Catalogue
64 Titles
Contested Karoo: Interdisciplinary perspectives on change and continuity in South Africa’s drylands
15 May 2024
This inter-disciplinary collection explores significant land-use changes in South Africa’s semi-arid Karoo region and their implications for social justice and the environment, across different scales. It brings together recent scholarship by established and younger researchers, in both the social and the natural sciences, to examine the ways in which the Karoo is being reconfigured as a new... Read more
From Boys to Men: Social constructions of masculinity in contemporary society
30 April 2024
The current emphasis in research and education on women and girls is fraught with problems. It has raised a concern that boys and men should be included in research and intervention work on gender equality and transformation. As a result, academics with a background of many years of work in women’s and gender studies undertook a research project focusing on the construction of masculinities... Read more
Hostels, homes, museum: Memorialising migrant labour pasts in Lwandle, South Africa
26 March 2024
The history of Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum, opened in 1998. Lwandle, about 40 km from Cape Town, was established in the 1950s by the apartheid state as a “native location” to house temporary migrant labor.
"Murray and Witz's discussions of architectural restoration, memory and oral history effortlessly incorporate academic debates that have raged for several decades.... Read more
Running to stand still: Politics and path dependency in South Africa’s municipal electricity sector
20 October 2022
The electricity supply crisis that gripped South Africa in 2007 impacted heavily on economic productivity, political stability, and every citizen.
To date, all attempts to understand how the country’s Electricity Supply Industry (ESI) has evolved focus narrowly on Eskom. This approach has become increasingly limited over the last 15 years as the national utility continues to spiral... Read more
Mainstreaming climate change in urban development: Lessons from Cape Town
30 August 2022
Cape Town’s drought crisis grabbed global headlines in 2018 and its causes and solutions were – and continue to be – hotly debated. But managing water shortages and other climate change impacts have been integrated into the city’s urban policy-making for some time, in response to rapid urbanisation and uncertainty about the exact nature, timing and magnitude of city-scale climatic... Read more
Waves of change: Coastal and fisheries co-management in southern Africa
12 August 2022
The oceans that meet along the southern African coast contain a diversity of ecosystems ranging from tropical coral reefs to cool-water kelp forests. Many of the coastal and marine species living in these waters are resources that are harvested by coastal communities to provide important sources of nutrition, income and livelihood.
However, ongoing over-exploitation of fisheries... Read more
Fighting poverty: Labour markets and inequality in South Africa
12 August 2022
Unquestionably, poverty and inequality are among the major challenges that face South Africa today. In this well-researched, comprehensive volume, the authors:
• use new techniques to measure and analyse household inequality and poverty in South Africa;
• analyse the nature and functioning of... Read more
Genes for Africa: Genetically modified crops in the developing world
12 August 2022
In Genes for Africa, Jennifer Thomson separates fact from fiction and explains why and how GM crops can help us combat poverty, starvation and disease in the developing world, in a safe and responsible way.
In the first part of the book the author explains the technology and looks at the differences and similarities between genetic modification, conventional plant breeding,... Read more
Taking action on climate change: Long term mitigation scenarios for South Africa
4 August 2022
Making a just transition to a low-carbon economy and society is one of the most difficult challenges globally. In South Africa, which needs to address poverty and inequality, reducing greenhouse gas emissions presents a daunting challenge. Nonetheless, the South African government initiated a process to develop long term mitigation scenarios. These were based on rigorous research, involving a... Read more
Upgrading informal settlements in South Africa: A partnership-based approach
4 August 2022
Informal settlements are a pressing urban challenge in South Africa and elsewhere in the world. Intervention and investment are needed, not only to improve material conditions, but also to combat social and political exclusion and marginalisation.
