Prof Jeremy Seekings

Director: Social Surveys Unit

Professor, Political Studies and Sociology, University of Cape Town

Professor Seekings has been at UCT since 1992. In this time he has also held visiting appointments at Yale (in 1994, 1999, 2002, 2006, 2007 and 2009), Oxford (1999) and Princeton (2008). He has an undergraduate degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Oxford, an Honours degree in African Politics from the University of the Witwatersrand, and a D.Phil in Politics from Oxford. His doctorate was a study of political mobilization and organization in South African townships between 1978 and 1984.

Contact details

Email: jeremy.seekings@gmail.com

Tel: +27 21 650 3505

Office: Rm 441, Leslie Social Science Building, Upper Campus, University of Cape Town

Current research

• Politics and economics of distribution and redistribution in post-apartheid South Africa
• Welfare state building in Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa
• Race and class in comparative perspective
• Political change in the Western Cape
• Household dynamics and HIV-AIDS
• Everyday violence in South Africa

Professor Seekings currently teaches courses on: race and class; the sociology of work; social theory; the analysis of household survey research; and the comparative politics of social policy. He has also taught on contemporary South African politics and society, democratic theory, and comparative politics broadly.

Within the Centre for Social Science Research, he directs two linked survey projects in Cape Town: the Cape Area Study (focused on adults) and the Cape Area Panel Study (focused on adolescents). Both of these projects have qualitative research components alongside the quantitative data.

Recent publications

His books include:

• Heroes or Villains: Youth Politics in the 1980s (Ravan Press, 1993).

• The UDF: A History of the United Democratic Front in South Africa, 1983-2001 (Ohio University Press, David Philip and James Currey, 2000), which won South Africa's top academic book prize.

• Class, Race and Inequality in South Africa (co-authored with Nicoli Nattrass, Yale University Press, 2005, and University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2006).

• Growing Up In The New South Africa: Childhood and Adolescence in Post-Apartheid Cape Town (co-authored with Rachel Bray, Imke Gooskens, Lauren Kahn and Sue Moses, forthcoming from the Human Sciences Research Council Press).

Professor Seekings edited the journal Social Dynamics from 2000 to 2006. During this period he edited a series of special issues including ones on:

• Quantitative Studies of South African Society: Special Issue of Social Dynamics 27,1 (2001).

• AIDS and Society in Southern Africa: Special Issue of Social Dynamics 28,1 (2002) (co-edited with Donald Skinner).

• Welfare Reform in South Africa: Special Issue of Social Dynamics 28,2 (2002).

• Households and Families in Southern Africa: Special Issue of Social Dynamics 29,2 (2003).
  Childhood and Adolescence in Southern Africa: Special Issue of Social Dynamics 32,1 (2006)

Since January 2005 he has been co-editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. He is also on the board of Research Committee 21 (Urban Sociology) of the International Sociology Association.
 
Other recent and forthcoming publications include:

• 'The Inconsequentiality of Employment Disincentives: Basic Income in South Africa', in Basic Income Studies [online journal] 2,1 (June 2007) [available on http://www.bepress.com/bis/vol2/iss1/art12/].

• 'The Mutability of Distributive Justice Beliefs in South Africa', South African Review of Sociology 38,1 (June 2007): 20-44.

• '"Pa's pension": The origins of non-contributory old-age pensions in late colonial Barbados', Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 35,4 (December 2007): 529-47.

• '"Not a Single White Person Should be Allowed to go under": Swartgevaar and the Origins of South Africa's Welfare State, 1924-1929', Journal of African History 48,3 (November 2007): 375-94.

• 'Workers and the beginnings of welfare state-building in Argentina and South Africa', African Studies 66,2&3 (August-December 2007): 253-72.

• 'The Continuing Salience of Race: Discrimination and Diversity in South Africa', Journal of Contemporary African Studies 26,1 (January 2008): 1-26.

• '"Just Deserts": Race, Class and Distributive Justice in Post-apartheid South Africa', Journal of Southern African Studies 34,1 (March 2008): 39-60.

• 'The Carnegie Commission and the Backlash against Welfare State-Building in South Africa, 1931-1937', Journal of Southern African Studies 34,3 (September 2008): 515-37.

• 'Deserving Individuals and Groups: The Post-Apartheid State's Justification of the Shape of South Africa's System of Social Assistance', Transformation 68 (2008): 28-52.

• 'Whose Voices? Politics and Methodology in the Study of Political Organisation and Protest in the Final Phase of the 'Struggle' in South Africa'. South African Historical Journal 62,1 (forthcoming, March 2010)

• 'The Rise and Fall of the Weberian Analysis of Class in South Africa between 1949 and the early 1970s', Journal of Southern African Studies (forthcoming, December 2009).

• 'Welfare Regimes and Redistribution in the South', in Ian Shapiro, Peter Swenson and Daniela Donno (eds), Divide and Deal: The Politics of Distribution in Democracies (New York: NYU Press, 2008): 19-42.

• 'South Africa since 1994: Who holds power after Apartheid?', in Raufu Mustapha and Lindsay Whitfield (eds), Africa in the Era of Democratisation: Turning Points in Contemporary African Politics (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, forthcoming).

• 'Racial and Class Discrimination in Assessments of "Just Desert" in Post-Apartheid Cape Town', in Miguel Centano and Katherine Newman (eds), Discrimination in an Unequal World (provisional title (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

• "Measuring the Gendered Consequences of AIDS: Householding and Poverty in South Africa", in Jennifer Klot and Vinh-Kim Nguyen (eds), The Fourth Wave: An Assault on Women. Gender, Culture and HIV in the 21^st Century (New York: SSRC and Geneva: UNESCO, forthcoming).