School of Social and Political Science

Description

The Centre of African Studies (CAS) is delighted to welcome you to the following book launch:

"Migration, Crisis and Temporality at the Zimbabwe-South Africa Border"

Speaker: Dr Kudakwashe Vanyoro, Lecturer in Social Anthropology (University of Witwatersrand)

This book is an empirical and theoretical inquiry into the constitution of Zimbabwean migrants at the Zimbabwe-South Africa border as political subjects. This focus is situated in a dynamic context of crisis where state and non-state perspectives on the situation in Zimbabwe have varied since Robert Mugabe’s demise from power. This inquiry necessitates taking an interest in the experiences of Zimbabwean migrant men crossing the border through irregular means who end up waiting in a transit shelter under the care of humanitarian and religious actors. This allows this book to make three arguments which contribute to wider theorising of migration governance and borders in so far as they allow it to challenge a) binary understandings of how power operates on the lives of Africa’s border dwellers, and b) the dominance of spatial perspectives in thinking about African borders. First, the making of the Zimbabwe-South Africa border and migration governance regime is not merely a territorial process but one situated in time as space. Second, we are seeing in the context at hand, as elsewhere, not merely direct regulation of mobility apropos by the state, but also through bureaucratisation of displacement in humanitarian institutions that have stepped into matters regarding the management and care of migrant lives. Third the Zimbabwe-South Africa border is not as knowable as the common power/agency binary may suggest but a site of ambiguity that produces paradoxical effects for immobile migrants in different places and times. This temporal engagement takes us to a place of understanding that this paradox occurs through an intricate entanglement of practices of government and subversion, even if it is in ways that may not always allow the governed to shape and transform regimes of government. 

When: Wednesday 28th February 2024 (3.30-5pm GMT)

Where: Hugh Robson Building, Lecture  Theatre G.04

Format: Hybrid.

For online attendance, please register via Eventbrite

Speaker Biography:

Kudakwashe Vanyoro is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is interested in migration, temporality, borders, humanitarianism and governance in Africa. He has been part of the migration research community for this period and has a solid understanding of migration dynamics, patterns and issues in Southern Africa. In terms of knowledge production, he is the author of a book titled Migration, Crisis and Temporality at the Zimbabwe-South Africa Border: Governing Immobilities (Bristol University Press, 2024). Alongside this monograph, he has published in a number of academic journals including: Gender & Development, Refugee Survey Quarterly, Globalizations, Journal of Southern African Studies, Anthropology Southern Africa, The Lancet, and Incarceration. His academic writing has won the Mixed Migration Centre (MMC) Alternative Voices Competition Prize for writers under 30, and the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM) 2022 Lisa Gilad Prize.