F Ro
Biographic Data
| ID | 11590 |
|---|---|
| NAME | F Ro |
| GIVEN NAMES | F |
| FAMILY NAME | Ro |
| SIGNATURE | RO F |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cape Town |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9642-3670 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 208 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Parenting, redress, remediation: Critical thoughts on violence and “nurturing care
The Nurturing Care Framework recognises infants’ embeddedness in broader networks. However, given gender norms and socio-structural features, key actors responsible for child well-being may misrecognise complex care dynamics and reinscribe parental (usually maternal) responsibility. The paper offers a South African example, tracing the emergence of ‘parenting’ as a remedy for colonial violence and its enduring social and affective infrastructures…
Parentalidade, reparação, remediação: Reflexões Críticas Sobre Violência E “Cuidado Carinhoso
O Marco de Cuidados Carinhosos e Sensiveis (Nurturing Care Framework) reconhece a inserção dos bebês em redes mais amplas. No entanto, dadas as normas de gênero e as características socioestruturais, os principais atores responsáveis pelo bem-estar infantil podem interpretar erroneamente as complexas dinâmicas de cuidado e reforçar a responsabilidade parental (geralmente materna). Este artigo apresenta um exemplo sul-africano, traçando a emergênc…
Still Unknown and Overlooked? Anthropologies of Childhood and Infancy in Southern Africa, 1995-2020
In 1995, Pamela Reynolds published a stringent critique of the lack of attention to children in southern African Anthropology. 'Not known because not looked for' made a powerful case for careful and close attention to children's worlds. Her diagnosis was terse; anthropology had not made sufficient theoretical inroads to understanding children and childhoods despite a research method that seemed custom-made for the task. Twenty-five years later, t…
Speech and Silence: Women’s Testimony in the First Five Weeks of Public Hearings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Assisted Reproductive Technology: Capital, Affect, Kinship, Bodies, Faith, Mobility, and Coloniality
Assisted Reproductive Technology: Capital, Affect, Kinship, Bodies, Faith, Mobility, and Coloniality
Covid, cohesion, connection, care: Thoughts on Connected Lives
2021). Covid, cohesion, connection, care: thoughts on Connected Lives. Anthropology Southern Africa: Vol. 44, No. 1, pp. 41-43
Publics, technologies and interventions in reproduction and early life in South Africa
Despite successful clinical interventions and maternal and child health monitoring for over a century, low and middle-income countries, including South Africa, continue to experience the quadruple burden of disease of high maternal mortality rates and poor infant and child health, non-communicable diseases, infectious diseases, and violence and injury. In this article, we focus on how different kinds of technologies in South Africa are implemente…
Rising tides and anthropological morals
Drawing on debates in southern African anthropology, I suggest that where knowledge claims themselves are in question, comparison, uncertainty, and play may be critical in reframing debates about the relation between anthropology and moral worlds, including anthropology's own
Assisted Reproduction: Politics, Ethics and Anthropological Futures
Anthropological literature on Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) has burgeoned in the forty years since IVF emerged as a potential solution to childlessness. A lexicon has consolidated, and key sets of debates have been identified. Chief among these are questions of kinship, the intersection of technologies and local moral worlds, and the circulation of gametes and technological know-how. The recent publication of five books in the Berghahn s…
The First Thousand Days: Motherhood, Scientific Knowledge, and Local Histories
Since 2013, South African nutrition policy focuses on "the first thousand days," (conception to two years), informed by Developmental Origins of Health and Disease research. Drawing on ethnographic research, we show how policy foregrounds certain categories of persons and casts "the maternal" as a time frame for interventions to secure future health and argue that this constitutes a "knowledge effect" - the outcome of framing questions in a parti…
On paper" and "having papers: Zimbabwean migrant women's experiences in accessing healthcare in Giyani, Limpopo province, South Africa
South Africa is signatory to international protocols that secure migrant rights to healthcare. Its national health policy prohibits discrimination. Pregnant women and children under six years ostensibly enjoy access to free healthcare, irrespective of migration status. What is clear "on paper," however, becomes considerably more opaque when experienced by those who do not "have papers." We explore this in Giyani, South Africa, an important migran…
The fires beneath: The life of Monica Wilson, South African anthropologist
Foreword to the Subsection on Forensic Anthropology: World Anthropology
Responses: World Anthropology
Milk, meaning, and morality
