Becoming a State actor:
Production of state awareness among Prison Officers in Ghana
Marlene’s PhD-project focuses on processes of becoming a prison officer and the production of state awareness in the everyday of prison staff in Ghana. Ghana is an interesting case to study as existing research has shown that Ghanaian civil servants have a strong commitment to the ‘good of the nation’, despite African state institutions often being portrayed as dysfunctional in inter-/ national discourses. Based on a twelve months ethnographic research in the Prisons Service, Marlene‘s project takes negotiations of proximity and practices of commensality between state actors as a starting point to understand the production of state awareness. Her project combines anthropological approaches to state, related debates on bureaucracy and the civil service, and prison ethnographies.