Professor Jeremy Seekings

Senior Research Officer, Sustainable Societies Unit

Research Interests

Inequality
Public Policy
Voting Behaviour

Biography

Professor Jeremy Seekings is interested in a wide range of topics concerning politics and society, in the present and historically, in Southern Africa and some other parts of the world. His first work was on the struggle against apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s and the transition to democracy in the 1990s. In the 2000s and 2020s he has continued to work on South Africa, including on social stratification and inequalities (class, status, race, gender), the transformation of kinship and families, and the history and contemporary politics of poverty reduction and welfare-state-building. Over the past decade he has worked increasingly elsewhere in Southern Africa (and parts of East Africa), the Caribbean and (most recently) parts of the Mediterranean, focusing on (a) public policy with an emphasis on poverty reduction and social protection and (b) political parties, elections and voting. His most recent research has focused on Botswana, Zambia and Malta. He is the Acting Director of the Institute for Democracy, Citizenship and Public Policy in Africa and the former Director of the Centre for Social Science Research (2012-2022). Currently, he is a Senior Research Officer at the Sustainable Societies Unit, part of the CSSR. He has a strong interest in the combination of quantitative and qualitative research.

Jeremy Seekings CV

Recent Publications

Seekings, J. (2022). Elite Ideology, Public Opinion and the Persistence of Poverty and Inequality in East and Southern Africa. In K. Hujo & M. Carter (Eds.). Between Fault Lines and Front Lines: Shifting Power in an Unequal World (pp. 175–190). London: Bloomsbury Academic. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350229068.0020
Nattrass, N., & Seekings, J. (2022). High Modernist Hubris and its Subversion in South Africa’s Covid–19 Vaccination Roll-Out. Journal of Southern African Studies, 1-21.
Seekings, J. (2022). Democratic Politics and Livelihoods in Africa. In The Routledge Handbook on Livelihoods in the Global South (pp. 181-193). Routledge.