Hugo Canham
Biographic Data
| ID | 637423 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Hugo Canham |
| GIVEN NAMES | Hugo |
| FAMILY NAME | Canham |
| SIGNATURE | CANHAM H |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of the Witwatersrand |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1469-3103 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 70 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Respatialising the Cape ocean through planetary attending
Pivoting around the oceanic environment of the Western Cape in South Africa, this paper surfaces black geographies of ocean often submerged from view by colonial spatialities and formations. This is done through an analysis of the documentary—The Glow in the Water—that co-produced by the authors as well as interviews we conducted as part of making the film. Despite the colonial apartheid state’s efforts to sever black people’s relations with the …
Roadside refusals: Resisting infrastructural violence in the south of Johannesburg
In this paper, we offer an analysis of what we are calling “roadside refusals” – coordinated and quotidian resistance efforts that take place alongside highways and are directed against the racial capitalist state’s infrastructurally violent impositions and abandonments. In particular, we look at roadside refusal in Nana’s Farm, a marginalized community situated beside the N12 highway in the south of Johannesburg. Drawing from interviews, communi…
Irritating queer studies
Naked Protests: The Language of Women’s Bodies at the End of Their Tether
Adopting a feminist standpoint, this article explores the language of women’s bodies at the end of their tether. It pauses on the varied affective registers communicated by different body parts during women’s naked protests. It reads the registers of exposed buttocks, the sociality of the protesting vagina, and the actions of bared breasts through affects of shame, disgust, and fear. This is done through an analysis of interview data from twelve …
Place Naming as Black Place-making in Johannesburg’s Informal Settlements
Informal settlements in South Africa exist on the periphery of formal town planning and expose the complex navigations of place-making, agency, and survival. However, these settlements are engaged in their own practices of landscape inscription through acts of place naming and place-making as a means of reclaiming land and solidifying identities of people and places. This paper explores place naming processes within three informal settlements in …
Coordinates of black planetary studies
Interspecies relations in Johannesburg's outdoors ecologies
Informed by methods in Black and Indigenous studies, this article attends to interspecies relations in the Black outdoors of informal settlements in the south of Johannesburg, South Africa. We decentre anthropocentric perspectives and lean into planetary understandings of the interactions between humans, plants, animals, and the cosmos as forms of relation in interspecies life. We suggest that like humans, the natural elements within these contex…
Insisting on relation: Hugo ka Canham & June Bam-Hutchison in conversation
Decolonizing psychology through struggles for land
The conception of Indigenous land as terra nullius-territory without a master-was fundamental in globalizing the colonial project. Contemporary mechanisms of coloniality are no different. All over the world, people are expelled from their lands for purposes of mineral extraction, dumping, industrial development, control over territory, and suppressing resistance. In this, the histories, knowledges, and affective relations that people have with la…
The last professor has gone
What will we do now that the professor has gone? Prof Bhekizizwe Peterson cared beyond the gesture. He may be the last of that school of deep thought and care for ideas and for others. Generations of us whose lives he touched are reeling at the news of his death. We are devastated and left floundering. We fear that the project of scholarly care has lost its last soldier. Prof loved us quietly and he looked at the academy with the eyes of someone …
Black studies and the spirit of generosity
The Providence of Review and Writing through Revision
Reading a liberation psychology archive in South Africa
Those working from within the liberation psychology paradigm strive to remould psychology so that it might be put to work for the task of liberation – a task with which most psychologists have, historically, been wholly unconcerned. In practice, liberation psychology tends to be porous, multiple, and under-resourced. Indeed, much of what we might think of as liberation psychology is not referred to as such by its practitioners. Surfacing liberati…
The operation of ideology in coronavirus vaccine Twitter influencer commentary
The study sought to provide a greater comprehension of the contending discourses and ideologies of coronavirus vaccine acceptance and reluctance in South Africa as revealed by Twitter influencer commentaries. 1 Naturally occurring data generated between February 2021 and February 2022 was collected from Twitter in the form of Tweets authored by South African social media influencers. The paper utilised Fairclough’s model of critical discourse ana…
Black women’s filicidal rage in zones of impoverishment
Visual and written accounts of rage in popular media tend to associate rage with violent masculinities.Footnote1 Filicide brings women’s rage into sharp relief. By reading South African women in relation to their ancestral peer, Sila van den Kaap and through a ‘black deformative’ analysis of media accounts and an interview of filicide in South Africa, this paper asserts that black women have ample cause for rage. Filicide brings the purportedly p…
Riotous Deathscapes
Autoetnografie retrospektywne, czyli dekolonialny Nowy Uniwersytet
Artykuł prezentuje retrospektywną autoetnografię jako metodologię dekolonialnego spojrzenia na neoliberalne warunki w szkołach wyższych. Autoetnografia jest rozumiana jako przestrzeń spotkania tego, co osobiste z tym co polityczne, historyczne i kulturalne. Ma na celu zakwestionowanie codziennych struktur władzy. Autorzy piszą o pragnieniu utopijnej przyszłości, tworząc obraz Nowego Uniwersytetu. Jako osoby, które doświadczyły dorastania w post-k…
The affective afterlife of naked body protests
In this paper, we explore the afterlife of naked body protests through an examination of interview and archival data from women who participated in various naked protests in South Africa. We engage the emotional outcomes that follow African women’s naked protests. We read black women’s naked body protests through the theoretical lenses of refusal and the affective economies of shame and psychic distress. By examining a data corpus of 16 interview…
