Dr Divine Fuh

Lecturer and Director of HUMA

Divine Fuh joined the University of Cape Town in 2012 from the University of Basel in Switzerland where he was a senior researcher/lecturer in the Chair for Research and Methodology, Institute for Sociology. Fuh coordinates the Research Group “Fixing the City”, with research interests in youth, masculinities, aspirations, precarity, agency, entrepreneurship, financial inclusion, popular culture and sustainability. His research examines the ways in which people seek ways of ‘smiling’ in the midst of ‘suffering’ focusing on cities, precarity/uncertainty, agency and the quest for stability and human dignity – critically examining aspirations, hope, happiness and becoming. His current publications on youth and upcoming books engage with the basic question of how youth in African cities cope with the many challenges that the weakness of the state, the economy and the many aspects of the on-going processes of globalisation provokes. It explores how urban youth develop new modes of agency that allows them to maintain an active attitude despite the permanent difficulties of finding a place in a society that apparently does not have one for them. FUH is a graduate of the Swiss Postgraduate Programme in Ethnology/Anthropology. He holds a B.Sc. (Honours) in Journalism & Mass Communication, and Political Science from the University of Buea in Cameroon, MA in Development Studies from the University of Botswana, and a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the University of Basel in Switzerland. He has taught at the Universities of Basel in Switzerland, Western Cape and Stellenbosch in South Africa, Brasilia in Brazil, and the University of Tokyo in Japan. He has been a visiting fellow at the Centre for Modern Oriental Studies in Berlin, Germany, and the African Studies Centre in Leiden, the Netherlands. He has served as a consultant for several international organizations and, has been editorial assistant for several journals, including being founding Managing Editor for Langaa Research and Publishing CIG. He is member of the Future Water Institute, and the Minerals to Metals Initiative at the University of Cape Town.