African Immigrant Youth Research Articles

“I would love for teachers to teach in a way that relates to my culture”: African immigrant youth composing digital collages

“I would love for teachers to teach in a way that relates to my culture”: African immigrant youth composing digital collages

Need for Culturally Competent and Responsive Cancer Education for African Immigrant Families and Youth Living in the United States.

Cancer prevalence data for Black Americans is monolithic and fails to consider the diverse cultures and backgrounds within that community. For instance, African immigrants constitute a meaningful proportion of the foreign-born Black immigrants in the United States (42%), but the prevalence of cancer in the African immigrant community itself is unknown. Therefore, without accurate cancer prevalence data, it is impossible to identify trends and other key factors that are needed to support the health of African immigrants and their children. Moreover, it is impossible to understand how the culture and language of subgroups influence their cancer-related health behavior. While research in this area is limited, the existing literature articulates the need for culturally responsive and culturally tailored cancer education for African immigrants and their adolescent children, which is what we advocate for in this viewpoint paper. Existing projects demonstrate the feasibility of culturally responsive programming for adults; however, few projects include or focus on adolescents or children born to African immigrants. To best meet the needs of this understudied community, researchers must use culturally competent interventions alongside familiar, usable media. For adolescents, technology is ubiquitous thus, the creation of a culturally tailored digital intervention has immense potential to improve cancer awareness and prevention for youth and their community. More research is needed to address many of the existing research gaps and develop a rich understanding of the unique experience of cancer among African immigrant families that can be used to inform intervention development. Through this viewpoint, we review the current state of cancer-related research among African immigrant families in the United States. In this paper, we acknowledge the current knowledge gaps and issues surrounding measurement and then discuss the factors relevant to designing an educational intervention targeted at African immigrants and the role of African immigrant youth.

The Tulumbe! Partnership: a case study in developing a community-led research agenda to address HIV among African immigrants in the United States.

Grassroots, community organizations are trusted resources within communities, which puts them in an ideal position to effectively engage individuals impacted by health inequities in defining meaningful research priorities. A community-centered approach to HIV research is critical for African immigrants living in the United States, who experience stigma and other socio-structural barriers to HIV prevention, care, and research engagement. Supporting community organizations with financial resources and capacity building activities to lead the development of research agendas ensures better alignment with community interests and fosters sustainability. We developed a community-initiated and -led research engagement project-Tulumbe!, which prioritized community leadership in all project activities. Community forums, health care provider and community questionnaires, interviews, and report-back sessions were held to examine the research interests and health concerns voiced by African immigrants. The iterative, community-led engagement process of more than 200 African immigrants, health providers, and researchers resulted in a community-defined research agenda with six areas of focus: family communication; self-efficacy for African immigrant women; deconstructing masculinity for African immigrant men; sexual health education for African immigrant youth; HIV stigma; and health literacy. Time, resources, and flexibility are needed to develop a viable community-led research partnership. Investing in community leadership not only produced a patient-centered research agenda but also led to community ownership of the process and results; thus, all partners were committed to sustaining the work.

Foregrounding black African immigrants in mathematics education research

Generally, research with Black youth/population in mathematics education have largely focused on their mathematics experiences in the context of United States with a special focus on issues of race/racism, equity, and social justice. While these studies are important and have informed our understanding of the schooling experiences of Black youth, there is a dearth of research with specificity on the mathematics learning experiences of Black African immigrant youth. In this paper, using duoethnography, we analyze our previous projects with Black African immigrant youth/families to argue for more nuances in the theoretical and methodological lenses when engaging with this population.

“At School, It's a Completely Different World”: African Immigrant Youth Agency and Negotiation of Their Adaptation Processes in US Urban Schools

African immigrant youth adaptation processes in US schools remain under-researched. Using qualitative case study, this article examines West African immigrant middle- and high-school youth adaptation experiences in US urban schools. Findings show that racialized experiences, English proficiency levels, and multilingualism affected social relationships (both supportive and conflicted) with families, communities, peers, and school contexts. These experiences crucially influenced African immigrant youths’ adaptation processes. Participants drew from community resources and developed resilience skills to negotiate acculturative stressors when seeking friendship, belonging, and an integrated sense of identity in their new home. Recommendations for further supporting positive adaptive strategies are discussed.

Aspiring to citizenship: African immigrant youth and civic participation in Cape Town, South Africa

Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Cape Town over four months, this article addresses the question of how African immigrant youth experience life and live as “citizens” in Cape Town. African immigrant youth straddle multiple positions, localities and identities. This article examines the ways youth activate citizenship and belonging through civic participation, often in the absence of formal citizenship. This research finds that youth are actively deciding to be the change they want to see in the world, looking backwards and forwards to determine their decision to participate in civic engagement. The youth’s notions of themselves and their aspirations impact not only their future life goals and dreams but drive their actions to contribute towards the betterment or improvement of their communities in the present. Civic participation through community engagement allows African immigrant youth to dream and access citizenship and become a part of society where they are recognised as contributing members.

