Changing Cities: Climate, Youth, and Land Markets in Urban Areas
are highly representational of Senegalese urban youth (who, for the purposes of this study, are defined as fifteen to thirty years of age). Of the two females, Khadija was an eighteen-year-old high school graduate and Amina was a twenty-eight-year-old master’s student at a private business school. Of the two males, Jean, twenty-four, was an English student at the public university; and Amadou, twenty-one, had no formal education except for learning English. Amadou, Jean, and Amina lived in Dakar’s urban agglomeration and were all urban migrants from different regions. The fourth participant, Khadija, lived in a large town of about 30,000 people located roughly three hours from Dakar, which was a regional center and highlights the importance of urban sites outside the capital. Amadou, Jean, and Amina represented different ethnic minority groups and spoke multiple national languages, whereas Khadija belonged to the Wolof majority and spoke Wolof and French. Because Amadou never attended formal school and grew up in a village with little exposure to French, he was unable to speak French, a rarity for young urban dwellers today. Amadou attended a total of seven ECs, Jean attended three, Amina attended two, and Khadija attended one. As a researcher, I constantly acknowledged how my status as a racial, religious, and linguistic outsider both facilitated and impeded access to certain spaces (Kvale 2007). Language barriers also challenged the assurance of high-quality data because interviews occurred in either French or English, with a fair degree of code-switching that also involved Wolof. My high-level of French and Wolof, along with rigorous data triangulation, enabled me to clarify misunderstandings. Learning in Senegalese ECs
The youth interviewed for this study demonstrated many of the characteristics of urban African youth, though their personal trajectories reflected the sociogeographic realities of urban Senegal. Unemployed and seeking education for future job placement, all the participants expressed fears for the future and saw English as increasing their possibility of securing a highpaying job. They also saw English as a critical tool for engaging globally and used the language as a means of self-identification from other youth. Khadija and Jean both felt that knowing English made them “special” and set them apart from peers that only knew a national language or French. For all participants, learning English was an important capability, which | 86 |