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.

Fiona C. Ross is Professor of Anthropology, a Fellow of the University of Cape Town and an NRF rated scholar (B2).

Her work is concerned with redress in the aftermath of apartheid. In its current formation, it centres on how ‘life’ is formulated by scientific disciplines, and what that means for the project of social recovery.

To address this question, she held an AW Mellon Chair in the Anthropology of the First Thousand Days of Life (2013-22).  That project focuses on how scientific knowledge about reproduction enters public policy and articulates with local social worlds. It considers the relation between ‘life’ and ‘forms of life’. This philosophical question is grounded in three research programmes.  Formations of Life considers how life (material, social and emotional) takes for under given conditions.  Genes, Technologies, Genealogies explores technologies, understood as both instruments and tools, including conceptual tools.  The programme on Nutrition and Food Security considers the social relations around nourishment. 

Her previous bodies of work focused on:

• the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa, particularly regarding gender and testimonies of violence; human rights; redress and recovery.
• Poverty and the making of everyday life in contemporary urban South Africa.

Academic Interests and Current Research Projects

My work is concerned with formations of social life in apartheid’s aftermath.

My interests span a variety of subfields in Anthropology, including urban, medical and linguistic anthropology, anthropological theory and critical ethnography.

My current research, supported by an AW Mellon Chair, explores how life is made social and how contemporary knowledge formations are mobilised in defence of well-being. More information is available at www.thousanddays.uct.ac.za.

I teach at all levels, and supervise research that focuses on Southern and Central Africa.

Selected Recent Publications

Saunders, R., R. Saunders and F. Ross. 2021.  The Saunders’ Fieldguide to Gladioli of South Africa. Struik/Random House: Cape Town. 

Lachman, Anusha, Astrid Berg, Fiona C. Ross and Michelle Pentecost. (2021).  ‘Infant Mental Health in Southern Africa: nurturing a field’ The Lancet. Volume 398, ISSUE 10303, P835-836.  https://doi.org/10.1016/ S0140-6736(21)00998-3 

Fiona C. Ross & Tessa Moll. 2020. ‘Assisted Reproduction: politics, ethics and anthropological futures,’ Medical Anthropology, DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2019.1695130

Manderson, Lenore, Fiona C. Ross. 2020. ‘Publics, technologies and interventions in reproduction and early life in South Africa.’ Palgrave Communications (formerly Humanities and Social Science Communications) 7, 40. DOI: 10.1057/s41599-020-0531-3.

Fiona C. Ross. 2020. ‘Ethics, Histories and Redress: Ethical Orientations in the Southern African Context’. Working Paper 3.  World Council of Anthropological Associations.
https://www.waunet.org/downloads/wcaa/publications/working-papers/wp3.pdf

Fiona C. Ross. 2020. Response to Commentary: ‘Why are black South African students less likely to consider studying biological sciences?’ (Prof. N Nattrass). South African Journal of Science. 116(special issue), Art. #8481. DOI: 10.17159/sajs.2020/8481.

Fiona C. Ross. 2020. ‘Rising Tides and Anthropological Morals.’  Colloquium on a/moral Anthropology. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. 10 (3): 1022-1025. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/711713

Pentecost, M and F. C. Ross. 2019. ‘The first thousand days: Motherhood, scientific knowledge, and local histories’ Medical Anthropology. Vol 38 (8): 747-761.  https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2019.1590825

Chekero, T and F C Ross. 2018. ‘On paper and having papers: Zimbabwean migrant women’s experiences in accessing healthcare in Giyani of Limpopo Province, South Africa.  Anthropology Southern Africa. Vol. 41 (1). https://doi.org/10.1080/23323256.2018.1442729 

I am an NRF-rated Professor at the University of Cape Town and Convenor of Health Humanities and the Arts (M.Phil).

Academic Interests and Current Research Projects

I am passionate about teaching anthropology in South Africa’s higher education landscape, and have dedicated my career to developing innovative course curricula in medical and visual anthropology. I am the convenor of anthropology's new interdisciplinary M.Phil Programme, Health Humanities and the Arts, which comprises a one year degree program that includes the participation of artists, performers, and health and humanities practitioners to address health inequalities and knowledge production in the health sciences across the African continent.

