Carina Tenewaa Kanbi is a PhD candidate in ARUA’s Mobility and Sociality in Africa’s emerging urban cohort at the African Centre for Migration and Society (ACMS), based at the University of Witwatersrand. She is an out-of-seat student predominantly based in Accra, Ghana. Before joining ACMS, Carina worked in international education, focusing on employability initiatives across the continent. 

Carina holds a Master’s of Arts in Politics from the University of Glasgow and a Master’s of Science degree in Migration and Ethnicity Studies from the Department of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam. Carina’s Master’s thesis focused on migrant decision-making and settlement of West Africans non-Ghanaians within Accra. She is passionate about mobility and settlement in African cities with the focus of her work throughout being intraregional and continental migrations.

Her doctoral thesis titled ‘The West African Wave: Understanding Creative Cosmopolitanism, Lifeworlds, and Mobility within the Continent’s Cultural Capitals’. Carina’s thesis focuses on belonging, translocalism, placemaking and mobility between and within West African cities. Her study looks to explore the boundaries of place, exploring how African cities are becoming deterritorialised and the subsequent impact on civic engagement, connections, imaginations and identity. Through the voices of West African creatives, her study will explore how these individuals operate within urban areas and whether they adopt a global, translocal or idiosyncratic formation with a specific focus on translocalism of ideas and people.