School of Law
Professor Jonathan Klaaren at the School of Law is pursuing a project on comparative South African and Indian constitutional law and constitutionalism in conjunction with staff members and graduates of the National Law School of India University (a law school situated in Bangalore).
He is also working on his own project on the history of South African citizenship and its relationship to immigration law formulated around Indian and Chinese indentured communities.
Executive Director, The EDGE Institute
Prof Stephen Gelb is running a project entitled ‘South-South links, Third World multinationals and development: South Africa, East Africa & India’.
This project will collect firm-level data to analyse the development impact in both host and home economies of foreign direct investment by companies from one developing economy into another.
It will focus on three inter-related research questions:
(i) the development impact of inward FDI on poor and middle-income host economies;
(ii) the development impact of outward FDI on poor and middle-income home economies; and
(iii) the relative development impact of ‘South-South’ versus ‘North-South’ FDI.
It will assess the contribution of FDI not only to macroeconomic variables such as financial inflows and fixed investment, but also to dynamic growth and efficiency via exports, technological change and innovation, labour force skills upgrading and competition in domestic product markets. The project will focus on investments between South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and India.
Direct investment from South Africa into other African economies has risen rapidly since 1994: South Africa is now the largest direct investor in the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa. There are growing FDI flows in both directions between South Africa and India, while India is the source of considerable direct investment in East Africa.
There are also direct flows amongst the three East African countries, especially from Kenya to its neighbours. The project will include a survey of outward investors from the five countries operating in one or more of the other four, with questionnaires applied at both head offices and subsidiaries. In addition, eight indepth company case studies will be done, covering the natural resource, manufacturing and services sectors.
The EDGE Institute will co-ordinate the project, and will be partnered by research institutes in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and India. The 18-month project will contribute to building international research networks between South Africa and other research institutes in the South. The project is supported financially by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Ottawa, Canada.
‘The Construction of Subject English in Secondary Schools in London, Delhi and Johannesburg’
India and South Africa share much in terms of their educational landscapes particularly as regards multilingualism and ethnic diversity. With regard to educational policy, the two countries stand to learn from each other. This project seeks to exploit this advantage. It is entitled, ‘The Construction of Subject English in Secondary Schools in London, Delhi and Johannesburg’ and through ethnographic research seeks to understand the different meanings that English as a subject accrues through the teaching practices with which it is associated. The project seeks to ‘crack the Bermuda triangle between policy and practice where so much gets lost’ and to investigate how the English classroom can be a site for building democracy and social justice. The project has already held one meeting in Johannesburg and one in Delhi.
A project has attracted funding from the British Academy and involves team members from Wits, the Institute of Education in London, and the University of Delhi.
Applied English Language Studies, School of Education
The focus of Yvonne Reed’s work is language teacher education and English language teaching in schools. She has co-authored several English textbooks which are used in South African and Nigerian schools and has contributed to and co-edited two books: Challenges of Teacher Development (2002) and Designing and Delivering Distance Education (2005).
She has worked with colleagues from the Open University UK and from universities and NGOs across sub-Saharan African on a research and development project titled TESSA (Teacher Education for Sub-Saharan Africa) which has created ‘open content’ multimedia resources and course design guidance for teachers and teacher educators throughout Africa.
Her current research interest is in the mediation of knowledge and constitution of readers’ subjectivities in textbooks and distance education materials.
School of Literature and Language Studies
Denise Newfield has a long-standing interest in English education. She developed and leads the interdisciplinary Masters in English Education programme and has been instrumental in setting up Media Studies as an undergraduate programme.
Her main research interests are teacher education, curriculum development, literature teaching and learning, multiliteracies and the implementation of multimodal pedagogies in teaching and learning in historically disadvantaged schools and at tertiary institutions. She has published widely in these areas.
Pippa Stein was the pioneer who began the CREATE project. She passed away in August 2008. This innovative transnational project was but one of many that Pippa instituted during her life.
Whether the Junction Avenue Theatre Company, the annual Nadine Gordimer Lecture, or groundbreaking work in the field of multi-literacies and pedagogy, Pippa was an adventurous and inspiring innovator.
In her obituary on Pippa, Nadine Gordimer commented: “She breathed life into every situation and circumstance in which she was involved”.
The Consortium for Research on Educational Access, Transitions and Equity (CREATE) is an international consortium funded by Dfid and managed from the Centre for International Education (CIE) at Sussex University, where Professor Keith Lewin directs the project.
The five-year project has been running since the beginning of 2006 and is a study of access patterns, enrolment, drop-out and drop-in as well as vulnerability to school drop out in basic education. Its aim is to increase access to knowledge and capabilities that can reduce poverty and enhance progress towards the Millennium Development Goals.
