Sophie Oldfield
Biographic Data
| ID | 203236 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sophie Oldfield |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sophie |
| FAMILY NAME | Oldfield |
| SIGNATURE | OLDFIELD S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cape Town |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5601-3041 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 205 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
At the heart of knowing the city
In this commentary, we expand on Narayanan's argument for ontological locationality by drawing on our long-term South African project, Knowing the City: Urban Scholarship from Apartheid to Democracy , which drew together cross-generational groups of South African urban studies scholars to build dialogues across our field. Resonating with Narayanan's push for more diverse and plural ‘formats, methods, and theories’, in this project we trace multip…
Raising a Public Health Concern: Women Overlooked in UK Drug Policy and Disadvantaged in Mixed-Gender Community Services
The British From Harm to Hope drugs strategy seems limited in gender responsiveness. Evidence is presented from a West Midlands case study where a qualitative participatory methodology with thematic analysis was employed. The project was co-designed by academics, women with lived-experience and third-sector research leaders. To identify community drug and alcohol treatment issues and solutions, interviews and focus groups were conducted with fema…
Artificial intelligence and the state: Seeing like an artificial neural network
The emergence of the modern state was closely intertwined with the advent of statistics and demographic data. Today, we are witnessing the ascent of artificial intelligence as a new technology of governance. This article seeks to lay the groundwork for a research agenda at the intersection of the state and artificial intelligence, unpacking the notion of "AI" and examining the consequences of the state transitioning from statistics to artificial …
Inhabiting the ‘posts’
In this commentary, I reflect on Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch’s critical re-conceptualization of the ‘post’ as space-time regime and a means to unearth and engage complex geographies of change in South Africa and other post-colonial and post-socialist contexts. I situate our parallel imperatives to work through entanglements: in Myriam’s case, through metaphors that help engage the complex directionalities that might articulate space-time configurat…
Persistent pasts, present struggles, imagined futures: Gender geographies in South Africa after apartheid
Any analysis of South African gendered performances, identities and inequalities confront past and present experiences of and struggles with race, colonialism, post-colonial development and sexuality. These tensions shape gendered geographical work, highlighting the importance of histories of race, class, and sexuality, as well as the ways in which gender itself can be approached as an analytical category and epistemic framing in South Africa. In…
In bodies and homes: Gendering citizenship in Southern African cities
How do the everyday contexts in which ordinary women struggle to access and maintain a place on the peripheries of the city shape experiences of citizenship? This paper explores this question in George, a periurban Lusaka neighbourhood in Zambia and through experiences of Zimbabwean migrant women’s negotiation of a place on the peri-urban edges of Khayelitsha, Cape Town, South Africa. In the logics of citizen-subjects, the experiences of these gr…
Politics and Community-Based Research: Perspectives from Yeoville Studio, Johannesburg
This book is a new and courageous examination of the complexity of embedded research.It is an honest and insightful reflection that ... challenges and deepens arguments around spaces of participation through theoretical reflection and, more centrally, through the actual experience of the embedded research of Yeoville Studio.It is an important work for this and other reasons
‘From the South’
Between activism and the academy: The urban as political terrain
A growing consensus suggests that urban scholarship can benefit from engaging with knowledge in multiple sites in and beyond the academy, for instance with activism central to politics in cities worldwide. This paper explores narratives of urban politics produced with activists to reflect on how we account for knowledge and practice in theorising the urban as political terrain. Research conducted with activists in a community-based ‘Civic’ organi…
Waiting for the state: A politics of housing in South Africa
Although specified in the South African Bill of Rights, for the majority of South African citizens the right to access housing translates in practice to the experience of waiting. In this paper we reflect on the micropolitics of waiting, practices of quiet encroachment, exploring how and where citizens wait and make do, and their encounters with the state in these processes. We argue that waiting for homes shapes a politics of finding shelter in …
Straining: Young Men Working through Waithood in Freetown, Sierra Leone
Young men in precarious situations of persistent un(der)employment in post-civil war Freetown, Sierra Leone are depicted in popular and policy debate as 'stuck' economically or 'dangerous' and prone to violence. In the present paper, by contrast, we draw on young men's explanations of their work and livelihood struggles as 'straining.' We explore the logic of straining, its innovations and demands, and its geography across the city, especially wh…
Globalizing capitalism and southern urbanization
In the post-colonial global south, the range of actions implied by scholars is far wider and inclusive than that traditionally understood as urban politics. ‘The political’ encompasses anti-colonial configuration, fought in nationalist struggles and by liberation movements; a politics post-independence committed to building a developmental state; the reconfiguration of this project as ‘crisis’, torn asunder by internationally driven structural ad…