My work is positioned at the intersection of medical, political and visual anthropology. Working in and out of disciplines underpins my pedagogical approach to interdisciplinary problem solving and knowledge production in the context of an evolving health humanities framework in Africa. My interests span a variety of subfields in Anthropology, including political economy, youth and childhood studies, ethnographic film, and medical anthropology.

My current research on covid-19 draws on my substantive HIV/AIDS research, in Southern Africa, with a particular focus on vaccine hesitancy and the politics of vaccine nationalism.

I am a passionate teacher at undergraduate and post-graduate levels and supervise a wide variety of post-graduate research projects.

Select Recent Publications

Levine, S., and L. Manderson (2021). "Proxemics, COVID-19, and the Ethics of Care in South Africa." Cultural Anthropology 36.3 (2021): 391-399.

Manderson, L., Burke, N. J., & Wahlberg, A. (Eds.). (2021). Militarising the Pandemic: Lockdown in South Africa. Viral Loads: Anthropologies of urgency in the time of COVID-19. UCL Press. Pages 47-66.

Levine, S. (2020). Opening the wound: Receptions and readings of Inxeba in South Africa. Journal of African Cinemas, 12(2-3), 177-189.

Manderson, L., & Levine, S. (2020). COVID-19, risk, fear, and fall-out. Medical Anthropology.

Manderson, L., and S. Levine (2020) "Aging, Care, and Isolation in the Time of COVID-19." Anthropology and Aging 41.2: 132.

Swartz, A., S. Levine, A. Rother, F. Langerman.  "Toxic layering through three disciplinary lenses: childhood poisoning and street pesticide use in Cape Town, South Africa." Medical humanities 44.4 (2018): 247-252.

Manderson, L. and S. Levine. 2018.  Southward Focussed: Medical Anthropology in South Africa. World Anthropologies: Special section on Medical Anthropology. American Anthropologist , Vol. 120, No. 3, pp. 566-569.

Levine, Susan (ed.), (2018).  At the Foot of the Volcano: Reflections on Higher Education in South Africa. Best Red (HSRC): Cape Town.

Levine, Susan. (2013). Children of a Bitter Harvest. Best Red/HSRC Press: Cape Town.

Levine, Susan (ed.), (2012). Medicine and the Politics of Knowledge. HSRC Press: Cape Town.

Dr Nikiwe Solomon is an early career researcher and lecturer working at the interface of science, technology, politics and urban river and water management in the Environmental Humanities South Centre and Anthropology Department at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her research focus is on how human and ecological well-being and issues of sustainability are entangled with politics, economics and technology. Nikiwe served as a research fellow in the Seed Box project, Feminist and Anticolonial Approaches to Environmental Humanities and Justice in the Global South with research focusing on flows – of currents (water and capital), toxics and cement. Nikiwe currently serves as Cape Town site PI for the project Critical Zones Africa: South and East Studies (CzASE Studies) which, for the next four years, aims to develop research on material flows in the Critical Zone that shape the everyday, and how tracing lived experience can inform governance for more habitable urban and peri-urban spaces.

Interests and Current Research Projects

Urban water systems; local and global food systems, neoliberalisation of the commons; sustainability; human and ecological well-being.

Co-editor of book with preliminary title of “Sons and Daughters of the Soil”. Other Co-authors include Associate Professor Lesley Green (Director of Environmental Humanities South, UCT) and Associate Professor Virginia MacKenny (School of Fine Art UCT)

Recent Publications

Book chapter

Solomon, N. 2016. The invisible visible and visible invisible: Zimbabwean migrant women. In F. Nyamnjoh and I Brudvig (eds) Johanesburg and their cell phones in Mobility, ICTs and Marginality in Africa. South Africa. HSRC Press.

