Violent Designs:
Making Home in a Divided South African City
housing activism and social movements
racial politics
participatory urban design
inequality and space
Publications
Talks and Conference Papers (selected)
“The Curious Case of the Stolen Shack: Prototyping South African Public Housing.” American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting (2023)
“In the Field Where We Hunted Snakes: Black Nostalgia and Living in Apartheid’s Remnants.” American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting (2022)
“Whiteness as Property, Expropriation as Murder.” AES/APLA Spring Conference (2020; cancelled due to COVID-19)
“‘Internal Contradictions’: Socialist Privatization in the Rainbow Nation.” American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting (2019)
“Alternatives, Not By Design: ‘Family Life’ in South African Townships.” Society for Applied Anthropology Annual Meeting (2019)
“The Politics of Adequacy: Racial Justice and Experimentation in South African Housing Design.” Invited Talk, Department of Anthropology and Justice & Peace Studies Program, Georgetown University (2019; flyer)
“‘Incremental to Compliance’: Deferment and Design in Cape Town.” American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting (2018)
“Arguing the Increment: The Politics of Compromise in South African ‘Slum Regularization.’” Talk, Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies, UC Irvine (2018)
“‘You Have Lost Nothing’: Housing, Memory, and Debt in Post-Apartheid South Africa.” American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting (2015)
“Private Utopias, Public Imaginaries: Transformation, Citizenship and Mega Housing Projects in Cape Town, South Africa.” Law and Society Association Annual Meeting (2015)
Other Media and Public Impact
Distressed publics: circumventing the mortgage from South Africa to Ireland with Berghahn Books (blog, March 18, 2022)
Together in crisis: the politics of Day Zero in Cape Town with Platypus: The CASTAC Blog (blog, February 20, 2018)