“We Don’t Live In Jungles”: Mediating Africa as a Transnational Socio-Spatial Field

Background/Context: Amid rising immigration from the African continent to the United States, researchers have begun to explore the transnational identities and networks of African immigrants. There is a small body of literature about whether educational supports for immigrant youth are differentiated to address the particularities of African immigrant youth. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: Transnational theories presume that subjects use social networks to connect home and diaspora. They are encountering both perceived and lived social spaces to navigate belonging in and across space. This study asks, “How do youth from the African continent mediate transnational belonging in NYC?” Studying the experiences of youth has implications for the curricular and extracurricular spaces of schools wherein newcomer youth navigate how to belong in the diaspora. Population/Participants/Subjects: Research participants are 19 newcomer African youth from Centrafrique, Cote d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Guinea, Mauritania, Niger, and Senegal. Most of the youth are multilingual and speak French and English as third or fourth languages. Research Design: This qualitative study draws from participatory action research and visual methods. The study was conducted with Sankofa Club, a weekly afterschool student-led club. In the club, students responded to stereotypes by producing websites about the continent and carrying out research within the club to compare their homes and share their migration stories. Findings/Results: The article presents “Africa” as a Mediated Transnational Space, produced by hegemonic structures, that youth mediate as they connect homes. The study finds that youth wrestled with their identification as African. It reexamines transnationalism and positions Africa as a social field through which youth are produced (come to be) as African subjects, redress their belonging to that field by contributing their own symbols and experiences, and use it as they navigate an Africa-in-NYC that does not adhere to continental boundaries. Conclusions/Recommendations: Educators can support the belonging to home, Africa, and the United States by representing Africa as a generative space in curriculum and social practices.

Immigration Debated: Central African Immigrant Youth’s Discourses of Fairness and Civic Belonging in the United States

ABSTRACT For the past several decades, public attitudes toward immigrants in the United States have centered on questions of legality and documentation, as well as economic and social impacts of immigration, whether real or imagined, such as employment and criminality. How immigrants, writ large, perceive of and contribute to these debates is insufficiently understood and has been underexplored in research. In this article, we analyze the responses of Central African newcomer immigrant and refugee adolescents in the United States to anti-immigrant political discourse in the year and a half after the 2016 Trump presidential election. Through critical discourse analysis of focus group interviews with these youth, findings are interpreted through an integrated Western and postcolonial philosophical framework of fairness as it relates to legality, race, and inclusion. We conclude by offering implications for schools and their constituents, including civic education that occurs across the curriculum and affords students opportunities to grapple with global challenges related to distribution of power and resources, rights and responsibilities, and justice and injustice.

Locating a pedagogy of love: (re)framing pedagogies of loss in popular-media narratives of African immigrant communities

Recent contexts of migration for immigrant communities from African countries have comprised what sociologist April Gordon discussed as a “new diaspora of black Africans to the U.S.” (p. 84). Yet amid contemporary contexts of migration, popularized narratives of African immigrant youth consistently linger on deficit framings and “emphasize what a particular student, family, or community is lacking”. As the ongoing work of rendering visible narratives of possibility, we analyzed how the cultural and linguistic strengths of African immigrant communities are named (or not named) in popular-media narratives of African immigrant communities. We utilized King and Swartz frameworks for “Afrocentric praxis,” as discussed by Johnson et al. in evoking a “pedagogy of love” (p. 47), together with the theoretical lens of BlackCrit to examine popular-media narratives. In particular, we examine complex meanings of locating a pedagogy of love in popular-media narratives of African immigrant communities in the interplay of three themes: “eldering and communal responsibility,” “language as a colonial modality of loss,” and “envisioning a pedagogy of love as speculative seeing.” We conclude with productive implications for teaching, teacher education, and educational research.

“You don’t sound black” African immigrant youth experiences of discrimination in the labor market in Calgary

This paper aims to understand the factors promoting racial microaggression from the perspective of first-generation Black African immigrant youth in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Most of the literature on Blacks and other visible minorities [1] in Canada is centered on integration challenges, which have been identified in terms of socioeconomic and political marginalization. Within the context of immigrant challenges of navigating the job market, one realizes that many institutionalized factors influence access to opportunities. However, there is little research on immigrant youth, notably Black youth, and their experiences of racial microaggressions in Canadian society. This study fills this gap by offering an understanding of the experiences of microaggressions among Black African youth in Calgary. This city is arguably becoming increasingly diverse with the influx of immigrants from different countries and other Canadian provinces. Drawing on qualitative research methods (40 semistructured interviews with Ghanaian and Sudanese youth immigrants, 20 females and 20 males between the ages of 18 and 30 years), we incorporate meaningful insights from African immigrant youth on racial drivers of microaggressions. The analysis is grounded in critical race theory (CRT). Findings indicate that the youth face marginalization in the labor market during the hiring process (linguistic discrimination), discrimination at the workplace, and exclusion because their names are exploited as identity markers. Overall, policies advocating for an inclusive society need to be strengthened to address these inequalities that are ingrained in Canadian cities. [1] In this study, a visible minority is defined by the Government of Canada as ‘persons, other than aboriginal peoples, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour’ (Statistics Canada, 2015).

