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Literary salon: Child care in a globalizing world - Perspectives from Ghana

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With Kari Wærness, Haldis Haukanes og Gro Lie

The family is the main provider of early child care. The availability and quality of this attention is crucial. "Child care in a globalizing world: Perspectives from Ghana" addresses several pertinent questions related to the family institution and how it may have changed in an era of societal transformation and rapid globalization.

Are caring capacities of families weakening and child care traditions, such as fostering, changing? What new domestic groups emerge when kin are scattered and husbands migrate? How do lone mothers combine multiple caring demands with work life? How are men's roles as fathers changing and shaped by new challenges? How do grandparents respond to the pressing needs of their children's children?

Join us in a conversation about globalization processes which profoundly affect family lives and human development around the world.

 

Kari Wærness is professor at the Department of Sociology at the University of Bergen. Her research has in particular focused on family care and ageing, female sociology and social policy. She has led the Research Council of Norway's program committee for women's studies in the social sciences and was research director of the Centre for Women's and Gender Studies at the UiB. She was the Norwegian coordinator of Globalization and Changes in the Cultures of Survival and Care: The Case of Ghana, the project on which this book is based.

Haldis Haukanes is a social anthropologist and associate professor at the Department of Health Promotion and Development at UiB. She is currently leader of the research project Gender in poverty reduction. Critical Explorations of Norwegian Aid Policy on Gender Equality and Women's Rights and the editor of Parenting after the century of the child. Travelling ideals, institutional negotiations and local responses (with Tatjana Thelen, Ashgate 2010).

Gro Th. Lie is professor in international health promotion at UiB and academic coordinator of UiB Global. As the initiator of Globalization and Changes in the Cultures of Survival and Care: The Case of Ghana she connected key actors in both Ghana and Norway. Lie is leader of the research group "Multicultural Venues of Health and Education". She has coordinated several projects in the South and supervised numerous PhD candidates.  Some of Lie's recent work include: Mapping synergy and antagony in North-South partnerships for health: a case study of the Tanzanian women's NGO KIWAKKUKI. Health Promotion International 2011, pp. 1-10 (with Corbin, J. Hope; Mittelmark, Maurice B.); and Health worker motivation in the context of HIV care and treatment challenges in Mbeya Region, Tanzania: A qualitative study. BMC Health Services Research 2011, Volume 11 (with Mbilinyi, Deogratius and Daniel, Marguerite).