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