Cati Coe
Transnational migration, Care, Aging, Social Protection Policy, West Africa
| Degrees: | BA (Hons, Wesleyan), MA and PhD (University of Pennsylvania) |
| Email: | Cati.Coe@carleton.ca |
| Office: | C677 Loeb Building |
| CV: | View |
| Website: | Visuals |
Professor
Cati Coe joined the Department of Political Science at Carleton University in 2022, arriving from Rutgers University in the United States, where she worked as a professor of anthropology for twenty years. Dr. Coe’s research focuses on transnational families from Ghana, examining long-distance parenting in scattered families with children left behind in or sent back to Ghana, before turning to the other end of the life course and the care of older persons. She is the author of The Scattered Family: Parenting, African Migrants, and Global Inequality (University of Chicago Press, 2013), The New American Servitude: Political Belonging among African Immigrant Home Care Workers (New York University Press, 2019), and Changes in Care: Aging, Migration, and Social Class in West Africa (Rutgers University Press, 2021). She is currently beginning a new project on how transnational migrants navigate national forms of social protection in later life. From her scholarship on African immigrant personal support workers in the United States, she has additional research interests in care worker organizing and resistance and the labor involved in end-of-life care.
As part of making her research more broadly available to the public, Dr. Coe has regularly written opinion essays and made two documentary films, “Stories from Home Care” (2021) based on the narratives of a personal support worker from Ghana working with older adults in the United States, and “Making Happiness: Older People Organize Themselves” (2020) about a social club for older adults in Ghana.
Selected Publications
“The Commodification of Social Reproduction: A View of Global Care Chains from a Migrant-Sending Country.” Geoforum, April 2023.
Changes in Care: Aging, Migration, and Social Class in West Africa. Series on Global Perspectives on Aging. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2021. Winner of the 2022 Toyin Falola Africa Book Award, Association of Global South Studies.
“Disposable Kin: Shifting Registers of Belonging in Global Care Economies,” American Anthropologist. Published online, January 2022, co-authored with Megha Amrith.
Special issue on “Migration and Social Class in Africa: Class-Making Projects in Translocal Social Fields,” Africa Today 66 (3-4), 2020, co-edited with Julia Pauli.
“Meaningful Deaths: Home Health Workers’ Mediation of Death at Home.” Medical Anthropology 39:1 (2020): 96-108.
The New American Servitude: Political Belonging among African Immigrant Home Care Workers. New York: New York University Press, 2019.
“Political Belonging through Elder Care: Temporalities, Representations, and Mutuality.” Anthropological Theory 19:2 (2019): 279-299, co-authored with Tatjana Thelen.