Using historical-ethnographical methods, my research foregrounds the political economy of everyday life. Its key concern is with how intimate politics of everyday living—acts embedded in sexuality, friendship, families, and other bonds—are shaped by and shaping 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 Masters 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 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. Here is a link to more details on the book, including reviews.
Families, Race and the Marketization of Basic Education
In an era when free-market ideologies have infiltrated mass education systems across the globe, my research addresses a deceptively simple question: “Why do children travel so much for schooling in South Africa?” Now, twenty years after the country’s first nonracial elections, some children spend more time in minibus taxis than in classrooms, and some schools plow thousands of rand into sports bursaries to attract “desirable” students. Indeed, perhaps no other country moved so quickly from a planned, segregated educational system to a highly marketized system. Yet advancing social justice demands that we conceive of the education market as simultaneously economic and cultural, and entangled with the dynamics of family life. In doing so, it provides a unique lens into South African society at a time when recent student protests fundamentally challenge the political settlement that led to Nelson Mandela’s “rainbow nation.” That is the study uses schooling as a lens into questions of race, class, and symbolic power. The book for this project is nearing completion.
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.
Labour and Industrial Restructuring
I worked for a union in the U.K. before studying for a Masters 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 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. Here is a link to more details on the book, including reviews.
Families, Race and the Marketization of Basic Education
In an era when free-market ideologies have infiltrated mass education systems across the globe, my research addresses a deceptively simple question: “Why do children travel so much for schooling in South Africa?” Now, twenty years after the country’s first nonracial elections, some children spend more time in minibus taxis than in classrooms, and some schools plow thousands of rand into sports bursaries to attract “desirable” students. Indeed, perhaps no other country moved so quickly from a planned, segregated educational system to a highly marketized system. Yet advancing social justice demands that we conceive of the education market as simultaneously economic and cultural, and entangled with the dynamics of family life. In doing so, it provides a unique lens into South African society at a time when recent student protests fundamentally challenge the political settlement that led to Nelson Mandela’s “rainbow nation.” That is the study uses schooling as a lens into questions of race, class, and symbolic power. The book for this project is nearing completion.
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.