Africa Seminar: The Social Navigation of Teenage Pregnancy and Motherhood in Adonkia, Sierra Leone

In celebration of her PhD achievement at CAS, Hamida Massaquoi will deliver a lecture titled ‘The Social Navigation of Teenage Pregnancy and Motherhood in Adonkia, Sierra Leone’. The lecture will be followed by comments from Professor Susan Whyte from the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen. A reception with snacks and drinks will take place afterwards at CAS.

Abstract:

In Sierra Leone, teenage pregnancy is commonly framed as a health crisis or risk within public health and development discourses. This research challenges these narrow framings of teenage pregnancy by situating them within the lived realities of girls and their families, and by demonstrating how cultural, moral and relational factors shape girls’ reproductive experiences and future trajectories. Drawing on eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork in Adonkia, Sierra Leone, the research explores how pregnancy and early motherhood are interpreted, managed and reproduced within kinship networks, religious value systems, and gendered expectations.

This seminar sheds light on the concept of reproductive misfortune to understand uncertainty and social reproduction. Rather than perceiving misfortune as a negative, individualised experience, the concept illustrates the shifting narratives and religious meaning-making that acknowledge the challenging and generative trajectories girls and their families navigate in their pursuit of security. By combining this concept with the analytic lenses of social navigation and gender performativity, the seminar discusses how young mothers actively negotiate pregnancy, motherhood, schooling and respectability in contexts marked by poverty and different layers of uncertainty.

The seminar contributes to interdisciplinary debates across anthropology, African studies, gender studies, public health and development studies, showing how teenage pregnancy exceeds its framing as a public health concern, thereby broadening the discourse on teenage reproduction, providing a more holistic understanding of reproduction as a socially embedded and negotiated process in contemporary Sierra Leone.