Cultural and linguistic experiences of immigrant youth: voices of African immigrant youth in United States Urban Schools

ABSTRACT This study explores experiences of 50 culturally and linguistically diverse African immigrant students attending public urban middle and high schools in the US. Drawing on in-depth interviews, and through constant comparison analysis, emerging findings highlight pedagogical, linguistic, and curricular variation struggles in the classroom; transitional contextual challenges; cultural mismatch; miscommunication, and stereotypes. In light of these experiences, African immigrant urban youth draw on familial, navigational and aspirational capital to resist stereotypical assumptions and to develop resilient skills necessary to navigate the inherent challenges. Findings underscore the importance of appreciating ways of knowing that deviate from the host country knowledges as instrumental to meeting the instructional needs of African immigrant students in United States schools.

“It’s Like They Don’t Recognize What I Bring to the Classroom”: African Immigrant Youths’ Multilingual and Multicultural Navigation in United States Schools

ABSTRACT Discourses of African immigrant children are rare in educational research. As such, African immigrant educational experiences are often obscured (in part, owing to the model minority myth about Africans based on higher education degrees received by African immigrants), as well as the actual experiences and realities for African immigrant K-12 students. This qualitative study examines cross-cultural educational experiences of 30 Black African immigrant youth in U.S. schools. The findings reveal multiple participants’ struggles with cultural and linguistic differences, stereotypes and marginalization in the school environment, low expectations from teachers, and adjusting to new schooling practices. The African youths’ voices exhibited development of resilience and navigation skills. Drawing on Alim and Paris’ culturally sustaining model, we propose recommendations and pedagogical implications for preparing globally competent teachers and teacher educators enabled and empowered to teach all 21st-century citizens, including African immigrants.

Identity Negotiation in Multilingual Contexts: A Narrative Inquiry into Experiences of an African Immigrant High School Student

Background/Context Inclusion of African immigrant youth voices in educational and research discourses remains rare despite the steady growth of this population in the United States over the past four decades. Consequently, the multilingual abilities of these youth remain typically unnoticed or ignored in the classroom, and little is specifically known about their histories, cultures, expectations, and achievements. Purpose Using the narrative inquiry approach and the Natural, Institutional, Discursive, Affinity, Learner, and Solidarity (NIDALS) theoretical lens, we explore the lived experiences of one African immigrant high school student in the midwestern United States. Research Design Using narrative inquiry, we qualitatively explored the lived cultural, racial, and ethnic identities and self-images experienced by a Ghanaian-born female high school student, Akosua (pseudonym), as she navigated and resisted identities ascribed to her in the midwestern U.S. Findings The student's narratives speak to issues of culture, identity, and self-image, as well as her literate life in multiple languages and literacy contexts in and out of school. The findings reveal narratives of ascribed identities, racialization, and perceived language hierarchies in the participant's daily life and indicate a need to challenge such narratives about African immigrant students and disrupt the reproduction of linguistic and racial inequality in the school system. Recommendations While school systems do follow state-sanctioned linguistic norms and ideologies, when educators draw on students’ experiences and funds of knowledge as resources already in the room in order to find ways of negotiating and disrupting language hierarchies and the ascribed identities they support, it allows all students, including multilinguals, to have their identity affirmed, even in school systems that have historically marginalized them. This, in turn, supports educational achievement, broadly realized, not only psychologically for all students but also economically and nationally for the country—a critical accomplishment in an era when educational quality in the U.S. is losing ground to foreign achievements.

Strategizing to Strengthen Social Inclusion: The Agency of Black African Immigrant Youth in Alberta, Canada

Strategizing to Strengthen Social Inclusion: The Agency of Black African Immigrant Youth in Alberta, Canada

Identity-Related Factors Affecting the Mental Health of African Immigrant Youth Living in Canada

In countries like Canada with significant immigrant populations, immigrant youth can have various experiences that impact their identity and mental health outcomes. This paper presents findings from a study that examined the perceptions of mental health among African immigrant youth living in Canada and the factors that affect their mental health outcomes, including identity-related factors. An interpretive description design was used and eight participants were recruited. Data were gathered through in-person and phone interviews. The paper focuses on the migration factors that affect African immigrant youths’ mental health. Three subthemes emerged from participants’ experiences: (a) social support; (b) discrimination and othering; and (c) identity and cultural shock. Using critical theory and intersectionality, the study showed that African immigrant youths’ identity and mental health were influenced by deeper socio-political and historical factors.