What would a progressive upgrading agenda for informal settlements entail, and how could it be achieved? This has been widely debated in... Read more
Sharing benefits from the coast: Rights, resources and livelihoods
4 August 2022
Coastal resources are vital for communities in developing countries, many of whom live in abject poverty. These resources also hold significant value for a number of different sectors such as mining, fisheries and tourism, which supply expanding global consumer markets. Although these activities provide opportunities for economic and income growth, global patterns indicate growing levels of... Read more
Who gets in and why? Race, class and aspiration in South Africa’s elite schools
4 August 2022
A main road snakes from the City Bowl in the north to Fish Hoek in the south, along which corridor sit some of the most prestigious academic schools on the continent, in sight of Africa’s leading tertiary institution, the University of Cape Town. This is a study of patterns of racial segregation in the elite primary schools of one of the ‘whitest’ and wealthiest areas of South Africa,... Read more
The House of Tshatshu: Power, politics and chiefs north-west of the Great Kei River c 1818-2018
3 August 2022
‘In 1852 Sir George Cathcart pronounced that the amaTshatshu chieftaincy no longer existed: “I have broken and banished the tribe”, he boasted. This deeply researched book, at once clear-sighted and moving, traces the consequences of this proscription to the present day. In the course of a detailed examination of 200 years of this Thembu chieftaincy, Mager and Velelo illuminate a number... Read more
Food security in South Africa: Human rights and entitlement perspectives
2 August 2022
Ensuring that every man, woman and child has access to adequate food at all times is one of the basic social and political goals of democratic South Africa, a right which is guaranteed in the country’s Constitution as in international law. Yet food insecurity remains widespread and persistent, at levels much higher than in countries with similar levels of per capita GDP. What in South... Read more
Steward leadership: A maturational perspective
2 August 2022
Steward Leadership is a form of leadership which focuses on others, the community and society at large, rather than the self. Many senior leaders and executives across the globe appear to move into a steward leadership mindset when their careers have matured, or when they are in the second half of their life- or career cycles, whereas executives of around 30 years old are typically focused on... Read more
The Strategic Corporal revisited: Challenges facing combatants in 21st‑century warfare
12 July 2022
As we enter an era of multidimensional warfare, and technological innovations continue to accelerate the pace of war, the importance of decisions made by junior military leaders — some of them with strategic impact – continues to grow exponentially. US Marine Corps General Charles C. Krulak coined the term ‘The Strategic Corporal’ nearly two decades ago, and it is more relevant today... Read more
The education triple cocktail: System-wide instructional reform in South Africa
12 July 2022
The education triple cocktail brings together rigorous quantitative and qualitative research on a new approach to improving foundational teaching and learning for schoolchildren living in working-class, poor and remote rural communities in resource-constrained systems like South Africa. At the core of this book is the theory and evidence for a powerful, new, interlocking and mutually... Read more
State, governance and development in Africa
12 July 2022
The inspiration for this book was a Summer School on State, Governance and Development presented by distinguished academics from the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Written by young African scholars, the chapters here focus on state, governance and development in Africa as seen from the authors’ vantage points and positions in different sectors of society.
The book... Read more
The Victoria Mxenge Housing Project: Women building communities through social activism and informal learning
12 July 2022
At the beginning of South Africa’s democratic change in 1994, the Victoria Mxenge Housing Project was founded by a group of 12 women who lived in shacks on the barren outskirts of Cape Town. These women had come from rural areas and were poor, vulnerable and semi-literate. Yet they learned how to build, negotiate with the government and NGOs, architects and building experts, and form... Read more
The Reb and the rebel: Jewish narratives in South Africa 1892-1913
12 July 2022
The personal histories of an immigrant father and his Cape-born son burst from some tattered Hebrew notebooks and a translucent typescript, giving the Jewish diasporic settlement in South Africa an immediacy seldom encountered before. The manuscripts of two Schrires – Reb Yehuda Leib (1851-1912) and his youngest son Harry (1895-1980) – include a diary, a memoir and an epic poem. They... Read more
Sustainable options: Development lessons from applied environmental economics
12 July 2022
This well-researched, important text argues a case for the use of environmental resource economics (ERE) as an analytic framework for the conceptualisation and design of sustainable policy options. Sustainable options integrates economic theories and concepts on the one hand with social and environmental challenges on the other.
Applying ERE in a developing context, like that... Read more
Nature divided: Land degradation in South Africa
7 July 2022
In the same way that South Africa’s people were divided along racial lines, so too was its landscape – into the predominantly communally farmed lands of the homelands and self-governing territories, and commercial farming areas. These divisions, reflected both in former government policy and local practice, have profoundly affected land degradation in South Africa.
This book, the... Read more
Rethinking leadership
7 July 2022
In the twenty-first century, leaders are having to speak a new language, create fluid organic structures, and recognise organisations as systems with self-renewing capacity.
Rethinking leadership explores what real leadership means, encouraging the reader to look within – examine assumptions and make explicit the trusted mental models, seek out reflective space and embark on... Read more
Post-conflict reconstruction and development in Africa: Concepts, role-players, policy and practice
7 July 2022
During the 1990s, nine out of ten of the bloodiest conflicts occurred on the African continent. And despite some 20 peacebuilding operations in Africa in the last 25 years, there is still a significant lack of cohesive strategy to target the key areas in the regeneration of a conflict-ridden country. An Afrocentric perspective is therefore a suitable starting point for research into the... Read more
Southern African liberation struggles: New local, regional and global perspectives
7 July 2022
This collection of essays brings together a set of new perspectives on the many liberation struggles in southern Africa, struggles that have continuing significance today. What links were there between different forms of struggle in the region? What was the wider context, including international solidarity work? What roles did different actors play in these struggles? Among the topics analysed... Read more
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