Donated human milk's status comes into question as it leaves the mother-child relationship and is reconfigured through practices and discursive structures that seek to stabilise it as a specific kind of object. Based on research conducted in Cape Town, South Africa, we examine the crucial role of technologies in aiding the milk's transformation as milk moves from donors' homes into the clinical setting where it is received by preterm, low-birth w…
Thermal optimum: Time, Intimacy and the Elemental in the First Thousand Days of Life
Thermal Optimum" is a collaboration between photographer Nicholas Eppel and anthropologist Fiona C. Ross. Focusing on pregnancy and early childhood, we sought a way to open questions about how the "hard facts" of biology are given force and presence through "soft" actions of care. Thermographic imaging, initially developed for military use, allows one to trace a subject's "heat signature," making visible aspects of the world that are ordinarily u…
Tyminski, Robert. The Psychology of Theft and Loss: Stolen and Fleeced. Foreword by Mary Brady. London & New York: Routledge, 2014. Pp xiv + 185. Hbk. £115. Pbk. £29.99
Primordial Psyche: A Reliving of the Soul of Ancestors by Pignatelli Spinazzola, Diego
Raw Life and Respectability: Poverty and Everyday Life in a Postapartheid Community
Through close ethnographic attention to modes of world making among people living in a very impoverished community in Cape Town, South Africa, in this paper I explore the histories of two key concepts-rouheid and ordentlikheid (Afrikaans; rawness and respectability)-and the social practices they enjoin. These distinctions and the modalities of living they generate produce relations between living and dying that complicate the prevailing theoretic…
Learning from people with long-term conditions: New insights for governance in primary healthcare
The introduction of top-down centrally driven solutions to governance of healthcare, at the same time as increasing policy emphasis on greater 'bottom up' patient and public involvement in all aspects of healthcare, has set up complex tensions for policy implementation and healthcare practice. This paper explores the interplay of these agendas in the context of changes in primary healthcare services provided by the National Health Service in Engl…
Life, form, substance: Anthropological Investigations
Not knowing endings: An Epilogue
As part of thinking about how life materialises in our work, four contributors — Fiona Ross (FR), Patricia Henderson (PH), Kathleen Lorne McDougall (KLM) and Thomas Cousins (TC) — met at a two-day workshop in June 2014. From our recorded discussion, we've crafted an epilogue that explores connections and points of productive divergence in the papers. It traces our engagement with the history of political-economic understandings of social life in …
Mother of two children
The paper considers the place of the impersonal in the making of intimacies (in this case, the “mother-child dyad”), through examining examples of how temporality, grammar, measurement and knowledge are imbricated and naturalised in the events and processes of life-giving. Experimental in genre, the paper is expressive rather than rationalist, shifting between the personal voice and a more distanced analytic to unsettle taken-for-granted modes of…
African women and apartheid: Migration and settlement in urban South Africa
African women and apartheid: migration and settlement in urban South Africa, by Rebekah Lee, London and New York, I.B. Tauris, 2009, xiv + 282 pp., £59.50, ISBN-13: 978-1845118198. It is hard to do
Raw Life, New Hope: Decency, housing and everyday life in a post-apartheid community
Raw Life, New Hope is the story of one community’s efforts to secure a decent life in post-apartheid South Africa. For residents of The Park, a squalid shantytown on the outskirts of Cape Town, life was hard and they described their social world as raw. Their efforts to get on with the messy business of everyday life were often undercut by cruel poverty. Despite their inhospitable conditions, they sought to create respectable, decent lives for th…
On having Voice and Being Heard: Some after-Effects of Testifying Before the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission
In much recent theorizing, the memory of violence is considered to constitute the post-colonial subject. The article is placed at the intersection of two arguments about the role of voice and memory, particularly memories of violence, in the constitution of the self and the collective. Richard Werbner (1998) has argued that `rights of recountability' are fast becoming part of the political arena as citizens seek to make themselves heard and ackno…
The First Thousand Days: Motherhood, Scientific Knowledge, and Local Histories
Since 2013, South African nutrition policy focuses on "the first thousand days," (conception to two years), informed by Developmental Origins of Health and Disease research. Drawing on ethnographic research, we show how policy foregrounds certain categories of persons and casts "the maternal" as a time frame for interventions to secure future health and argue that this constitutes a "knowledge effect" - the outcome of framing questions in a parti…