Great Expectations: Perspectives of Young West African Immigrant Men Transitioning to the Canadian Labour Market Without Postsecondary Education

This article employs a life course perspective to examine the life experiences—expectations, disappointments and second chances—of young men from West African immigrant families who did not complete postsecondary education. Specifically, it demonstrates the discrepancy between the education and career expectations that parents have for their sons and the men’s own expectations as they transitioned from high school to the labour market. Based on a larger qualitative study of the postsecondary education decisions of male African immigrant youth in Southern Ontario, Canada, the article highlights the life stories of 20 young men in Toronto who transitioned to adulthood in economically vulnerable families. The findings demonstrate that the young men took a non-linear path to the labour market.

Gender-Based Expectations and their Effect on Mental Health Amongst Black African Immigrant Young Men Living in Canada

Black African immigrant men’s mental health is relatively understudied. This article is part of a larger study that explored the perceptions of mental health amongst African immigrant youth living in Canada. Using an interpretive description methodology, underpinned by an intersectional and critical lens, this article addresses racial, societal, and cultural expectations that could have an effect on Black African immigrant men’s mental health. Eight men and women who self-identified as Black African immigrants between the ages of 18 and 25 participated in the overall study, while five participants contributed the data for this article. Masculinity as a determinant of health, the resilience of African men, and the intersections of identity and vulnerability are discussed. It is concluded that the stigma surrounding Black African men speaking out about their mental health warrants a deeper examination in relation to their mental health outcomes. Areas of further inquiry include exploring mental health service utilization amongst Black African immigrant men.

Exploring Factors That Facilitate Acculturation Strategies and Academic Success of West African Immigrant Youth in Urban Schools

Immigrant students in U.S. educational system experience challenges learning to adapt and integrate into new educational environments. Little is known, however, about factors that facilitate acculturation strategies of immigrant youth from West Africa and how they affect their academic success and challenges faced. Considering the current political discourse over the influence of immigration in U.S. schools, 20 immigrant youth from Ghana and Nigeria were recruited and interviewed in the metropolitan area of New York City. Analyses of semi-structured interviews revealed that teacher, parent, and peer support; social and electronic media; and extracurricular activities emerged as the factors that helped acculturation strategies and academic success. Challenging factors were dealing with sociocultural differences; discrimination, stress, and social integration; and language differences. The article discusses the implications of these findings for teachers to understand acculturation strategies to help West African immigrant youth to adapt, acculturate, and integrate into new school environments.

Selective acculturation among low-income second-generation West Africans

ABSTRACTPrior research on the acculturation processes of the children of Black immigrants has focused on adult children from middle-class backgrounds. This raises questions about the experiences of adolescent children of immigrants from low-income backgrounds. To address this gap, this article draws on interviews with 71 West African high school students from working-class backgrounds in New York City. I find that African immigrant youth selectively acculturate into their American communities and highlight three mechanisms driving this process; adoption of American cultural features, distinction from their non-African counterparts and addition to the American cultural pool. I offer three cultural features that elucidate each mechanism respectively; cuisine, language, and fashion. I also show that racism structures acculturation and limits cultural agency. These findings highlight that selective acculturation is not exclusive to the children of middle-class Black immigrants, but also occurs for their working-class counterparts. Moreover, I underscore the cultural contributions immigrants and their children make to their host society and the mutual cultural reconstitution that occurs such that both immigrants’ ethnic culture and the cultural landscape of their host communities are fundamentally transformed.

It is tough to be a Liberian refugee in Staten Island, NY: the importance of context for second generation African immigrant youth

ABSTRACTThis long-term ethnographic study about the Liberian refugee community in Staten Island, NY shows that their integration and identity formation are not only influenced by race, but also by the context of reception [Portes, Alejandro, and Rubén G. Rumbaut. 1996. Immigrant America: A Portrait. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press]. Second generation Liberian Americans have to deal with a number of sources of stigma, leading them to distance themselves from their African heritage. As the children of refugees, they endure taunts associated with this label. The term ‘refugee’ for Blacks in the U.S. has often been equated with being an economic burden. In addition, images of the civil war that raged in Liberia still predominate in the media. Due to the war, many Liberian parents never completed their formal education and thus are illiterate, forcing them to work as home health aides, another cause of shame for the second generation. Finally, the geographical context also matters for Liberian American youth. Seeking to escape discrimination from African Americans in their neighborhoods, they often embrace a ‘Black’ identity, de-emphasizing their African heritage. However, this is to limited effect. Outside of their neighborhood, in greater Staten Island, being ‘Black’ is yet another stigma.