My concern here is a small, but important slice of the South African Anthropocene: the undermining, by coal mining, of the sub-surface of Sasolburg, the South African company town set up in the 1950s by the apartheid state.
The systemic nature of corruption in local government needs to be understood it terms of the social and economic forces acting on the state, particularly the formation of new classes and elites within the dynamics of the South African political transition.
Debt cancellation and land redistribution were not just demands of revolutionary movements in ancient times. In South Africa redistribution of land is at the heart of contemporary activism, enlivened by recent moves towards a new Expropriation Bill.
Kant’s philosophy centrally focusses on trying to give an a priori account of conditions of the possibility of various human phenomena, including metaphysics, empirical knowledge, there being moral reasons and the nature of just political power.
The global rise of Pentecostalism and other relatively charismatic forms of Christianity has prompted extensive commentary in the social sciences, whether through the lens of syncretic cultural practice, psychological experiences of transcendence, or the socioeconomic logics of millennial capital
In this talk, I argue that the psychoanalytic concepts of shame and envy—when framed at the societal level—are not only among the principal drivers of violence in South Africa, they are also responses to violence in the broadest sense of the term, that is, violence understood as &ldqu
Please do not circulate or quote since this is work in progress. It is the draft of a book prospectus in the making. I hope that our discussion will help me to improve it.
Social protest is not a new phenomenon in Ghana, as protests have been from pre-independence era as a tool of engagement between the citizens and the state.
NWFZs are a firm feature of the global nuclear political landscape, affecting territories from Africa to Latin America, and from the South Pacific to Southeast Asia. Yet traditional and critical scholars alike have under-valued the importance of this occurrence.
This paper seeks to answer the following question: (1) how does the concept of ‘the state’ obfuscate our understandings of the causes of (socio)political instability? The paper critically engages existing literature on ‘the state’ in order to shed light on existing definitions of the concept.
This contribution offers some observations with regard to political identities in a pop- ular movement largely based in the shantytowns of Durban, South Africa.
The role of trust in long-distance trade has long been a topic of scholarly inquiry and debate amongst economists, sociologists and historians. Much of this literature hinges on the social, legal and economic structures that undergird – if not obviate – the concept of trust.
Under the emergence of modernity, captivity, or more precisely, its dynamic traces a living experience of the new; the production or invention of the americas as the new.
This paper operationalises a concept of nourishment in relation to an ethnographic account of a day at a soup kitchen in Kylemore, in the Dwars river Valley, South Africa.
The international financial system is one of the most powerful forces shaping both the global economy and the domestic political economy in many countries around the world.
This paper deals with ways of approaching architecture within the shifting uncertainties of the giant Congolese capital. Taking a cue from Kinshasa, I will make a case for being receptive to what the current situation of built matter in urban space has to say.
In Mozambican bureaucratic practice “arquivo morto”, literally translated as “dead archive” refers to a site where documents that are inactive or have been taken out of circulation are kept before they are eventually destroyed.
In 1952, the General Assembly of the United Nations (UN) agreed to establish a commission to study the “racial situation” in South Africa, a topic that had been raised in the organization since 1946, when India first brought the “treatment of Indians” under white rule to t
Transformation is a topical issue within cricket circles in South Africa and will continue to remain so until there is redress. The study of cricket and transformation can be viewed as a social metaphor that allows for the analysis on socio- economic issues in the country.
The transition in South Africa from apartheid to a constitutional democracy with equal rights for all has been described and celebrated in innumerable accounts. The best overview is probably Patti Waldmeir’s, Anatomy of a Miracle.
South Africa’s legal system maintains its legitimacy despite the commonplace experiences of injustice that take place at the hands of the criminal justice system.
Governing Islam traces the colonial roots of contemporary struggles between Islam and secularism in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The book uncovers the paradoxical workings of colonial laws that promised to separate secular and religious spheres, but instead fostered their vexed entanglement.
[An extract in place of an abstract:] How then might one talk about the ‘reading’ that Customs official undertook from an OOO or speculative realist position? Most obviously, officials were object-oriented.
The idea of a specific configuration called an “African Political Theology” (henceforth APT) raises a number of interrelated questions centred on definition (nomenclature), tradition (relationships), and development (sustainability).
This paper proposes the oceanic south to navigate various conceptions of southness, while registering a more turbulent alterity and materiality than they sometimes admit.
Over the last decade, the Wits School of Clinical Medicine has increased efforts to develop a new generation of doctors who produce research, or who are at least research-literate.
Suspicion. The term evokes so many moods, so much affect, used as ways of reading the world: uncertainty, fear, anxiety, doubt, and the unknown. But also their opposites: faith, trust, confidence, certainty, the known and knowable. Is suspicion the defining feature of our times?
