ABSTRACT
This book departs from a mainstream position which represents in-school pregnancy in opposition to education and schooling: the latter are associated with notions of progress and development, while pregnancy works against individual and social progress, being synonymous with backwardness and tradition. In this chapter, I consider the research context of this study, defining its boundaries within the interconnections between development, education, and gender. The chapter then focuses on teenage pregnancy, by carrying out a tracing exercise, which identifies the emergence of teenage pregnancy as a problem in the West. This position established a norm against which most countries are to be assessed, despite different histories and socio-cultural values (Macleod, 2003). The value of this chapter, however, is to bring to the fore local understandings of pregnancy, which offer a necessary interlocutor to the global conceptual framework. These often position pregnancy at the core of identity formation (Mikell, 1997; Iliffe, 2005), as a rite of passage which identifies the onset of adulthood (Osório & Cruz e Silva, 2008; Mkhwanazi, 2010) in a context where traditional rites of passage tend to be performed less and less due to a more general prescription for the modernisation of traditional societies (Harcourt, 1997, p. 12).
