Hanrahan, Kelsey

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    Caregiving as mobility constraint and opportunity: married daughters providing end of life care in northern Ghana
    (Taylor & Francis, 2018-01) Hanrahan, Kelsey B.; Towson University. Department of Geography & Environmental Planning
    In the global south where care services are sparse and familial care remains practically and socially important, end of life care often occurs within families. Furthermore, in health care related policy development, care is often assumed to be ensured by ‘traditional’ norms of extended family relationships. In this context, the demands of providing care may require care providers to relocate, as well as reorganize their everyday responsibilities. This article contributes to geographies of care by offering an examination of the mobility constraints experienced by married and externally-resident daughters seeking to provide end of life care to a parent in northern Ghana. Drawing on ethnographic research, I examine how particular familial relationships are embedded with socially constructed labour obligations, leading to conflicting responsibilities at a parent’s end of life. I then consider how a woman as a daughter works to overcome these constraints to provide end of life care. I conclude that understanding the mobility of care providers can contribute to avoiding potentially damaging assumptions of ‘traditional’ norms of care and is an important consideration towards understanding the geographies of care in the rural global south.
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    To hold and be held: engaging with suffering at end of life through a consideration of personal writing
    (Routledge, 2017) Hanrahan, Kelsey B.; Towson University. Department of Geography & Environmental Planning
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    The spaces in between care: considerations of connection and disconnection for subjects of care
    (Wiley-Blackwell, 2020-06) Hanrahan, Kelsey B.; Towson University. Department of Geography & Environmental Planning
    Drawing on work that explores human vulnerability and the incoherence of the subject in the process of subject formation, I build on the ideas of care as relational and connectedness within human geography. I examine how, in the process of becoming subjects of care, subjects encounter incoherence within themselves and between each other. I explore how this incoherence within and between subjects can be thought of as a disconnection, or the space in between subjects, and how the relationship of care can be conceptualised as the navigation of disconnections as those becoming subjects of care work to build connections. In this paper, I examine ethnographic data from northern Ghana, focusing in on the relationships of care that were constructed during one woman's end of life, highlighting the ways in which connections were forged across spaces of disconnect during the receipt and provision of care. Consideration of these spaces in between has the potential to contribute to our understandings of the experiences of the relational construction of care for both the recipients and providers of care. It also has the potential to contribute an understanding of the meaning and process of care that construct highly contingent and varied outcomes – ranging from soothing and supportive to distressing and invasive – for those involved.
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    Feminist contributions to geography coming from, and focused on, Ghana
    (Pennsylvania Geographical Society, 2018) Hanrahan, Kelsey B.; Towson University. Department of Geography & Environmental Planning
    This is a brief discussion of feminist and gender-focused geography from Ghana. I am deeply indebted to the work of Mariama Awumbila at the University of Ghana (UG), a geographer who has written elsewhere on the development of feminist and gender-focused research in Ghana, in African institutions, and by African scholars (see Awumbila 2007a, 2007b). Women’s activism and scholarship in sub-Saharan Africa is sometimes labeled “feminist,” but the term is controversially linked to Western ideas. Today in Ghana, young women may embrace issues of equality and empowerment but shun the label as elitist, while older women more readily identify with it (Bawa 2018). Recognizing this, in this piece I cautiously refer to feminism in Ghana in discussing the relationship between women’s rights activism in the first few decades of Ghana’s nationhood and the development of practice and scholarship aimed at addressing gender inequalities that involved activist-academics (Bawa 2018), but I will also refer more broadly to scholarship as gender-focused. I begin with a brief discussion of the development of feminist and gender-focused scholarship in Ghana. I then speak to the progress made over the last decade since Awumbila’s reviews were published. I will briefly examine the contributions made by geographers both from within and outside of Ghana who have contributed to the documentation of women and gender dynamics in Ghanaian societies, and have worked to critique feminist and gendered analyses imported from global North contexts.
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    Moving beyond Neverland: reflecting upon the state of the diverse economies research program and the study of alternative economic spaces
    (University of British Columbia, Okanagan, 2015-03-19) Hanrahan, Kelsey B.; Fickey, Amanda; Towson University. Department of Geography & Environmental Planning
    The project of examining economic diversity and alterity has grown significantly both within the discipline of geography and beyond. There now exists an expansive literature pertaining to diverse economies and alternative economic spaces, which continues to grow in new and exciting ways. In this observation piece we reflect upon the current state of the diverse economies literature and the study of alternative economic practices, which we argue is in need of more nuanced analysis in the form of self-critique. We suggest that such an analysis is possible by bridging the gap between ‘believers’ and ‘skeptics’. Researchers exploring the economic landscape must be critical, reflexive, and reach beyond literature and political boundaries while still being hopeful. We must explore common themes, shared concerns, and possibilities for future research. In this paper, we briefly consider two topics which are in need of further attention within this field of study: (1) the importance of power relations and gendered positions; (2) the significance of historical-geographic context. Those examining alterity and/or diversity must engage more frequently with one another as each of these fields offer lessons for enacting a radical politics of the economy rooted in hope; we must actively join together in our efforts to identify and document potentially emancipatory economic forms.
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    Living care-fully: the potential for an ethics of care in livelihoods approaches
    (Elsevier, 2015-08) Hanrahan, Kelsey B.; Towson University. Department of Geography & Environmental Planning
    This article explores the potential contribution of a feminist ethics of care to livelihoods approaches. Current critiques argue that considerations of material outcomes have been prioritized at the expense of social well-being. I argue that autonomy and independence frame our current approaches to understanding how people support themselves. This has obscured the interdependent and contingent nature of connections that found our social lives and reduced social connections to an instrumental role. The potential for taking a care-full approach to livelihoods is examined through the unfolding negotiations of livelihood strategies between an elderly woman and her daughter-in-law in rural northern Ghana.
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    Interstices of care: re-imagining the geographies of care
    (Wiley, 2020-06) Hanrahan, Kelsey B.; Smith, Christine E.; Towson University. Department of Geography & Environmental Planning
    In this introduction we argue that taking a topological approach to care can encourage us to understand both how caring relations and practices are produced and the forms they take as they shift and transform. We suggest that thinking topologically about the articles collected in this special section highlights how caring actions and practices ripple out into the world beyond immediate caring relationships and the immediate moment. Responding to a call within geographies of care to be thoroughly attuned to the placed‐ness of caring relations and to contribute work that theorises from places beyond the global north, the papers in this collection are situated in diverse geographical and cultural contexts, thoroughly contextualised in place and time and explore complicated relations that shape and challenge care. The geographies of care presented in this collection are a sampling of the diverse forms of care that are possible and, we argue, that by employing a topological approach to care, the possibility of what care can be and mean multiplies and expands.