Photo credit: Christina Heatherton
I am an Associate Professor of Sociology at Florida International University in the United States and a Senior Research Associate in Sociology at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa.
My first book, Delivery as Dispossession: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Postapartheid City, was released in 2022 on Oxford University Press. It explains why local governments seek to evict some residents while tolerating others and is rooted in years of ethnographic fieldwork over the past decade in Cape Town, South Africa. In 2023, it received the American Sociological Association’s (ASA) Robert E. Park Award, as well as Honorable Mention for the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) Global Division’s Outstanding Book Award.
I am currently working on two subsequent projects. First, with the sociologist Marcel Paret, I am writing a series of articles, and ultimately a monograph, about organized resistance to apartheid in the 1970s and 80s. Broadly, we asses the relative roles of race and class—which is to say, racism and capitalism—in mobilizing anti-apartheid activists. Specifically, this research concerns a typically neglected wing of the movement, independent of the African National Congress, including an array of anti-capitalist tendencies and the Black Consciousness movement. It considers these activists as theorists in their own right, assessing how novel modes of analysis were simultaneously strategic interventions. The project involves extended interviews with key figures in the milieu we characterize as South Africa’s radicals. An edited volume related to this research was published in June 2024 on Routledge entitled The South African Tradition of Racial Capitalism.
Second, with the sociologist Josh Seim, I am writing a book provisionally entitled Driven by Theory: Keeping Qualitative Data in the Passenger Seat. An accessible introduction to qualitative methods, it will be of particular interest to ethnographers, interviewers, and social scientists carrying out archival research. The book insists that all research is necessarily theory-driven, and that refusal to acknowledge this fact leads sociologists into a morass of empiricism. With accessible guidelines and practical examples, we demonstrate that theory is not an obstacle to data collection but rather, its necessary precondition. This book is intended as a guide for students, but it will equally be of interest to social scientists following epistemological debates in qualitative methods.
More broadly, my research and teaching interests span urban ethnography, political sociology, race and ethnicity, critical geography, global urban studies, and social theory. I am Deputy Editor of City and Community, an Associate Editor of Critical Sociology, and a member of the editorial boards of the South African Review of Sociology and Spectre.
This book documents the emergence and development of the theory of racial capitalism in apartheid South Africa. It interrogates the specificity of this theory in the South African context and draws lessons for its global applicability. Out in hardback now, this volume will be out in paperback in Winter 2025.