immigrants, African care workers don't tend to become involved or politically active. Many plan to leave rather than putting down roots in the US. Offering revealing insights into the dark side of a burgeoning economy, The New American Servitude carries serious implications for the future of labor and justice in the care work industry.

Africa is known both for having a primarily youthful population and for its elders being held in high esteem. However, this situation is changing: people in Africa are living longer, some for many years with chronic, disabling illnesses. In Ghana, many older people, rather than experiencing a sense of security that they will be respected and cared for by the younger generations, feel anxious that they will be abandoned and neglected by their kin. In response to their concerns about care, they and their kin are exploring new kinds of support for aging adults, from paid caregivers to social groups and senior day centers. These innovations in care are happening in fits and starts, in episodic and scattered ways, visible in certain circles more than others. By examining emergent discourses and practices of aging in Ghana, Changes in Care makes an innovative argument about the uneven and fragile processes by which some social change occurs. There is a short film that accompanies the book, “Making Happiness: Older People Organize Themselves� (2020), an 11-minute film by Cati Coe. Available at: https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-thke-hp15

Transnational Aging and Reconfigurations of Kin Work documents the social and material contributions of older persons to their families in settings shaped by migration, their everyday lives in domestic and community spaces, and in the context of intergenerational relationships and diasporas. Much of this work is oriented toward supporting, connecting, and maintaining kin members and kin relationships-the work that enables a family to reproduce and regenerate itself across generations and across the globe.