The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South
In all the debate on theorizing cities from and for the south, discussions of health remain relatively silent amid the rush to f ind adequate explanatory frameworks for a rapidly changing urban reality. This silence remains despite the fact that the broad canon of urban studies has actually been remarkably prolif ic in responding to Robinson’s (2006: x) assertion that urban theory has ‘excluded many cities and their citizens from their accounts o…
Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South
"Massive demographic and economic changes over the last three decades mean that cities that are highly profiled in the canon of urban studies no longer reflect the hubs of urbanisation or the most critical contemporary global urban problems. In this Handbook, we assess what a geographical corrective in representation, process and voice might mean for urban analysis and theory. We profile an emergent, if diffuse, body on work on cities that has as…
Intertwining lives and logics: Household and informal economies in Cape Town
Enabling households to make ends meet, the practices of small, informal businesses are not simple, but bound up in the struggles of households and the social and economic relationships that weave local economies together. This paper draws on stories of local businesses in an impoverished Cape Town township to situate these diverse logics and strategies, the histories and aspirations that shape small business success and struggle. Drawing on inter…
A Politics of Land Occupation: State Practice and Everyday Mobilization in Zille Raine Heights, Cape Town
In this paper we reflect on a contested land occupation in Cape Town, the informal settlement of Zille Raine Heights in the city's southern suburbs, to explore the settlement's struggle to gain a legal right to land and the state's attempts to remove it. In occupying land and defending their right to a decent place in the city, Zille Raine Heights and other settlements like it challenge the state in precise ways. This paper explores the provision…
Accessing the State: Everyday Practices and Politics in Cities of the South
This special issue explores everyday practices and politics of accessing the state and state resources from a southern, urban perspective. The collection of papers documents, urban low-income residents’ everyday relationships with the state, through the study of actual practices of interaction with a range of state representatives at the local level (councilors and officials, at various levels of local government). Formal and informal, legal and …
The Contested Politics of Housing Allocation in Ikapa, Cape Town, 1981-1994
This article investigates housing allocation politics in the Ikapa townships of Cape Town from 1981 to 1994. It focuses on the ways in which officials and community actors struggled for agency in housing allocation through differently constructed assertions of legitimacy and legality. Complex and contested politicised identities both divided and interlinked ‘community’ and ‘state’, enmeshed in dichotomous categories such as: ‘borners’ (people hol…
The Parallel Claims of Gated Communities and Land Invasions in a Southern City: Polarised State Responses
We identify and explore the parallels and differences between gated communities and land invasions as forms of residential territory in cities of the South. Using the case of Cape Town, South Africa, the parallel narratives regarding the reasons for invading or gating land are analysed and placed in contrast with an inconsistent state response. For while both ‘gaters' and ‘invaders' are driven by similar desires for a secure home and private auto…
Who's Serving Whom? Partners, Process, and Products in Service-Learning Projects in South African Urban Geography
The literature on service learning in geography courses has established and substantiated the importance and usefulness of such projects for student learning. In this paper the assumption is questioned that similar sets of benefits accrue to ‘community’ participants, those involved who are located outside the university context. The research undertaken demonstrates that projects, and the research or ‘service’ that they produce, are embedded in mo…
The paradox of ‘Free Basic Water’ and cost recovery in Grabouw: Increasing household debt and municipal financial loss
Engagement and reconstruction in critical research: Negotiating urban practice, policy and theory in South Africa
In this paper we examine critical engagement in research in order to rethink and reconfigure binaries such as theorizer and practitioner and theory and practice across South and North. We argue that while we welcome the 'moral geographies' literature (and its ideas about 'caring at a distance') as a catalyst for forging more beneficial connections between South and North, we suggest this is not enough. Drawing on South African experiences of crit…
Differentiation in South African and Indian Cities
Urban networks, community organising and race: An analysis of racial integration in a desegregated South African neighbourhood
UTshani BuyaKhuluma––The Grass Speaks: The political space and capacity of the South African Homeless People’s Federation
Accessing the State: Everyday Practices and Politics in Cities of the South
This special issue explores everyday practices and politics of accessing the state and state resources from a southern, urban perspective. The collection of papers documents, urban low-income residents’ everyday relationships with the state, through the study of actual practices of interaction with a range of state representatives at the local level (councilors and officials, at various levels of local government). Formal and informal, legal and …
Straining: Young Men Working through Waithood in Freetown, Sierra Leone