Research is being conducted in India, South Africa, Bangladesh and Ghana. The Wits Education Policy Unit is carrying out the project in South Africa and our research partner in India is the National University of Educational Planning and Administration, Delhi, where the Institution Coordinator is Dr R.Govinda.
Geography and Planning, School of Architecture and Planning
Claire Bénit-Gbaffou is coordinating a three years research programme on ‘The Voice of the Poor in Urban Governance in South African Cities – Mobilisation and Relationships with the State’, and is currently building a comparative project with an Indian team working on the same topic.
The comparative project on Johannesburg, Cape Town, eThekwini and Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata, is aimed at understanding interactions between civic movements, government and political parties in order to address the question: why do lower income residents, a democratic majority, fail to significantly influence urban policies agenda?
One research direction is focusing on the fragmentation of lower income residents and their everyday relationships with the state; another is looking at elite capture of decision-making processes, in the new context of local democracy and participatory governance.
Post Doctoral Research Fellow, Centre for India Studies in Africa
Dr. Soske recently he finished a PhD thesis entitled, "'Wash Me Black Again': African Nationalism, the Indian Diaspora, and Kwa-Zulu Natal, 1944-1960." His research interests include 20th Century African intellectual history, Africa's place in the modern Indian Ocean, South Asian Diasporas in Africa and the Caribbean, southern African liberation struggles, and the Gandhi-Ambedkar debate. He has also curated and written on contemporary visual art. Recent projects include South-South: Interruptions & Encounters (http://www.jmbgallery.ca/ExPastSouthSouth.html) and Reflecting on the 2009 Tamil Diaspora Protests: A Series of Three Artist Workshops (http://www.savac.net/html/education.htm#tsc).
At CISA, Dr. Soske is completing a book manuscript based on his PhD thesis. He is also working on a biographical project on Dr. Abu Baker "Hurley" Asvat, an AZAPO cadre and leader in non-racial sport who operated a clinic in Soweto for close to twenty years. This project also will explore the historic border between Lenasia and Soweto, zoned by the Apartheid regime as "Indian" and "African" areas, by looking at different ways that communities both adapted to and challenged apartheid constructions of space.
School of Architecture and Planning
As a scholar and architect, Randall Bird has worked on the relationship between art, architecture and landscape and the dynamics of colonialism in Madagascar.
In addition to his main areas of research, Bird has a strong interest in the intersection of science, the history of disease, tropical medicine, public health, and architecture in Africa and the Indian Ocean arena.
Researcher
Samadia Sadouni is writing a book on the transnational trajectory of the South African international and controversial preacher, Ahmed Deedat (1918-2005). The model of religious polemics in the 19th Century India and its reappropriation by Deedat in South Africa has created a new genre of TV Muslim preacher. She is also doing research on the Somali Muslim Migrants in Johannesburg..
Head, School of Social Sciences
Prof Worby has a longstanding research interest in South Asia and southern Africa.
Dept of Sociology
Associate Professor in Sociology; Chairperson of the Global Labour University – Wits (a network that includes the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, as well as universities in Germany and Brazil).
Formerly staff writer at the SA Labour Bulletin; Managing Editor Work In Progress journal; Director, Social Policy MA programme, University of Durban Westville; Head of Research, National Union of Mineworkers; Director of Policy, Government Communication and Information System (GCIS).
Research interests include globalization, labour, social movements, civil society, media, ecological sociology. Recent interest in exploring family history in South India (Tamil Nadu), as well as broader Indian-South African Left/progressive connections historically.
Sociology, School of Social Sciences
Michelle Williams is a senior lecturer in the department of sociology. Her book The Roots of Participatory Democracy: Democratic Communists in South Africa and Kerala, India compares the communist parties in South Africa and Kerala in the 1990s. She is currently working on a project that looks at cooperatives.
Political Science, School of Social Sciences
Dr Louw is engaged in a three-year study of the politics and developmental trajectories of tribal forest dwellers in Aghai, Maharashtra. His project is funded by the Indian Council for Social Science Research and Indo-Dutch Programme on Alternatives to Development.
WISER
Dr Pamila Gupta is developing a historical ethnography of Portuguese decolonization in Mozambique through a focus on the Goan immigrant community in Maputo, exploring ideas of community, memory, diaspora, and postcoloniality.
School of Social Sciences
Prof Bonner is working on comparative urbanization in South Africa and India.
Lecturer, Department of History
Dr. Suriano researches popular culture and leisure activities in colonial and post-colonial Tanzania (former Tanganyika). She has conducted research on past and present popular music, fashion, youth identities, gender and generational conflicts between the 1920s and 2005.
