CSSR Lunchtime Seminar: Prof Jess Auerbach
The Institute for Democracy, Citizenship and Public Policy in Africa (IDCPPA) and the Centre for Social Sciences Research at the University of Cape Town invites you to join us for a seminar on 04 October 2022. Associate Professor Jess Auerbach will be presenting on the topic: A house, a car and an education? Angola’s emerging middle class under conditions of capitalismo selvagem
In this talk, Jess Auerbach will be drawing on her book From Water to Wine: Becoming Middle Class in Angola (University of Toronto Press, 2020) to explore class and social stratification in contemporary Angola. She argues that in the context of post-Cold War and post-civil war economic development, conventional tools and metrics are ill-equipped for the analysis of class and social stratification in countries where the social, historic and economic realities are so complex. Instead, she calls for human-eye views of material transformation and ideological shifts, using ‘capitalismo selvagem’ (wild capitalism) as a theoretical and conceptual entry.
Jess Auerbach is an anthropologist working here at UCT’s graduate school of business where she directs the MPhil in Inclusive Innovation. She holds a PhD from Stanford and an MSc from Oxford. Jess was recently awarded a P rating from the National Research Foundation, is an Iso Lomso Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study, and a Research Associate at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has conducted long-term ethnographic research in Angola, Brazil, and Mauritius and is the author of numerous articles and two books, From Water to Wine: Becoming Middle Class in Angola (U Toronto, 2020) and Archive of Kindness: Stories of everyday heroism from the South African pandemic (BK Publishing, 2021). She is currently working on her third monograph Capricious Connections: the story of an African undersea cable system.
Seminar details
Date: 04 October 2022
Time: 12:45 pm-2pm SAST
Location: Centre for Social Science Research Seminar Room, 4.29