Raw Life and Respectability: Poverty and Everyday Life in a Postapartheid Community
Through close ethnographic attention to modes of world making among people living in a very impoverished community in Cape Town, South Africa, in this paper I explore the histories of two key concepts-rouheid and ordentlikheid (Afrikaans; rawness and respectability)-and the social practices they enjoin. These distinctions and the modalities of living they generate produce relations between living and dying that complicate the prevailing theoretic…
Involving older people in research: Methodological issues
The policy imperative to increase public participation in health and social care research, planning and service delivery raises significant questions about optimum approaches, methods and the extent to which this policy can influence change in practice. This paper highlights the key policy literature on user involvement and participatory research methods to establish the context for a partnership research project exploring perceptions of risk in …
Model Communities and Respectable Residents? Home and Housing in a Low-income Residential Estate in the Western Cape, South Africa
Recent work on the post-apartheid city has paid little attention to how people grapple with new opportunities for urban living. This article explores the ways in which housing provision precipitated complex moral reasoning and social reorganisation among impoverished residents of a Cape Town shantytown as they attempted to actualise their ideals of respectability. These ideals overlapped with those of the state and planners associated with the ho…
Sense-scapes: Senses and Emotion in the Making of Place
Drawing on material generated in research in an informal settlement in the Western Cape, and building on the ideas of Michel de Certeau (1988) and Shirley Ardener (1993), the paper explores how spaces are gendered. It shows that processes of objectification similar to those involved in map-making operate as punishment for those who violate gendered spatial conventions. The paper calls for an understanding of the contexts within which abstraction …
Codes and Dignity: Thinking about ethics in relation to research on violence
Beginning with an anecdote concerning consent forms, the paper offers a critique of assumptions that legalistic protocols offer an adequate guarantee of ethical research. Drawing on research on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it explores some of the complexities that research on violence brings to the fore. In the light of testifiers' concerns about the proliferation of their testimonies in contexts beyond their control, th…
On paper" and "having papers: Zimbabwean migrant women's experiences in accessing healthcare in Giyani, Limpopo province, South Africa
South Africa is signatory to international protocols that secure migrant rights to healthcare. Its national health policy prohibits discrimination. Pregnant women and children under six years ostensibly enjoy access to free healthcare, irrespective of migration status. What is clear "on paper," however, becomes considerably more opaque when experienced by those who do not "have papers." We explore this in Giyani, South Africa, an important migran…
Diffusing domesticity: Domestic fluidity in Die Bos
(1996). Diffusing domesticity: Domestic fluidity in Die Bos. Social Dynamics: Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 55-71
Assisted Reproduction: Politics, Ethics and Anthropological Futures
Anthropological literature on Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) has burgeoned in the forty years since IVF emerged as a potential solution to childlessness. A lexicon has consolidated, and key sets of debates have been identified. Chief among these are questions of kinship, the intersection of technologies and local moral worlds, and the circulation of gametes and technological know-how. The recent publication of five books in the Berghahn s…
The fires beneath: The life of Monica Wilson, South African anthropologist
Foreword to the Subsection on Forensic Anthropology: World Anthropology
Learning from people with long-term conditions: New insights for governance in primary healthcare
The introduction of top-down centrally driven solutions to governance of healthcare, at the same time as increasing policy emphasis on greater 'bottom up' patient and public involvement in all aspects of healthcare, has set up complex tensions for policy implementation and healthcare practice. This paper explores the interplay of these agendas in the context of changes in primary healthcare services provided by the National Health Service in Engl…
Mother of two children
The paper considers the place of the impersonal in the making of intimacies (in this case, the “mother-child dyad”), through examining examples of how temporality, grammar, measurement and knowledge are imbricated and naturalised in the events and processes of life-giving. Experimental in genre, the paper is expressive rather than rationalist, shifting between the personal voice and a more distanced analytic to unsettle taken-for-granted modes of…
Urban Development and Social Contingency: A Case Study of Urban Relocation in the Western Cape, South Africa
