Michelle Williams received her BA (Political Economy of Industrial Societies and German), MA (Sociology), and PhD (Sociology) from the University of California, Berkeley. She was a Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Sociology and Political Studies at Wits University (August 2005-December 2006). She has published on communism in South Africa and India, the solidarity economy, social movements, labour, and the growing area of scholarship comparing and connecting India and South Africa. She is currently working on a book project with Vishwas Satgar on the solidarity economy, focusing on cooperatives in the global political economy tracing the linkages from consumer markets to producer cooperatives. With funding from the Norwegian Research Council and in collaboration with colleagues from the Norwegian Institute of Urban and Regional Research (Norway) and the Centre for Development Studies (Kerala, India) she is involved in research on women’s participation in local economic and political spaces, comparing a township and two rural areas in South Africa with communities in Kerala. She was a member of the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (2007-2011) and is the chair person for the Global Labour University Programme (GLU) at Wits. She also is a member of the Development Studies programme's board.

Event type: Seminar
Date of event: Thursday, September 18, 2014
Venue: Centre for African Studies Gallery, Upper Campus, UCT