SSU Researchers

Director: Dr Beatrice Conradie

Current SSU Researchers

Singumbe MuyebaSingumbe is a researcher and Ph.D. candidate who is investigating social relationships in ‘mixed’ housing projects. For his thesis, he is taking advantage of two natural experiments arising from the pattern of housing allocation in Cape Town and Lusaka to investigate home ownership and poverty among the poor. In 2011-12 Singumbe will be at Yale, on a Fox Fellowship.
Ralph SsebagalaRalph’s interests include the analysis of household use of debt and indebtedness in South Africa; the effect of debt on personal welfare; the importance of the household debt crisis; the design and implementation of the South African credit market regulatory reforms, and the effect of the credit regulatory reforms on the debt crisis. Ralph will be spending the second half of 2011 at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.
Bronwyn NortjeBronwyn is doing her research Masters in Sociology. This research focuses on South African attitudes to distributive justice and the deserving poor. Specifically, it hopes to identify which moral, behavioural, and demographic features influence people’s decisions with respect to the just allocation of social assistance.

Elena Moore

Elena is a Junior Research Fellow working with Bob Mattes (DARU) on a survey of diversity in Johannesburg and Cape Town. The PI of the survey is Owen Crankshaw from the African Centre for Cities at UCT. Elena is also conducting research into the sociology of family in contemporary South Africa.
Beatrice ConradieBeatrice is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Economics. Her research investigates how agriculture functions in a broader society, in the presence of increasing regulation. A second strand of her research investigates how farmers respond to environmental changes. A third element brings in a localised study of productivity growth to explain why some regions of the local farming economy are more successful than others.
Maria Garcia CordeiraMaria’s research topic is ‘The value of tourism on the Agulhas Plain: an application of the Travel Cost Method (TCM)’. TCM is a non-market valuation approach, enabling the value of a tourist recreational amenity to be determined through the analysis of the travel costs incurred by the tourist, which are treated as a proxy for the value of recreation or tourism.
Ken JubberKen’s research focuses on the emotional construction of culture, evolutionary sociology, and indigenous theorists and theory. He is also assisting with some of Jeremy Seekings’s responsibilities at UCT.
Thobani NcapaiThobani Ncapai is part of the Cape Area Panel Study team. His primary responsibilities are monitoring and evaluation, fieldwork (face-to-face and telephonic interviews) and data cleaning. He also assists with other research projects.
Bulelwa NokweBulelwa Nokwe is a fieldworker, assisting primarily with in-depth interviews. This year she has been conducting interviews on the quality of community in racially mixed and other neighbourhoods, experiences of unemployment, and perceptions of respectability.
Jenn SchwendemannJenn is a Masters student in the Sociology Department. Her dissertation examines the extent of gender differences in educational outcomes in South Africa, and explores why girls in South Africa do as well as if not better than boys in many respects - in contrast to the situation across much of Africa.
Rutendo MurambiwaRutendo’s research explores the nature and extent of xenophobic attitudes, and arose out of concern for  the attitudinal state of the nation. She explores people’s perceptions and narratives of experiences with foreign nationals. Her explorations draw on literature and empirical work conducted in Cape Town around violence and xenophobia.