Reports to the WRC

Amis, A.M and Solomon, N. 2016. Exploring the Value of Integrating Green Innovations in Business. Report to the Water Research Commission. WRC Report No. 2349/1/16. ISBN 978-1-4312-0769-5

Forthcoming

Co-editor of book with preliminary title of “Sons and Daughters of the Soil”. Other Co-authors include Associate Professor Lesley Green (Director of Environmental Humanities South, UCT) and Associate Professor Virginia MacKenny (School of Fine Art UCT)

Dr Marlon Swai is a Hip Hop artist from Cape Town with a background in spoken word and graphic design. He completed his PhD in the department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University (NYU). His research and dissertation evaluates how the youth movement forms the backbone of Hip Hop in South Africa, and how it simultaneously supplements and critiques formal education by promoting the kind of politicization and awareness-raising that is indispensable to various kinds of social justice work. In addition to researching the pedagogical approaches within resistive art, Marlon’s academic interests expand to Hip Hop's potential for galvanizing Pan-African collaboration toward social justice, specifically with regards to issues around gender discrimination in relation to masculinity, internalized oppression and the politics of representation. His curiosity for the workings of cross-cultural imagination and communication was fed by his experience of spending eight years in Brooklyn, Harlem and the Bronx where he supported immigrant and refugee youth in their acquisition of English language and literacy, as well as their socio-emotional adjustment to life in the United States.  

Marlon’s future interests include the flipped classroom in the African context, youth activist contributions to critical literacies, the political economy of small-scale environmental sustainability work; and a continued exploration in developing pedagogy for healthy masculinities.

My research explores the aftereffects of violence and its materialisation in death, disability and debility, and how subjectivities are formed and expressed under conditions of endemic violence in South Africa. More pragmatically, my research focuses on epistemology, disability, debility, race, gender, sexuality and other vectors of oppression and inequality. I am working towards developing an African Feminist approach to disability and debility.

I also experiment with writing to explore building intellectual, affective and ethical relations with readers that enable liberatory political horizons to be realized. My research is expressed in expository conceptual work which theorises explicitly, conceptually driven academic texts that use vulnerable writing to explore my intimate negotiation of episteme and consider settler colonial conceptual terrain and through fiction, which I use to enliven, and understand the theoretical quandaries I am troubled by.  My novel, Called to Song, published in 2018, was longlisted for the Sunday Times Barry Ronge Fiction Prize (2019), shortlisted for the National Institute of Humanities and Social Science Prizes Fiction Book Awards (2020) and received the UCT Meritorious Book Award (2020).

My teaching reflects my epistemic orientation towards pluriversal liberatory anthropologies and the necessity to cultivate ethical imaginaries and subjectivities based on students’ ethico-political commitments. I am committed to developing the anthropology of disability and debility for the Global South and teach extensively on disability and debility. In 2020, I was awarded the Dean’s Teaching Award for my innovative curricula.

Current work and interests

• Book manuscripts

At present, I am working on a new novel which follows the aftermath of sexual violence, and its long affective life in reshaping survivors, their families and relations. The novel attempts to explore how debilitation, as an ordinary and everyday modality of being and sociality is woven through lives.

Based on my PhD research, Protesting death-disability-debility imaginaries: ontological erasure and the endemic violences of settler colonialism, I am working on a manuscript for publication.

With Polo Moji and Aika Swai, I am co-editing Conversational Bridges in African Feminisms based on the 2021 African Feminisms conference which we organized and hosted at UCT.

• Research projects

At present, I am leading the ethnographic research in an interdisciplinary project, led by Willem Stassen in Emergency Medicine and Judith McKenzie in Disability Studies: UCT Grand Challenges: The development of an approach to community-based, disability-inclusive disaster risk reduction systems.

• Journal Articles

Mohamed, K. (forthcoming) Debilitating research: scholarship of the obvious and epistemic trauma.

Select Publications

Books

Mohamed, K. (2018) Called to Song: a novel. Kwela: South Africa.

Edited journals and books

Lykke, N., Koobak, R., Bakos-Jarrett, P., Arora, S. & Mohamed, K. (Eds) (2023) Pluriversal Conversations on Transnational Feminisms: And Words Collide from a Place. Routledge.

https://www.routledge.com/Pluriversal-Conversations-on-Transnational-Feminisms-And-Words-Collide/Lykke-Koobak-Bakos-Arora-Mohamed/p/book/9781032457994

Co-edited with Tamara Shefer (2015) Special Issue: Gender and Disability, Agenda Feminist Journal, 29(2).

Journal articles (selection)

Rink, B., Mohamed, K., Ngoasheng, A. & Behari-Leak, K. (2020). Crossing Borders as New Academics in Contested Times. Cristal Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning, 8;1-20.

