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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores links between changing ideas about education in the kinship group and adolescents' migration. The stories shared by adolescent migrants in Lower Casamance, Senegal, show that adolescents experience and do relatedness in gendered ways.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the links between changing ideas about education within the wider kinship group and adolescents' migration to enable their educational aspirations. Our analysis includes formal schooling and vocational training, often in the form of informal apprenticeships. Earlier studies in West Africa have shown a narrowing of the sense of obligation and responsibility among rural and urban based kin, which is not simply a one-way process of urban kin feeling stretched by requests for help with schooling from poor rural relatives. The fact that young rural relatives sometimes replace the domestic labour of urban cousins at the expense of their own education, has changed how rural parents and adolescents themselves look at relatedness and the relationships involve recurrent negotiation. In this paper, we look at how gender differences in mobility patterns tie in with local notions of gender and age appropriate work which in turn shape educational opportunities for adolescent boys and girls. Through the stories shared by adolescent migrants in Ziguinchor in the Lower Casamance region of Senegal in a series of field trips between October 2017 and October 2018, the paper examines how the network of kin use education and relocation to negotiate gender identities and statuses within the kinship group, and how adolescents position themselves in relation to these negotiations. We argue that although many adolescents emulate the dominant views on their position in the family, it is through their work practices, demeanour and educational dreams that we discover how influence their pathways and mobilities.