Reinvigorating Social Support Systems in Rural Northwestern Ghana: Towards Affective Empathy in a Neoliberal Age

We are delighted to welcome Dr Constance Awinpoka Akurugu, Visiting Fellow at the University of Leeds and Senior Lecturer at Simon Diedong Dombo University of Business and Integrated Development Studies in Ghana. Dr Akurugu will be presenting at a hybrid seminar relating to her current research:

Reinvigorating Social Support Systems in Rural Northwestern Ghana: Towards Affective Empathy in a Neoliberal Age

Abstract

Africanists and postcolonial scholars frequently allude to the concept of a supportive extended family system that extends a lifeline to less privileged members of society such as the indigent and the aged. Yet the extended family and the network of support it enables have come under immense threat in the neoliberal age. This article examines the constrained role of the extended family system and its implications. The study is based on residential ethnographic fieldwork data gathered in rural northwestern Ghana. The article draws on transnational discourses on empathy and local conceptions of interdependence and unity as encapsulated by African communitarian philosophies such as Ubuntu and ti jaa bunyini, ‘we are all from one stock’ of the Waala people of northern Ghana to explore how to generate empathy. The extended family system and its support network have come under intense attack by neo-liberal individualist values. Ti jaa bunyini philosophy, similar to Ubuntu, and many humanistic ones offer important opportunities for reinvigorating debates on African indigenous support networks as important steps towards nurturing affective empathy. This study makes an important contribution to discourses on affective empathy by connecting it to communitarianism. Nurturing empathy is necessary towards imagining forms of existence that are dignifying for the marginalised and for preventing them from descending into abysmal deprivation.

For more information on this event please contact cgd@leeds.ac.uk