Ellison Tjirera
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Ellison Tjirera is a Namibian by birth. He holds an MA in Sociology from the University of Namibia (2012). Tjirera has been a Research Associate at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), a Windhoek-based think tank since 2009 when he co-authored Not Speaking Out: Measuring National Assembly Performance and later went on to complete research on Gender and Parliament commissioned by the government and the UNFPA. He joined WiSER as a Ph.D. Fellow in July 2013. His academic interests include urban sociology/studies, post-apartheid societies, parliamentary democracy, gender studies and governance issues broadly conceived. For his Ph.D. project, Ellison sought to understand what kind of a city Windhoek is. He explored the latter using as a point of departure the intersection between the so-called informal traders and the authorities, and how in turn this intersection is rendered in artistic forms. In 2019, Ellison earned his Ph.D. in Sociology from Wits with a thesis titled 'Writing Windhoek - Multiple Representations of a City'. Tjirera is currently a sociology lecturer at the University of Namibia, Windhoek.