Linking young people’s precarious labour, migration, and their social mobility in Ghana: attending to temporality and trajectories

This paper contributes to debates on temporality and the social mobility trajectories of independent child migrants and working children, drawing on findings from research conducted in 2022 with young adults who participated in an earlier study in 2010 as children working in artisanal gold mining in Ghana. The findings show that national and global economic conditions, not childhood work, have shaped the participants’ (im)mobility experiences and trajectories over the past 12 years. Based on this longitudinal evidence, the paper challenges the widely held view that child labour in and of itself creates enduring adverse effects on children’s social mobility trajectories. It argues that this understanding reflects a simple cause-and-effect linear temporal logic, which fails to consider the enduring impact of structural factors on working children’s trajectories. This understanding also incorrectly interprets social mobility trajectories that do not follow a linear, continuously upward trajectory as failures. The paper’s central thrust is that the temporality of progress and working children’s social and spatial trajectories should be understood as a complex, dynamic process rather than a fixed outcome predictable or predetermined by their participation in precarious labour at specific moments in time.