Transnational, Agentive, and Connected: Anglophone Cameroonian Women in Migration, Communication, and Conflict

Extant literature chiefly portrays (African) women as passive or unnoticed stakeholders and men as prominent actors in today’s world experiencing record migration, proliferation of new communication technologies, and increased armed conflict. However, this dissertation – based on my ethnographic research among Anglophone Cameroonian women in Maryland and Virginia (USA) and their salient networks (especially in Cameroon) – challenges this view by revealing women’s agentive engagement in migration, communication, and conflict. Key findings highlight these fields comprising very gendered processes that reinforce, modify, and change women’s sociocultural roles and identities to varying degrees as horizontal power increasingly supersedes vertical power. In response, the women calculatedly adopt hybrid identities, strategically negotiate relationships/ networks, and utilize new/social media due to its near-ubiquity, affordances (usable features), and horizontal accessibility. Their actions further lead to highly mediatized transnational and conflict-related endeavors that contest understandings of nation and conflict as restricted to geographical borders. I equally introduce three terms in the dissertation: online mothering, strategic (in)visibility, and strategic communicative (in)visibility. Online mothering describes how women tactically employ new communication technologies to perform parenting even at a distance, thus facilitating their access to paid labor without jeopardizing their domestic roles. Likewise, strategic (in)visibility captures how within conflict (the Anglophone Crisis), women deliberately expose or conceal their or others’ identities, sometimes simultaneously, to safely navigate tense terrains and deploy covert and overt sociopolitical power. This translates to strategic communicative (in)visibility in their online activities, facilitated by the media’s ability to concurrently hide and reveal its users. Through these practices, the women accentuate and subvert notions of womanhood and their bodies, and utilize voice, collective memory, and multiple identities to disarm the wider public, counter dominant male-centered realities, and earn a place within peace negotiations and future politics. Overall, the dissertation centers the vitalness of meaningfully including women (as agentive, diverse stakeholders instead of homogenous tokens), the diaspora, and new/social media in migration and conflict studies and ventures seeking long-lasting peace. It also advocates for understanding peace beyond the absence of direct violence to more holistic wellbeing and social justice in everyday life even within societies with limited physical violence. It further attests to notions and practices of womanhood increasingly becoming more complex, thus contesting women’s hitherto simplified portrayals, complicating dichotomized empowerment-disempowerment discourses, and cementing the salience of more intersectional approaches to their experiences, vital for understanding better what being human, and woman, mean in the 21st century.