She is currently working on the history of Tanganyikan jazz (in Swahili dansi) and the ways it was depicted in the Swahili press in the 1940s and 1950s.
School of Literature and Language Studies
Prof Hofmeyr is writing a book based on a series of biographies of people whose intellectual’s projects only become visible when seen in the context of the Indian Ocean. These include:
DDT Jabavu who was interested in pacificism and visited India to attend the World Pacifist Congress in 1949. He wrote a travelogue based on his journey to India and East Africa.
JLP Erasmus, a Boer commandant in the Anglo-Boer war, who was captured by the British in 1901 and sent to India as a prisoner of war. Here he became interested in Indian history and religion. On his return to South Africa he wrote a series on the Ramayana and Mahabharata for Gandhi’s newspaper Indian Opinion.
Bhawani Dayal, a social reformer and satyagrahi/passive resister who moved between South Africa and India. He was imprisoned in both South Africa and India and wrote some of the earliest accounts of satyagraha in Hindi.
School of Literature and Language Studies
Prof Michael Titlestad is doing research on shipwreck and castaway narratives in the Indian Ocean. Shipwreck narratives, apart from comprising the first popular literary forms in Europe, were an important site for ruminating on the processes, potential and limits of empire, in the context of the emerging Enlightenment.
These narratives, many of which were written (or dictated) by mariners, and so represent a more proletarian rendition of the historical imaginary, are important social documents less constrained by the hegemonic versions of race and culture that pervade later texts.
Further, shipwreck stories (such as those concerning the Grosvenor, the Guardian, the Batavia, and the Birkenhead) have circulated through endless (ideological) re-telling, whether as ‘history’, or analogical or allegorical narratives in colonial and postcolonial literature.
Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research
British merchant ships which dominated the trade of the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth century were largely crewed by African and Asian seamen known as lascars. This group of men was avowedly transnational, both in their origins and their patterns of mobility. There is currently little work on lascars and that which does exist focuses mainly on Indians. Prof Hyslop’s work seeks to draw out the African dimension of the lascar world.
Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research
Prof Nuttall is interested in the narrative forms and cultural traditions produced out of the specific island experiences of the Indian Ocean.
African Literature, School of Literature and Language Studies
Dr Ojwang is completing a book on East African Indian fiction. East African Indians occupy an important, yet often neglected role, in the history of the former British Empire. The ambivalent cultural politics of this diasporic community, and the literature that this ambivalence has generated, is the subject of this research, which delves into the remarkable archive of the Indian experience in East Africa and examines the cultural codes that have come to define ‘Indianness’ across the Indian Ocean.
The book manuscript, when completed, will not only be the first comprehensive study of the literature produced by figures such as Bahadur Tejani, Moyez Vassanji, Kuldip Sondhi, Jameela Siddiqi and Peter Nazareth, but it will also use the uniquely positioned culture of the East African Indians to reflect on, and bring new insights, into some of the most vexing issues in postcolonial studies today.
The research examines the contradictory forces at work in the cultures of globalization, hybridity, migrancy and the debates surrounding them. To do this, it probes the interplay of local and global forces, for, in a significant sense, East African Indian writing is rooted in a fundamental sense of the local but at the same time draws its identity from the expanded cartography in which ‘Indianness’ has been made and remade in the last two centuries.
Film and Media Studies
Dr. Ebrahim’s research explores the manifestations of the Bollywood phenomenon in the South African context, with particular focus on several key aspects: the expansion of the market for Bollywood films to crossover audiences, the implications of mainstreaming in terms of the commodification of ethnicity, and in relation to competing discourses of national identity, Bollywood’s use of South Africa for location shooting, the integration of South African characters into Bollywood narratives, and South African Indian film industry co-operation.
School of Electrical and Information Engineering
This Centre has been established by Professor Dwolatzky who has an active interest in studying the Indian software industry. Over the past 15 years India has emerged as a major international force in the global market for software 'outsourcing' and 'off-shoring'. Indian companies, such as Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), are now leading global IT companies, exporting software services (such as software development) from India to the USA, Europe and South Africa.
TCS is, in fact, working with our own University to implement new administrative IT systems. The 'Joburg Centre for Software Engineering' (JCSE) was recently established at Wits to study and promote best practice in Software Engineering in South Africa. A key question, in applying notions of best practice to the local software industry is: What can South Africa learn from the Indian experience in this field?
Professor Dwolatzky is keen to initiate a multi-disciplinary research project to study this, and other related questions. The Centre has significant links with India. http://www.jcse.org.za