Doctoral Dissertation Research Hanrahan: Interdependent Livelihood Strategies Among the Elderly in Northern Region, Ghana

DDRI: Interdependent Livelihood Strategies among the Elderly in Northern Ghana This research focuses on the social construction of aging and the social and spatial relations of elderly persons in a rural community in Northern Ghana and aims to understand how elderly men and women engage in a variety of livelihood strategies. This research investigates how the familial and extra-familial intergenerational relationships of elderly persons affect their participation in household economies and their access to support from others. In addition, this research investigates how elderly men and women negotiate and secure their livelihoods as their social and spatial relations change and their ahility to engage in physical labor decreases with age. Throughout their life courses, individuals' social and spatial relations undergo reconfiguration; social roles and relationships shift within families, households, and communities. By employing ethnographic methods, including comprehensive household surveys, individual life histories narrative interviews, focus groups, participant observation and participatory mapping, this research will document and analyze the social and spatial relations of everyday practices that contribute to livelihood strategies among the elderly in a rural community in Northern Ghana. The intellectual merit of this research lies in the ways it complicates the standard approach taken to understanding livelihood practices. By incorporating concepts from geographical work on gender and on aging, this research is in effect a critique of development-oriented livelihood studies, which have tended to underplay the effects of socially and spatially constructed understandings of age and gender. It is by investigating how these understandings inform social relationships and the spatiality of everyday practices across the life course, that this research will add a depth and richness to scholarship on rural livelihoods in Africa. This research brings together insights from a wide range of social science literature, including geographical gerontology, critical geographies of age, critical feminist geographies and geographies of care, and livelihood studies. This research project will have broader impacts as it connects with the growing awareness of the rights and needs of older persons in developing places where the neglect of the elderly continues, despite international policies ratified in the early 21 st century. Further, elderly people continue to be important contributors to the support of families and communities and are thus an important target popUlation for economic and social development. Both within policy and scholarship, the need for a richer and expanded empirical knowledge of aging and the elderly in different contexts is agreed upon. This research also contributes both empirically and theoretically to the goals of feminist movements within Ghana, which are working towards understanding and integrating women and other marginalized persons into development planning and policy practices. Findings from this research will be shared with the community members with whom the project is conducted, as well as with the academic community at the University of Ghana at Legon and independent researchers in the Northern Region. The work will be published in top-ranking journals from the United States and Africa. Copies of published work will be shared with both the Department of Geography, as well as the Library at the University of Ghana at Legon.