Asanda-Jonas Benya

Profile

Asanda is a Sociologist and ethnographer by training. She is based at the University of Cape Town in South Africa where she teaches around labour, gender and race and convenes the undergraduate and postgraduate industrial Sociology stream. Her research is at the intersection of gender, class and race, working specifically around critical labour & work studies and black feminist thought. Her main research project has been an ethnographic study of women underground miners in South Africa’s platinum mines, looking at the construction of gendered subjectivities in underground mining. Her current project looks at the diverse ways in women’s lives and livelihoods around sites of extraction across Southern Africa are affected by mines/mining. 

Areas of expertise

• Labour studies, Extractives

• Gender and Women’s studies

• Labour and social movements

• Workplace identities

• Mining and corporate social responsibility

• Race and Class

• Ethnography