Children’s community space experiences in Nima: Tracing racializing assemblages of the human

This PhD thesis is based on a collaborative exploration into children’s everyday experiences and practices in community space, undertaken with the youth-focused NGO Spread-Out Initiative in the Nima neighborhood of Accra, Ghana. Focusing on children’s lived experiences in the densely populated Nima neighborhood district, we devised and facilitated participatory, arts-based methods workshops with 17 of the NGO’s students (10-17 years) and semi-structured interviews with Nima elders and city authorities. Our research and this thesis concern the children’s everyday experiences in community space, and their/our inventive practices and methods of inhabiting, recreating, and imagining community spaces otherwise - through their everyday practices, speculative storytelling, and as a collaboratively produced site- specific intervention.

In this thesis, I argue that children’s geographies of post-independent African cities do not fully consider race and racialization in the shaping of subjectivity, space, and spatial experience. I frame a Black feminist geographic work that draws together Spread-Out Initiative’s Pan-Africanist approach, our collaborative reflections, local and scholarly discourses on the human, and scholarship demonstrating the production of Blackness in post-independent Ghana. I consider the nuances of these children’s everyday experiences and practices in the afterlife of slavery and colonialism, and I conceptualize the children’s spatial experiences and practices as an assemblage of their bodies, race (Blackness as genre of the human), affect, material, and space. Through empirically based narratives, I demonstrate that these racializing assemblages of subjection, through which the modern human emerges, do shape these children’s experiences, but without fully occluding the alternative modes of Black life that they produce through their everyday inventive, imaginative spatial practices. This thesis therefore contributes to urban studies and geography scholarship by extending Black geographic thinking to contemporary urban Ghana through the specificity of children’s embodied experiences and spatial practices in Nima.