Research

Research Pipeline

I have three projects within my research pipeline in which I investigate elements of the following research areas: Youth Training and Upskilling, Philanthropy and International Development, Labor, Work, and Professionalism, and Race, Class, and Gender in Transnational Institutions.

1. Training African Youth for the Future of Work

This line of research forms the basis of my doctoral dissertation. I investigate how organizations recruit, select, and prepare young African workers for the digital transformation of work. My aim is to reconcile organizations’ pledges of African youth’s development with the history of failed and damaging programs. Using Nairobi as my case study, I will delve into the reciprocal communication between the organizations and their varied audiences.

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2. Power Relations Among International Development Workers

In this line of research, I put forth the theory of elastic transnational stratification, the process of organizational needs being met according to which actor’s identity would be most success.

Under this line of research, I published “She Can Get a Visa: How Nationality and Class Shape NGO Decision-Making” in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. This project focuses on how nationality and class are proxies for worker identities within NGOs, with evidence from fieldwork and in-depth interviews at a small NGO in Kenya. The study underscores how nationality and class impact task allocation and decision-making power within these NGOs.

3. Organizational Paradigms and Worker Experience

This line of research scrutinizes how organizational paradigms shape the experiences of workers. One area of interest under this line of research is how newly implemented diversity and inclusion initiatives within organizations influence identity, status, and representation. I explore the “Matthew effect” on individuals and how these diversity measures impact the social capital of diversity recruits and the overall image of the organization.

Published ethnographer with extensive international field research experience.

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Dissertation Research

Government officials and business leaders from the United States and eastern Africa descended upon Nairobi to discuss how to expand mutually beneficial economic opportunities at the 2024 American Chamber of Commerce in Kenya Business Summitt. A recurring call to action throughout the keynote addresses and panels was how to take advantage of Africa’s rich human capital in the form of young people entering the workforce in droves. These sentiments echo UN reports on the African demographic dividend, the premise of MasterCard Foundation’s Young Africa Works program, and many other desires to tap into the potential of African youth for the continent and beyond.

The preoccupation with Africa’s resources—particularly it’s human resources—is not new but is rather a new iteration of a long tradition of colonial and imperial powers that create programs to recruit, select, and educate African youth for the creation of an elite network. Initially this work was done through military and missionary stations on the continent to teach basic skills as part of their civilizing missions to create extensions of their empires (Akyeampong 2014; Bereketeab 2020; Brissett 2020). The format of these programs range from one-time scholarships or fellowships, professional development seminars, to “life skills” workshops and cohort-based fellowship programs that regularly meet, they all espouse – implicitly or explicitly—neoliberal values like individualism, market-based solutions, and globalization. While outwardly these programs are upskilling African youth for the digital labor market, they are also contending with the reproduction of urban versus rural inequalities and how to integrate African youth into labor markets outside of the continent. The rapidly aging populations of the U.S., Europe, and East Asia that need injections of young, high-skilled laborers butts against migration policies that disadvantage workers from sub-Saharan Africa. That is not to say all organizations are ignorant of the soft-skills needed to create African global citizens.

The primary goal of this dissertation is to understand how organizations recruit, select, and invest in the human capital of African young people. The secondary goal of this dissertation is understand how African youth make sense of this discourse and navigate these pathways given the expansion of educational opportunities and rise of careerism and professionalism, particularly within the philanthropy sector (Hwang and Powell 2009).

My core research questions are: 

  1. What approaches do organizations use to prepare Kenyan youth for success in the digital workplace and fourth industrial revolution?
  2. How do these organizations recruit and select Kenyan youth to participate in their programs?
  3. How do young African job seekers conceive of the various pathways, opportunities, and discourse around navigating the digital transformation of work?

 

 

Grad BEN Talks 2020 | Shaquilla Harrigan from Penn Arts & Sciences.

Areas of
Expertise

Each of my research areas address some part of the following themes.

  1. Youth Training and Upskilling

  2. Philanthropy and International Development

  3. Labor, Work, and Professionalism

  4. Race, Class, and Gender in Transnational Institutions