Buffett Book Talk with Chelsie Yount on Selective Solidarity: Children & Middle-Class Moralities in Transnational Senegal
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?
At our recent Buffett Book Talk with anthropologist Chelsie Yount, she shared insights from 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 was co-sponsored by Northwestern University's Program of African Studies.