Young men in precarious situations of persistent un(der)employment in post-civil war Freetown, Sierra Leone are depicted in popular and policy debate as 'stuck' economically or 'dangerous' and prone to violence. In the present paper, by contrast, we draw on young men's explanations of their work and livelihood struggles as 'straining.' We explore the logic of straining, its innovations and demands, and its geography across the city, especially wh…
Waiting for the state: A politics of housing in South Africa
Although specified in the South African Bill of Rights, for the majority of South African citizens the right to access housing translates in practice to the experience of waiting. In this paper we reflect on the micropolitics of waiting, practices of quiet encroachment, exploring how and where citizens wait and make do, and their encounters with the state in these processes. We argue that waiting for homes shapes a politics of finding shelter in …
Urban networks, community organising and race: An analysis of racial integration in a desegregated South African neighbourhood
Engagement and reconstruction in critical research: Negotiating urban practice, policy and theory in South Africa
In this paper we examine critical engagement in research in order to rethink and reconfigure binaries such as theorizer and practitioner and theory and practice across South and North. We argue that while we welcome the 'moral geographies' literature (and its ideas about 'caring at a distance') as a catalyst for forging more beneficial connections between South and North, we suggest this is not enough. Drawing on South African experiences of crit…
UTshani BuyaKhuluma––The Grass Speaks: The political space and capacity of the South African Homeless People’s Federation
Between activism and the academy: The urban as political terrain
A growing consensus suggests that urban scholarship can benefit from engaging with knowledge in multiple sites in and beyond the academy, for instance with activism central to politics in cities worldwide. This paper explores narratives of urban politics produced with activists to reflect on how we account for knowledge and practice in theorising the urban as political terrain. Research conducted with activists in a community-based ‘Civic’ organi…
The Parallel Claims of Gated Communities and Land Invasions in a Southern City: Polarised State Responses
We identify and explore the parallels and differences between gated communities and land invasions as forms of residential territory in cities of the South. Using the case of Cape Town, South Africa, the parallel narratives regarding the reasons for invading or gating land are analysed and placed in contrast with an inconsistent state response. For while both ‘gaters' and ‘invaders' are driven by similar desires for a secure home and private auto…
The Centrality of Community Capacity in State Low-income Housing Provision in Cape Town, South Africa
The development of low-income housing continues to be a political imperative and an urban reconstruction priority for the post-apartheid South African state. But, even though policies for housing construction and delivery by the state are in place, in practice many homeless families initiate, direct and drive the process through which they secure state-provided housing. I analyse in this study two such cases where homeless residents in peripheral…
A Politics of Land Occupation: State Practice and Everyday Mobilization in Zille Raine Heights, Cape Town
In this paper we reflect on a contested land occupation in Cape Town, the informal settlement of Zille Raine Heights in the city's southern suburbs, to explore the settlement's struggle to gain a legal right to land and the state's attempts to remove it. In occupying land and defending their right to a decent place in the city, Zille Raine Heights and other settlements like it challenge the state in precise ways. This paper explores the provision…
Who's Serving Whom? Partners, Process, and Products in Service-Learning Projects in South African Urban Geography
The literature on service learning in geography courses has established and substantiated the importance and usefulness of such projects for student learning. In this paper the assumption is questioned that similar sets of benefits accrue to ‘community’ participants, those involved who are located outside the university context. The research undertaken demonstrates that projects, and the research or ‘service’ that they produce, are embedded in mo…
Class and Effective State Institutions: The Botswana Meat Commission
Thefailure of the African state, capitalist or socialist, to induce successful economic transformation has led to attempts by neo-liberal institutions and scholars to jettison it out of the business of economic development except in the form of 'night watchman'.1The minimalist strategy which is at the heart of such efforts ignores the historical evidence that sustained accumulation and development anywhere has been the product of either a capital…
Artificial intelligence and the state: Seeing like an artificial neural network
The emergence of the modern state was closely intertwined with the advent of statistics and demographic data. Today, we are witnessing the ascent of artificial intelligence as a new technology of governance. This article seeks to lay the groundwork for a research agenda at the intersection of the state and artificial intelligence, unpacking the notion of "AI" and examining the consequences of the state transitioning from statistics to artificial …
Persistent pasts, present struggles, imagined futures: Gender geographies in South Africa after apartheid
Any analysis of South African gendered performances, identities and inequalities confront past and present experiences of and struggles with race, colonialism, post-colonial development and sexuality. These tensions shape gendered geographical work, highlighting the importance of histories of race, class, and sexuality, as well as the ways in which gender itself can be approached as an analytical category and epistemic framing in South Africa. In…
