Yaa Oparebea Ampofo

Yaa Oparebea Ampofo (she/her) is a PhD student in the Department of Educational Policy Studies and a Planetary Health Scholar through the Global Health Institute and the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. She also holds an BA in Environmental Studies from Yale University. With a concentration in Comparative and International Education (CIE), her interests lie at the intersection of education decolonization, environmental studies, and sustainable development discourses. She is particularly interested in engaging with diverse and heterogenous frameworks of human-earth relations, well-being, and socio-ecological change. Her doctoral research explores representations of environmental and sustainability education across various discursive spaces in Ghana. Specifically, she examines how Ghanaian youth construct meanings about human-earth relations and well-being in the context of their routines and responsibilities, though different communal, ecological, and institutional nodes (eg the extended family, schools, labor and social spaces, and religious settings). Yaa’s pre-dissertation fieldwork in Ghana will focus on the work of faith-based environmental movements and how youth are participating in and navigating these spaces. Her hope is that through such work, we might imagine radically different and decolonizing pedagogies and policies for supporting youth across the continent in managing their needs and the needs of the planet, to be able to respond to the very rapid socio-ecological changes that are reshaping life across the world.

Check out Yaa’s post-fellowship report here.