Photo credit: Christina Heatherton
I am an Assistant 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 a second monograph on the emergence of the concept of “racial capitalism” in South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement. Drawing on archival research and oral histories with key activists from the period, this work demonstrates that “racial capitalism” was developed as a strategic concept by radical social movements active in a very particular conjuncture: late apartheid South Africa. An edited volume related to this research will appear in June 2024 on Routledge entitled The South African Tradition of Racial Capitalism.
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 Associate Editor of City and Community and a member of the editorial boards of the South African Review of Sociology and Spectre.