Politics and Community-Based Research: Perspectives from Yeoville Studio, Johannesburg
This book is a new and courageous examination of the complexity of embedded research.It is an honest and insightful reflection that ... challenges and deepens arguments around spaces of participation through theoretical reflection and, more centrally, through the actual experience of the embedded research of Yeoville Studio.It is an important work for this and other reasons
The Contested Politics of Housing Allocation in Ikapa, Cape Town, 1981-1994
This article investigates housing allocation politics in the Ikapa townships of Cape Town from 1981 to 1994. It focuses on the ways in which officials and community actors struggled for agency in housing allocation through differently constructed assertions of legitimacy and legality. Complex and contested politicised identities both divided and interlinked ‘community’ and ‘state’, enmeshed in dichotomous categories such as: ‘borners’ (people hol…
In bodies and homes: Gendering citizenship in Southern African cities
How do the everyday contexts in which ordinary women struggle to access and maintain a place on the peripheries of the city shape experiences of citizenship? This paper explores this question in George, a periurban Lusaka neighbourhood in Zambia and through experiences of Zimbabwean migrant women’s negotiation of a place on the peri-urban edges of Khayelitsha, Cape Town, South Africa. In the logics of citizen-subjects, the experiences of these gr…
Class and Effective State Institutions: The Botswana Meat Commission
Thefailure of the African state, capitalist or socialist, to induce successful economic transformation has led to attempts by neo-liberal institutions and scholars to jettison it out of the business of economic development except in the form of 'night watchman'.1The minimalist strategy which is at the heart of such efforts ignores the historical evidence that sustained accumulation and development anywhere has been the product of either a capital…
The Centrality of Community Capacity in State Low-income Housing Provision in Cape Town, South Africa
The development of low-income housing continues to be a political imperative and an urban reconstruction priority for the post-apartheid South African state. But, even though policies for housing construction and delivery by the state are in place, in practice many homeless families initiate, direct and drive the process through which they secure state-provided housing. I analyse in this study two such cases where homeless residents in peripheral…
Partial formalization and its implications for community governance in an informal settlement
Local state restructuring and urban transformation in post-apartheid Cape Town
Differentiation in South African and Indian Cities
Urban networks, community organising and race: An analysis of racial integration in a desegregated South African neighbourhood
UTshani BuyaKhuluma––The Grass Speaks: The political space and capacity of the South African Homeless People’s Federation
Engagement and reconstruction in critical research: Negotiating urban practice, policy and theory in South Africa
In this paper we examine critical engagement in research in order to rethink and reconfigure binaries such as theorizer and practitioner and theory and practice across South and North. We argue that while we welcome the 'moral geographies' literature (and its ideas about 'caring at a distance') as a catalyst for forging more beneficial connections between South and North, we suggest this is not enough. Drawing on South African experiences of crit…
The paradox of ‘Free Basic Water’ and cost recovery in Grabouw: Increasing household debt and municipal financial loss
Who's Serving Whom? Partners, Process, and Products in Service-Learning Projects in South African Urban Geography
The literature on service learning in geography courses has established and substantiated the importance and usefulness of such projects for student learning. In this paper the assumption is questioned that similar sets of benefits accrue to ‘community’ participants, those involved who are located outside the university context. The research undertaken demonstrates that projects, and the research or ‘service’ that they produce, are embedded in mo…
The Parallel Claims of Gated Communities and Land Invasions in a Southern City: Polarised State Responses
We identify and explore the parallels and differences between gated communities and land invasions as forms of residential territory in cities of the South. Using the case of Cape Town, South Africa, the parallel narratives regarding the reasons for invading or gating land are analysed and placed in contrast with an inconsistent state response. For while both ‘gaters' and ‘invaders' are driven by similar desires for a secure home and private auto…
The Contested Politics of Housing Allocation in Ikapa, Cape Town, 1981-1994
This article investigates housing allocation politics in the Ikapa townships of Cape Town from 1981 to 1994. It focuses on the ways in which officials and community actors struggled for agency in housing allocation through differently constructed assertions of legitimacy and legality. Complex and contested politicised identities both divided and interlinked ‘community’ and ‘state’, enmeshed in dichotomous categories such as: ‘borners’ (people hol…
A Politics of Land Occupation: State Practice and Everyday Mobilization in Zille Raine Heights, Cape Town
In this paper we reflect on a contested land occupation in Cape Town, the informal settlement of Zille Raine Heights in the city's southern suburbs, to explore the settlement's struggle to gain a legal right to land and the state's attempts to remove it. In occupying land and defending their right to a decent place in the city, Zille Raine Heights and other settlements like it challenge the state in precise ways. This paper explores the provision…