One of the axes of social transformation in the postapartheid state has been the provision of private property to low-income households. This paper examines the effects of opportunities for housing as residents of a shantytown in the Western Cape moved to formal houses in a new suburban housing development. It argues that residents are engaged in ongoing efforts to secure their visions of ideal domestic relations, and that it is important to see …
Milk, meaning, and morality
Donated human milk's status comes into question as it leaves the mother-child relationship and is reconfigured through practices and discursive structures that seek to stabilise it as a specific kind of object. Based on research conducted in Cape Town, South Africa, we examine the crucial role of technologies in aiding the milk's transformation as milk moves from donors' homes into the clinical setting where it is received by preterm, low-birth w…
Still Unknown and Overlooked? Anthropologies of Childhood and Infancy in Southern Africa, 1995-2020
In 1995, Pamela Reynolds published a stringent critique of the lack of attention to children in southern African Anthropology. 'Not known because not looked for' made a powerful case for careful and close attention to children's worlds. Her diagnosis was terse; anthropology had not made sufficient theoretical inroads to understanding children and childhoods despite a research method that seemed custom-made for the task. Twenty-five years later, t…
Rising tides and anthropological morals
Drawing on debates in southern African anthropology, I suggest that where knowledge claims themselves are in question, comparison, uncertainty, and play may be critical in reframing debates about the relation between anthropology and moral worlds, including anthropology's own
Introduction to the Special Number on Ethics
Diffusing domesticity: Domestic fluidity in Die Bos
(1996). Diffusing domesticity: Domestic fluidity in Die Bos. Social Dynamics: Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 55-71
Facing the Truth: South African Faith Communities and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
The authors suggest new roles that faith communities can play in the search for truth and in the reconstruction of South Africa
Speech and Silence: Women's Testimony in the First Five Weeks of Public Hearings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission
On having Voice and Being Heard: Some after-Effects of Testifying Before the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission
In much recent theorizing, the memory of violence is considered to constitute the post-colonial subject. The article is placed at the intersection of two arguments about the role of voice and memory, particularly memories of violence, in the constitution of the self and the collective. Richard Werbner (1998) has argued that `rights of recountability' are fast becoming part of the political arena as citizens seek to make themselves heard and ackno…
Uniting a Divided City: Governance and Social Exclusion in Johannesburg
Sense-scapes: Senses and Emotion in the Making of Place
Drawing on material generated in research in an informal settlement in the Western Cape, and building on the ideas of Michel de Certeau (1988) and Shirley Ardener (1993), the paper explores how spaces are gendered. It shows that processes of objectification similar to those involved in map-making operate as punishment for those who violate gendered spatial conventions. The paper calls for an understanding of the contexts within which abstraction …
Involving older people in research: Methodological issues
The policy imperative to increase public participation in health and social care research, planning and service delivery raises significant questions about optimum approaches, methods and the extent to which this policy can influence change in practice. This paper highlights the key policy literature on user involvement and participatory research methods to establish the context for a partnership research project exploring perceptions of risk in …
Model Communities and Respectable Residents? Home and Housing in a Low-income Residential Estate in the Western Cape, South Africa
Recent work on the post-apartheid city has paid little attention to how people grapple with new opportunities for urban living. This article explores the ways in which housing provision precipitated complex moral reasoning and social reorganisation among impoverished residents of a Cape Town shantytown as they attempted to actualise their ideals of respectability. These ideals overlapped with those of the state and planners associated with the ho…
Urban Development and Social Contingency: A Case Study of Urban Relocation in the Western Cape, South Africa
One of the axes of social transformation in the postapartheid state has been the provision of private property to low-income households. This paper examines the effects of opportunities for housing as residents of a shantytown in the Western Cape moved to formal houses in a new suburban housing development. It argues that residents are engaged in ongoing efforts to secure their visions of ideal domestic relations, and that it is important to see …
