This paper briefly reflects on intersectionality’s travels to two distinct locales in the Global South, India and South Africa, where it has been enthusiastically taken up by academics and activists alike.
This paper traces the genealogy of the New Right from its earlier inception in the late 1980s and early 1990s, unravelling the core features of the 'New Right' that can be demonstrated to be relevant for current day South Africa.
The presentation, examining the economic and infrastructural performance of Cape Town, Johannesburg and Nelson Mandela Bay will refer to the data in the attached slides.
In the late 1990s, as the hearings of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) began, stories of past abuse, including sexual violence, within the exiled camps of the African National Congress (ANC) emerged.
Artificial intelligence systems are being developed to identify known ‘criminals’ through facial recognition profiling, and also to identify criminal physiognomies of those considered to be potential criminals.
A considerable amount of research shows that drugs in colonial settings drew groups into relations of dependence—that is, they acted as ‘labour inducers’ and ‘labour enhancers’ in the words of Jankowiak and Bradburd.
Silicosis has troubled the South African mining industry since the 1880s. Since 1902, several commissions of inquiry have investigated this problem but none of them recommended common-law liability as an appropriate mechanism for compensating victims.
Ibn Rushd’s the Decisive Treatise (1126–98) is widely acknowledged as an important text for understanding his legal ideas, with some scholars describing this text as a legal opinion (fatwa) issued for the Malikite jurists of that period.
This paper takes a fresh look at the relationship between the ANC and the Soviet Union, using archival records, interviews, and memoirs from both South Africa and Russia.
As part of a larger project on a global history and critique of “efficiency”, in this presentation I argue that the plantation constitutes a model of “development” that still haunts us.
Wage work, it is said, is disappearing in the “ new ” age of capital, to rising alarm across the world. Yet there is little agreement about why, where, or in what measure. Or what might take its place in the fore- seeable future.
This paper examines the formation and early development of the University of Dar es Salaam and the University of Zambia in relation to the larger project of producing a professional workforce for nation building in Tanzania and Zambia.
In this paper, I outline a certain landscape of the judicialization of health in South Africa. The “judicialization of health” refers to ways in which claims to health are made through the law (Biehl and Petryna 2011).
This paper is a work-in-progress. It arises from a larger study of what the medical literature labels “metabolic disorders” in different African sites that has expanded into a consideration of metabolic systems as social as well as biological phenomena.
From the 1960s to the present, South Africa offered a site for neoliberals to think through the conditions necessary to preserve the market order, especially under conditions of what they perceived as the problem of white minority and even white decline.
This paper examines the ways in which the people of northern Tshwane mediate their exclusions through engaging with the Mabopane Station to reach different places and to carry out socio-economic activities at the Station itself.
For a long time measuring and thus shaping populations was a privilege of governments and an articulation of sovereignty. It was mainly governments who could establish the necessary infrastructure to quantify population.
The chapter is part of my forthcoming book A Dam for Africa: The Volta River Project and Modernization in Ghana (Indiana University Press), which explores the history of the Akosombo Dam, the country’s largest development project, completed in 1965.
The history of South Africa’s major economic policy debates since the 1980s, as well as the related story of post-apartheid poverty and inequality statistics, could be fruitfully interpreted through the lens of financialization (Feher, Davis) and in light of the naked lo
This paper is a work in progress. I offer an ethnographic account of everyday encounters with the state in Cameroon that, following Harold D. Lasswell, I describe as a garrison state.
The article explores the transfer of knowledge and technological innovation by Eskom, the state owned vertically integrated South African power utility in South Africa and the rest of the continent in the period between 1997 and 2005 as forms of techno-nationalism, techno-globalisation and techno
In the aftermath of the Angola's twenty-seven year civil war, the Angolan state launched a countrywide 'national reconstruction' programme, investing in large-scale infrastructure and housing as a means, it claimed, of stabilising the economy and reversing the worst material effects o
This paper considers two questions: 1) can ethnography be used to understand global processes or is its rootedness in time and place fatal? 2) What is policing - who exercises power through it and to what ends?
Whilst social protection policy has long been shaped and sometimes driven by international or transnational actors, in the 2000s these actors assumed new importance.
Speculative fiction is one of the most diverse and complex genres of African literature today. Its contributors come from all across Sub-Saharan Africa, and the range of topic covered is astounding.
This paper examines ideas about solidarity that have been generated by the South African government’s proposals to create a National Health Insurance (NHI) Fund.
