Bio
I am an ethnographer of race and class in postcolonial democracies. 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 two subsequent projects. First, with the sociologist Marcel Paret, I am writing a series of articles, and ultimately a monograph, about organized resistance to apartheid in the 1970s and 80s. Broadly, we assess the relative roles of race and class—which is to say, racism and capitalism—in mobilizing anti-apartheid activists. Specifically, this research concerns a typically neglected wing of the movement, independent of the African National Congress, including an array of anti-capitalist tendencies and the Black Consciousness movement. It considers these activists as theorists in their own right, assessing how novel modes of analysis were simultaneously strategic interventions. The project involves extended interviews with key figures in the milieu we characterize as South Africa’s radicals. An edited volume related to this research was published in June 2024 on Routledge entitled The South African Tradition of Racial Capitalism.
Second, with the sociologist Josh Seim, I am writing a book provisionally entitled Driven by Theory: Keeping Qualitative Data in the Passenger Seat, currently under contract with University of California Press. An accessible introduction to qualitative methods, it will be of particular interest to ethnographers, interviewers, and social scientists carrying out archival research. The book insists that all research is necessarily theory-driven, and that refusal to acknowledge this fact leads sociologists into a morass of empiricism. With accessible guidelines and practical examples, we demonstrate that theory is not an obstacle to data collection but rather, its necessary precondition. This book is intended as a guide for students, but it will equally be of interest to social scientists following epistemological debates in qualitative methods.
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 Deputy Editor of City and Community, an Associate Editor of Critical Sociology, and a member of the editorial boards of the South African Review of Sociology and Spectre. You can read more about my work on my personal website.
Recent Publications
Books
2027. Driven by Theory: Keeping Qualitative Data in the Passenger Seat, with Josh Seim. Under contract with University of California Press.
2024. The South African Tradition of Racial Capitalism, edited with Marcel Paret. New York: Routledge.
2022. Delivery as Dispossession: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Postapartheid City. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Most Recent Publications
2025 (forthcoming). “Racial Capitalism.” In Decolonizing International Affairs, edited by Sakiko Fukuda-Parr and Sean Jacobs. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
2025. “Race, Class, and the Politics of Liberation in the Life of Eddie Webster,” with Marcel Paret. South African Review of Sociology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/21528586.2025.2499815.
2025. “Absorbed in Struggle: South Africa’s Passive Revolution from Below,” with Marcel Paret. Critical Sociology. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/08969205251330.
2025. “South Africa’s Radicals: The Anti-Apartheid Movement’s Forgotten Wing,” with Marcel Paret. Souls. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/10999949.2024.2445881.
2025. “Communists and Black Liberation Movements: Divergent Trajectories in the United States and South Africa, 1939–1969,” with Marcel Paret. Social Forces 103(4):1374–1392.
2024. “Cracking the Iron Ceiling: On Ethnography as Theory,” with Josh Seim. Critical Sociology 50(6):991–1004.
2024. “Two Racial Capitalisms: Marxism, Domination, and Resistance in Cedric Robinson and Stuart Hall,” with Marcel Paret. Antipode 56(4):1802-29.
Recent Awards and Fellowships
2024. ASA Political Economy of the World-System Distinguished Article Award
2024. ASA Outstanding Marxist Sociology Article Award (Honorable Mention)
2023. ASA Community and Urban Section Robert E. Park Book Award
2023. SSSP Global Division Outstanding Book Award (Honorable Mention)
2022. Donald D. Harrington Faculty Fellowship, University of Texas at Austin
2021. ASA Sociology of Development Best Faculty Article Award (Honorable Mention)
Areas of Expertise
urban sociology, political sociology, social theory, historical sociology, racial capitalism, ethnography, anticolonial politics, decolonization, postcolonial development, Marxism, Black internationalism, housing struggles, South Africa