Codes and Dignity: Thinking about ethics in relation to research on violence
Beginning with an anecdote concerning consent forms, the paper offers a critique of assumptions that legalistic protocols offer an adequate guarantee of ethical research. Drawing on research on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it explores some of the complexities that research on violence brings to the fore. In the light of testifiers' concerns about the proliferation of their testimonies in contexts beyond their control, th…
Introduction to the Special Number on Ethics
Compass of the Soul: Archetypal Guides to a Fuller Life by Giannini, John. L
Raw Life, New Hope: Decency, housing and everyday life in a post-apartheid community
Raw Life, New Hope is the story of one community’s efforts to secure a decent life in post-apartheid South Africa. For residents of The Park, a squalid shantytown on the outskirts of Cape Town, life was hard and they described their social world as raw. Their efforts to get on with the messy business of everyday life were often undercut by cruel poverty. Despite their inhospitable conditions, they sought to create respectable, decent lives for th…
African women and apartheid: Migration and settlement in urban South Africa
African women and apartheid: migration and settlement in urban South Africa, by Rebekah Lee, London and New York, I.B. Tauris, 2009, xiv + 282 pp., £59.50, ISBN-13: 978-1845118198. It is hard to do
Learning from people with long-term conditions: New insights for governance in primary healthcare
The introduction of top-down centrally driven solutions to governance of healthcare, at the same time as increasing policy emphasis on greater 'bottom up' patient and public involvement in all aspects of healthcare, has set up complex tensions for policy implementation and healthcare practice. This paper explores the interplay of these agendas in the context of changes in primary healthcare services provided by the National Health Service in Engl…
Life, form, substance: Anthropological Investigations
Not knowing endings: An Epilogue
As part of thinking about how life materialises in our work, four contributors — Fiona Ross (FR), Patricia Henderson (PH), Kathleen Lorne McDougall (KLM) and Thomas Cousins (TC) — met at a two-day workshop in June 2014. From our recorded discussion, we've crafted an epilogue that explores connections and points of productive divergence in the papers. It traces our engagement with the history of political-economic understandings of social life in …
Mother of two children
The paper considers the place of the impersonal in the making of intimacies (in this case, the “mother-child dyad”), through examining examples of how temporality, grammar, measurement and knowledge are imbricated and naturalised in the events and processes of life-giving. Experimental in genre, the paper is expressive rather than rationalist, shifting between the personal voice and a more distanced analytic to unsettle taken-for-granted modes of…
Tyminski, Robert. The Psychology of Theft and Loss: Stolen and Fleeced. Foreword by Mary Brady. London & New York: Routledge, 2014. Pp xiv + 185. Hbk. £115. Pbk. £29.99
Primordial Psyche: A Reliving of the Soul of Ancestors by Pignatelli Spinazzola, Diego
Raw Life and Respectability: Poverty and Everyday Life in a Postapartheid Community
Through close ethnographic attention to modes of world making among people living in a very impoverished community in Cape Town, South Africa, in this paper I explore the histories of two key concepts-rouheid and ordentlikheid (Afrikaans; rawness and respectability)-and the social practices they enjoin. These distinctions and the modalities of living they generate produce relations between living and dying that complicate the prevailing theoretic…
Foreword to the Subsection on Forensic Anthropology: World Anthropology
Responses: World Anthropology
Milk, meaning, and morality
Donated human milk's status comes into question as it leaves the mother-child relationship and is reconfigured through practices and discursive structures that seek to stabilise it as a specific kind of object. Based on research conducted in Cape Town, South Africa, we examine the crucial role of technologies in aiding the milk's transformation as milk moves from donors' homes into the clinical setting where it is received by preterm, low-birth w…
Thermal optimum: Time, Intimacy and the Elemental in the First Thousand Days of Life
Thermal Optimum" is a collaboration between photographer Nicholas Eppel and anthropologist Fiona C. Ross. Focusing on pregnancy and early childhood, we sought a way to open questions about how the "hard facts" of biology are given force and presence through "soft" actions of care. Thermographic imaging, initially developed for military use, allows one to trace a subject's "heat signature," making visible aspects of the world that are ordinarily u…
Sociology (26 works) · Political science (16 works) · Law (12 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Anthropology (9 works) · Art (9 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Psychology (9 works) · South African History and Culture (9 works) · Philosophy (8 works)