Using historical-ethnographical methods, and a spatial lens, my research aims to provide an original perspective on the social roots of everyday inequalities in health, education, addiction, and labour--that is I am concerned with documenting, theorizing, and challenging "structural violence." I hope to unravel the political economic forces at work while recording, with all the contradictions of a white man undertaking the research, the humanity and struggles of marginalized groups. Focused on South Africa, a country I have had the privilege of working in for more than 30 years, my research thus addresses how acts embedded in sexuality, friendship, labour, families, education, and addiction, are shaped by and shape social and spatial inequalities. I am/have been involved in four areas of research.
Labour and Industrial Restructuring
I worked for a union in the U.K. before studying for a Master's Degree in South Africa and have a longstanding interest in labour issues. My Masters degree was a critique of post-fordist industrial restructuring models in South Africa.
The Political Economy of Intimacy and AIDS
My 2010 book Love in the Time of AIDS (Indiana and University of KwaZulu-Natal Presses) is based on ethnographic work from 2000-9 in an “informal settlement” and "township" in South Africa where around 1 in 3 residents are HIV positive. It is an attempt to write a political economy analysis of AIDS but to understand the embodiment of inequality in emotions and everyday practices, including love. I am critical of simplistic political economy and gender models in understanding AIDS in "Africa"--a continent long seen as diseased and loveless.
Families, Race and the Marketization of Basic Education
When apartheid ended in 1994, the ANC government placed education at the centre of its plans to build a nonracial and more equitable society. Yet by the 2010s a wave of student protests—beginning with the #RhodesmustFall movement—voiced powerful demands for decolonised and affordable education. Drawing on ethnography, archival research, and more than 500 interviews, this project followed families and schools in Durban over nearly a decade. Shedding new light on South Africa’s political transition and the global phenomenon of education marketisation, the study rejects simple descriptions of the country’s move from “race to class apartheid.” It reveals how “white” phenotypic traits like skin colour retain value in the schooling system even as the multiracial middle class embraces prestigious linguistic and embodied practices the book calls “white tone.” But the story is also one of family love and sacrifice: white parents’ efforts to preserve past educational privileges and the rise of the “black tax”—the support black wage earners provide to families who fund school fees and other expenses. This project will result in a book published in January 2019 by Cambridge University Press called Race for Education: Gender, White Tone, and Schooling in South Africa. Here and here are some shorter pieces I have written.
The Sociality of Heroin Use
This study, which I am just beginning, evolves from work in Umlazi Township which since the 2010s has been shaken by two powerful forces: first, thousands of residents, mostly young men, became addicted to a low-grade heroin drug known locally as whoonga; second, a process of estrangement began as whoonga addicts came to be labelled by some community and family members as amaphara—a new word some believe derived from “parasites” because addicts were characterized as sucking resources from communities and families to fuel their addiction. Whoonga took hold of South Africa with devastating speed, taking a wrenching toll on communities throughout the country. My aim is to understand the rise of Whoonga use and the construction of amaphara--and to use these as a window into questions of race, gender, and power in post-apartheid South Africa. Here is a short piece I wrote on the labour roots of whoonga.
University Worlds
University Worlds is an interdisciplinary, two-year, SSHRC funded project that explores a deceptively simple question: what is a university? We follow this question into lecture halls, boardrooms, student group meetings, planning documents, and archives to develop a complex but vivid portrait of Toronto’s largest academic institution. See universityworlds.ca.
Two recent reports I co-authored are on why students drop out of UTSC, and equity and online learning.
Labour and Industrial Restructuring
I worked for a union in the U.K. before studying for a Master's Degree in South Africa and have a longstanding interest in labour issues. My Masters degree was a critique of post-fordist industrial restructuring models in South Africa.
The Political Economy of Intimacy and AIDS
My 2010 book Love in the Time of AIDS (Indiana and University of KwaZulu-Natal Presses) is based on ethnographic work from 2000-9 in an “informal settlement” and "township" in South Africa where around 1 in 3 residents are HIV positive. It is an attempt to write a political economy analysis of AIDS but to understand the embodiment of inequality in emotions and everyday practices, including love. I am critical of simplistic political economy and gender models in understanding AIDS in "Africa"--a continent long seen as diseased and loveless.
Families, Race and the Marketization of Basic Education
When apartheid ended in 1994, the ANC government placed education at the centre of its plans to build a nonracial and more equitable society. Yet by the 2010s a wave of student protests—beginning with the #RhodesmustFall movement—voiced powerful demands for decolonised and affordable education. Drawing on ethnography, archival research, and more than 500 interviews, this project followed families and schools in Durban over nearly a decade. Shedding new light on South Africa’s political transition and the global phenomenon of education marketisation, the study rejects simple descriptions of the country’s move from “race to class apartheid.” It reveals how “white” phenotypic traits like skin colour retain value in the schooling system even as the multiracial middle class embraces prestigious linguistic and embodied practices the book calls “white tone.” But the story is also one of family love and sacrifice: white parents’ efforts to preserve past educational privileges and the rise of the “black tax”—the support black wage earners provide to families who fund school fees and other expenses. This project will result in a book published in January 2019 by Cambridge University Press called Race for Education: Gender, White Tone, and Schooling in South Africa. Here and here are some shorter pieces I have written.
The Sociality of Heroin Use
This study, which I am just beginning, evolves from work in Umlazi Township which since the 2010s has been shaken by two powerful forces: first, thousands of residents, mostly young men, became addicted to a low-grade heroin drug known locally as whoonga; second, a process of estrangement began as whoonga addicts came to be labelled by some community and family members as amaphara—a new word some believe derived from “parasites” because addicts were characterized as sucking resources from communities and families to fuel their addiction. Whoonga took hold of South Africa with devastating speed, taking a wrenching toll on communities throughout the country. My aim is to understand the rise of Whoonga use and the construction of amaphara--and to use these as a window into questions of race, gender, and power in post-apartheid South Africa. Here is a short piece I wrote on the labour roots of whoonga.
University Worlds
University Worlds is an interdisciplinary, two-year, SSHRC funded project that explores a deceptively simple question: what is a university? We follow this question into lecture halls, boardrooms, student group meetings, planning documents, and archives to develop a complex but vivid portrait of Toronto’s largest academic institution. See universityworlds.ca.
Two recent reports I co-authored are on why students drop out of UTSC, and equity and online learning.