Description:

How do children of migrant parents grapple with the multiple, and sometimes contradictory, moral expectations they encounter at home and abroad? What can their practical struggles tell us about the ways they reproduce transnational kinship and experience integration?

Join us for a Buffett Book Talk with anthropologist Chelsie Yount on Selective Solidarity: Children and Middle-Class Moralities in Transnational Senegal (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025), her ethnography of Senegalese households in Paris and Dakar that analyzes ways families negotiate transnational kinship. Yount will share insights into how global inequalities change the ways transnational families negotiate “economic moralities,” or expectations about material obligations. She will detail experiences of family life in global capitalism, focusing on middle-class downward mobility to highlight the ways socioeconomic relations are redefined as resources stretch thin.

This event is co-sponsored by the Program of African Studies, part of the Office for Research at Northwestern University.

About the author

Chelsie Yount is a postdoctoral fellow at Leiden University in the Netherlands. She earned a PhD in anthropology in 2017 at Northwestern University and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Her work in linguistic and economic anthropology provides insights on morality in economic relations, offering an analysis of processes of value creation between global markets and households in Africa.

Please note that 720 University Place is not an ADA-accessible space. Increasing physical access to buildings and facilities is a goal of the University, but not all buildings and venues have been updated at this time.