Warped Intimacies, Vulnerability, and Psychic Absorptions: The Spiritual and Political Lives of Ghanaian Youth Under the Global Order

This paper examines religion as an affective, digital, and political practice through which young Ghanaians attempt to navigate economic precarity and global inequality. Focusing on Christian youth in Accra, ages 18-35, the study interrogates how spirituality mediates psychic life and how religious practices and spaces function as modes of survival and social networks, as places of belonging, identity, and ethical formation. As Africa’s youth population rapidly expands, this research examines youth as a social category formed through technological ambiguities, structural failures, and uncertain futures, global ecological pressures, and declining mental health. To make sense of Africa’s religious landscape, the research introduces the language of “warped intimacies” and argues that Ghanaian youth’s high religiosity reveals a reconfiguration of social relations toward religious figures and institutions. This project aims to unearth the material and affective consequences of transnational economic and theological forces on the lives of young Ghanaians.