Cati Coe | Rutgers University-Camden (original) (raw)

Papers by Cati Coe

This series publishes books that will deepen and expand our understanding of age, aging, ageism, ... more This series publishes books that will deepen and expand our understanding of age, aging, ageism, and late life in the United States and beyond. The series focuses on anthropology while being open to ethnographically vivid and theoretically rich scholarship in related fields, including sociology, religion, cultural studies, social medicine, medical humanities, gender and sexuality studies, human development, critical and cultural gerontology, and age studies. Books will be aimed at students, scholars, and occasionally the general public.

Ethnoscripts, May 5, 2021

American Anthropologist, 2022

This video uses the author's own field recordings from Ghana to instruct undergraduate and gr... more This video uses the author's own field recordings from Ghana to instruct undergraduate and graduate students how to write ethnographic fieldnotes.

The Palgrave Handbook of African Education and Indigenous Knowledge, 2020

Africa Today, 2020

Increasing interest in the middle class in Africa and the Global South has prompted new discussio... more Increasing interest in the middle class in Africa and the Global South has prompted new discussions of social class since 2010; however, this literature does not adequately theorize migration, despite the role that global flows play in cultivating class aspirations. Migration complicates the concept of social class as a stable identity, in that migrants usually have multiple class statuses across their lifetime and in different social fields and geographic locations. Furthermore, class remains undertheorized within the literature on African migration and migration in general, despite the fact that class-making projects are central to migrants within, into, and out of Africa. The introduction to this special issue contends that migration and social class should be considered together.

Transnational Aging and Reconfigurations of Kin Work, 2019

Children's Geographies, 2020

ABSTRACT It is well-known that contemporary African youth struggle to attain adulthood, associate... more ABSTRACT It is well-known that contemporary African youth struggle to attain adulthood, associated with a middle-class status. A healthcare certificate offered by private schools in Accra, Ghana provides an example of how youth marginality is produced. Two models of middle classness co-exist in Ghana: a developmentalist one, linked to the state bureaucracy, education, and national progress; and a neoliberal one, associated with entrepreneurship, global capitalism, and the state’s promotion of private markets. The certificate program reveals the contradictory, confusing role that education plays in the current context, in which the neoliberal middle class relies on the infrastructure and dreams developed by a developmentalist state. In the process, students are enchanted by a new form of cultural capital which has little exchange value in local labor markets.

Social Anthropology, 2020

Medical Anthropology, 2019

ABSTRACT After several generations in the United States in which medicalized deaths have become n... more ABSTRACT After several generations in the United States in which medicalized deaths have become normal, more people are seeking to die at home. However, home deaths lead to emotional uncertainty and practical confusion, in which kin lack a cultural script. In this article I draw on interviews with patients’ kin and their African immigrant home health workers, and show that the care workers helped create a more meaningful death through their knowledge of death, familiarity with the physical processes of death, and their presence, which they used to create pathways for their patients and their kin. Video abstract Read the transcript Watch the video on Vimeo

Identities, 2017

This is the author's manuscript for a work that has been accepted for publication. Changes result... more This is the author's manuscript for a work that has been accepted for publication. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as copyediting, final layout, and pagination, may not be reflected in this document. The publisher takes permanent responsibility for the work. Content and layout follow publisher's submission requirements.

Journal of Religion in Africa, 2017

International Journal of Cultural Studies, 1998

Users of electronic forums often invest quite seriously in their on-line creations and communicat... more Users of electronic forums often invest quite seriously in their on-line creations and communications because they see them as places to fulfil utopian dreams. However, because people have different notions of 'the good life', conflict inevitably ensues about the particular form the community should take. I examine this phenomenon as it manifested in two political debates on LambdaMOO, an electronic community accessible through the Internet. The debaters resorted to discourse from real-world political discussions - using metaphors of ethnicity, immigration, colonialism, tourism, and first peoples' rights - in order to protect their 'community' and 'culture' from perceived internal division and external threat. The justifications for generating these boundaries came from the real world, yet paradoxically, to users of LambdaMOO, the boundaries emphasized LambdaMOO's separation from the real world.

Journal of Anthropological Research, 2011

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2014