Accessing the State: Everyday Practices and Politics in Cities of the South
This special issue explores everyday practices and politics of accessing the state and state resources from a southern, urban perspective. The collection of papers documents, urban low-income residents’ everyday relationships with the state, through the study of actual practices of interaction with a range of state representatives at the local level (councilors and officials, at various levels of local government). Formal and informal, legal and …
Globalizing capitalism and southern urbanization
In the post-colonial global south, the range of actions implied by scholars is far wider and inclusive than that traditionally understood as urban politics. ‘The political’ encompasses anti-colonial configuration, fought in nationalist struggles and by liberation movements; a politics post-independence committed to building a developmental state; the reconfiguration of this project as ‘crisis’, torn asunder by internationally driven structural ad…
The Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South
In all the debate on theorizing cities from and for the south, discussions of health remain relatively silent amid the rush to f ind adequate explanatory frameworks for a rapidly changing urban reality. This silence remains despite the fact that the broad canon of urban studies has actually been remarkably prolif ic in responding to Robinson’s (2006: x) assertion that urban theory has ‘excluded many cities and their citizens from their accounts o…
Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South
"Massive demographic and economic changes over the last three decades mean that cities that are highly profiled in the canon of urban studies no longer reflect the hubs of urbanisation or the most critical contemporary global urban problems. In this Handbook, we assess what a geographical corrective in representation, process and voice might mean for urban analysis and theory. We profile an emergent, if diffuse, body on work on cities that has as…
Intertwining lives and logics: Household and informal economies in Cape Town
Enabling households to make ends meet, the practices of small, informal businesses are not simple, but bound up in the struggles of households and the social and economic relationships that weave local economies together. This paper draws on stories of local businesses in an impoverished Cape Town township to situate these diverse logics and strategies, the histories and aspirations that shape small business success and struggle. Drawing on inter…
‘From the South’
Between activism and the academy: The urban as political terrain
A growing consensus suggests that urban scholarship can benefit from engaging with knowledge in multiple sites in and beyond the academy, for instance with activism central to politics in cities worldwide. This paper explores narratives of urban politics produced with activists to reflect on how we account for knowledge and practice in theorising the urban as political terrain. Research conducted with activists in a community-based ‘Civic’ organi…
Waiting for the state: A politics of housing in South Africa
Although specified in the South African Bill of Rights, for the majority of South African citizens the right to access housing translates in practice to the experience of waiting. In this paper we reflect on the micropolitics of waiting, practices of quiet encroachment, exploring how and where citizens wait and make do, and their encounters with the state in these processes. We argue that waiting for homes shapes a politics of finding shelter in …
Straining: Young Men Working through Waithood in Freetown, Sierra Leone
Young men in precarious situations of persistent un(der)employment in post-civil war Freetown, Sierra Leone are depicted in popular and policy debate as 'stuck' economically or 'dangerous' and prone to violence. In the present paper, by contrast, we draw on young men's explanations of their work and livelihood struggles as 'straining.' We explore the logic of straining, its innovations and demands, and its geography across the city, especially wh…
Persistent pasts, present struggles, imagined futures: Gender geographies in South Africa after apartheid
Any analysis of South African gendered performances, identities and inequalities confront past and present experiences of and struggles with race, colonialism, post-colonial development and sexuality. These tensions shape gendered geographical work, highlighting the importance of histories of race, class, and sexuality, as well as the ways in which gender itself can be approached as an analytical category and epistemic framing in South Africa. In…
In bodies and homes: Gendering citizenship in Southern African cities
How do the everyday contexts in which ordinary women struggle to access and maintain a place on the peripheries of the city shape experiences of citizenship? This paper explores this question in George, a periurban Lusaka neighbourhood in Zambia and through experiences of Zimbabwean migrant women’s negotiation of a place on the peri-urban edges of Khayelitsha, Cape Town, South Africa. In the logics of citizen-subjects, the experiences of these gr…
Politics and Community-Based Research: Perspectives from Yeoville Studio, Johannesburg
This book is a new and courageous examination of the complexity of embedded research.It is an honest and insightful reflection that ... challenges and deepens arguments around spaces of participation through theoretical reflection and, more centrally, through the actual experience of the embedded research of Yeoville Studio.It is an important work for this and other reasons
Political science (20 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Urban and Rural Development Challenges (15 works) · Geography (14 works) · Law (14 works) · Politics (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Economics (9 works) · Economic growth (8 works) · South African History and Culture (8 works)