Asanda Benya: 10 years after Marikana. Critical ethnographic reflections

HUMA Doctoral Seminar Series

Speaker: Asanda Benya (University of Cape Town, South Africa)

This talk will be a critical reflection on my PhD journey, particularly the ways in which working underground with miners for a year and the Marikana massacre, which happened while I was conducting fieldwork, shaped my intellectual journey and commitments. I will share some of the challenges, ethical dilemmas and methodological ruptures I experienced while doing this ethnographic research. I hope to share how Marikana for me, both as an ethnographer and as a mineworker at the time, was a destabilizing moment, a turning point.

About the speaker: Asanda Benya is a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her work focuses on the intersection of gender, class and race. She has published in labour and feminist journals in areas of women in mining, gender and the extractive industries, labour and social movements, social and economic justice. She is currently working on a book project based on her ethnographic study on women underground miners.