Mohamed, K. (2019) An African Feminist Decolonial Disability Studies, Codesria Bulletin, Vol 1&2: 19-21.

Mohamed, K. & Shefer, T. (2015) Gendering Disability and Disabling Gender: a critical reflection on intersections of gender and disability. Agenda, 29(2): 1-12.

Mohamed, K. (2012) Who is the Southern African anthropologist? Anthropology Southern Africa, 35(3&4): 111-112.

Book chapters

Mohamed, K. (2023) Pedagogies of Precarity. Colliding Words and Worlds: Pluriversal Conversations on Transnational Feminisms. In Lykke, N., Koobak, R., Bakos-Jarrett, P., Arora, S. & Mohamed, K. (Eds) Pluriversal Conversations on Transnational Feminisms: And Words Collide from a Place. Routledge.

Mohamed, K. (2022). Resilience, the Massification of Grief and the Covid-19 pandemic. In T. Enomoto, M. Swai & K. Umeya (eds) Bouncing Back: Critical Reflections on the Resilience Concept in Japan and South Africa (pp. 199-219). Cameroon: Langaa RPCID.

Mohamed, K. (2022). Pedagogies of betrayal: a meditation on internalised racism. In Nadia Sanger & Benita Moolman (eds)  Racism, Betrayals and New Imaginaries: Feminist Voices (pp. 36-53). UKZN Press: South Africa.

Other

     Mohamed, K. Debilitating Capitalism and the tragedy of essential work, Coronatimes, 27 April 2020  https://www.coronatimes.net/debilitating-capitalism-and-the-tragedy-of-essential-work/

Mohamed, K. (2020) Remaking the Ordinary in Lockdown: Corona Chronicles, Print edition, Melinda Ferguson (ed.) MFbooks / NB Publishers)

Mohamed, K. Questions for White Liberals. Feminist Talk, GenderIT.Org. https://genderit.org/feminist-talk/questions-white-liberals 18 June 2020.

Mohamed, K. (2018) Disability Matters! South African Labour Bulletin, July/August: 30-32.

Francis B. Nyamnjoh holds a BA and an MA from the University of Yaounde, Cameroon, and a PhD (1990), from the University of Leicester, UK. He joined the University of Cape Town in August 2009 as Professor of Social Anthropology from the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), where he served as Head of Publications from July 2003 to July 2009.

He has taught sociology, anthropology and communication studies at universities in Cameroon and Botswana, and has researched and written extensively on Cameroon and Botswana, where he was awarded the “Senior Arts Researcher of the Year” prize for 2003. In October 2012 he received a University of Cape Town Excellence Award for “Exceptional Contribution as a Professor in the Faculty of Humanities”. 9.) In September 2021, he was elected as a fellow by the College of Fellows of the University of Cape Town, in recognition of his research. He is recipient of the “ASU African Hero 2013” annual award by the African Students Union, Ohio University, USA; of the 2014 Eko Prize for African Literature; and of the ASAUK 2018 Fage & Oliver Prize for the best monograph for his book #RhodesMustFall: Nibbling at Resilient Colonialism in South Africa.

He is: a B1 rated Professor and Researcher by the South African National Research Foundation (NRF); a Fellow of the Cameroon Academy of Science since August 2011; a fellow of the African Academy of Science since December 2014; a fellow of the Academy of Science of South Africa since 2016; Chair of the Board of Langaa Research and Publishing Centre in Bamenda, Cameroon since 2005; and was Chair of the Editorial Board of the South African Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) Press from January 2011 to December 2019. His scholarly books include: Africa’s Media, Democracy and the Politics of Belonging (2005); Insiders and Outsiders: Citizenship and Xenophobia in Contemporary Southern Africa (2006); “C'est l'homme qui fait l'homme”: Cul-de-Sac Ubuntu-ism in Côte d'Ivoire (2015); #RhodesMustFall: Nibbling at Resilient Colonialism in South Africa (2016); Drinking from the Cosmic Gourd: How Amos Tutuola Can Change Our Minds (2017); Eating and Being Eaten: Cannibalism as Food for Thought (2018); and The Rational Consumer: Bad for Business and Politics: Democracy at the Crossroads of Nature and Culture (2018).

His current research interests include: Incompleteness, Mobility, Encounters, Belonging, Citizenship and Conviviality.