Socio-Spatial Transformations

The theme explores the constitution of social subjectivities and citizenship across a diversity of African sites — whether origins, stations or destinations for people on the move. Drawing on quantitative, qualitative and visual methodologies, it considers the material and moral transformations of the spaces and institutions connected to human movement, surfacing poorly understood places and processes involved in the making of social, political and ethical communities and boundaries.

It incorporates the work of the South African Research Chair in Mobility and the Politics of Difference and of Xenowatch: multi-sited research on mobility, urbanisation and political possibility, alongside broader inquiries into political community and identity in fluid, often translocal sites. Methods run from traditional quantitative approaches to oral history, critical cartography, narrative analysis, eco-system mapping and highly localised political ethnographies across Southern and Eastern Africa — most of it conducted with local and international partners, colleagues and graduate students.