This article is based on the accounts of a group of children who work at an artisanal gold mining site. Their work is potentially harmful; yet, it is also the means by which they attempt to access their rights to education and other opportunities. The article argues that child labour preventative efforts must recognize and address this complication. This is in order to develop interventions that unquestionably serve some working children’s best interests.

This paper is a critique of the dominant anti-trafficking discourse and activism in Ghana. It argues that the discourse grossly underplays the role of external forces in shaping the conditions underpinning children's labour mobility in the past and the hardships underpinning the phenomenon today. In place of critical analysis and understanding, anti-child-trafficking campaigns employ melodramatic 'shock and awe' tactics and a tendency to blame local culture or traditions for activists' claims of 'pervasive' child trafficking in the country. The paper suggests that dominant anti-trafficking discourse and activism in Ghana thus reinvigorate historic and persistent external causal agents of inequality which drive Ghanaian children's labour mobility today. The paper demonstrates this problem and offers correctives to it.

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Okyere, Samuel (2017) A note on versions:The version presented here may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the repository url above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription. AbstractThis article contributes to debates on the practicality and utility of prior ethical review in ethnography and qualitative research using an ethnography of children's involvement in artisanal gold mining work in Ghana as a case study. Reflecting on dilemmas and obstacles encountered in attempts to employ prescribed institutional ethical guidance modelled for childhood research in the UK during the fieldwork, the discussion brings to attention some of the problems that can arise when ethical guidance is not anchored in the lived realities or value systems of the setting in which fieldwork is conducted. The article seeks to rejuvenate calls for more flexible and socio-culturally responsive ethical review and practice as an alternative to the prescriptive ethical regimes.

Main purpose/theme of session : This session will focus on the historical and political complexities and ambiguities of defining slavery and its relationship to inequality, exploitation and subordination. It will set up and frame the themes of the conference by exploring what is constructed as the opposite of slavery, the development of the binary between slavery and freedom, and the content of that freedom, particularly in relation to labour and belonging. Speakers from Philosophy and English will consider the connections between old and new slaveries, and reflect on the shifts and continuities in the ways in which slavery is socially imagined and politically contested.