Women’s refusal of racial patriarchy in South African academia
This paper explores the career experiences of women academics at three South African universities. To understand the experiences of women academics, we conducted an intersectional interrogation of the politics and practices of belonging in departmental cultures. The sample consisted of thirty women academics whose interviews were analysed through a discursive thematic frame. We found that while all participants experienced gender-based discrimina…
Conundrums in teaching decolonial critical community psychology within the context of neo‐liberal market pressures
In this paper, we provide empirically informed reflections on the difficulty of undertaking critically inflected, decolonial praxis in community psychology within the overdetermined global order of neo‐liberalism. Using interviews with 10 alumni of the Masters in Community‐Based Counselling (MACC) psychology program at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in South Africa, we extend what have hitherto been largely theoretical debates about t…
Dog walking: Doing class and undoing anthropocentrism
Beginning with anecdotal accounts about the aspirations of black middle-class people, with dog walking as the point of entry, this study sought to understand the meanings attached to dog walking from the perspectives of ten middle-class black people who walk their dogs. Applying discourse analysis to interview data we found that dog walking is a habituated class performance. While some disavowed the idea of dog walking as a performance of middle …
Black Death and Mourning as Pandemic
Black bodies have been the site of devastation for centuries. We who inhabit and love these bodies live in a state of perpetual mourning. We mourn the disproportionate dying in our families, communities and the dying in the black diaspora. We are yet to come to terms with the death that accompanied the AIDS pandemic. Tuberculosis breeds in the conditions within which most of us live. We die from hours spent in the belly of the earth where we dig …
Zulu love letter: Drawing in and re-assembling
Watching Zulu Love Letter again in 2020, I was attentive to what the film did to me corporeally. I was curious as to what truths I would be moved to feel in my body. This is my entree to this discu
Retrospective Autoethnographies: A Call for Decolonial Imaginings for the New University
In this article, we present "retrospective autoethnographies" as a methodology for decolonial inquiry/intervention in the context of neoliberal settings, specifically the university. Autoethnography represents that epistemic and methodological space where the personal intersects with the political, historical, and cultural to critique everyday power structures. Instead of inserting the autobiographical past into the present, we write of our prese…
Tea girl and garden boy” bankers: Exploring Substantive Equality in Bankers’ Narratives
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore what narratives of inequality tell us about societal inequality both inside and outside of workplaces. It illuminates the intertwined fates of social agents and the productive potential of seeing organisational actors as social beings in order to advance resistance and substantive equality. Design/methodology/approach This research empirically examines narratives of inequality and substantive empowe…
Being black, middle class and the object of two gazes
The growth of the black 1 middle class in ‘post-apartheid’ 2 South Africa has become the subject of scholarly and public interest. Applying elements of discourse analysis to interview and group discussion based data, this article provides a qualitative thematic exploration of two pressures that confront a group of black middle-class professionals residing in Johannesburg, South Africa. The first pressure is the experience of being black under the…
Retrospective Autoethnographies: A Call for Decolonial Imaginings for the New University
In this article, we present "retrospective autoethnographies" as a methodology for decolonial inquiry/intervention in the context of neoliberal settings, specifically the university. Autoethnography represents that epistemic and methodological space where the personal intersects with the political, historical, and cultural to critique everyday power structures. Instead of inserting the autobiographical past into the present, we write of our prese…
Theorising community rage for decolonial action
Rage is under-theorised in South Africa. This absence is more pronounced in psychological scholarship. This is a remarkable oversight since we have gained infamy as the world’s epicentre of protest action. In this article, I read the landscape of scholarly production to conduct an analysis of how community rage and protests are made sense of. The analysis focuses on work from the past decade as it has been reported that this period has witnessed …
Epistemological resistance towards diversality: Teaching community psychology as a decolonial project
In contexts of political instability and change, the value of disciplinary knowledges and the processes that constituted them is often questioned. Psychology is not exempt from this process. Little South African work has illustrated what teaching for decoloniality may mean in South African psychology. We draw on examples of curriculum design in community psychology from the Universities of the Witwatersrand, South Africa and Stellenbosch, three l…
Conundrums in teaching decolonial critical community psychology within the context of neo‐liberal market pressures
In this paper, we provide empirically informed reflections on the difficulty of undertaking critically inflected, decolonial praxis in community psychology within the overdetermined global order of neo‐liberalism. Using interviews with 10 alumni of the Masters in Community‐Based Counselling (MACC) psychology program at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in South Africa, we extend what have hitherto been largely theoretical debates about t…
Outsiders within: Non-conformity among four contemporary black female managers in South Africa
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to foreground non-conformity in organisational life as it relates to black female managers. My intervention here is to problematise organisational theory in relation to its limited ability to engage with affect and to point to a more generative framework. Through centering the body, the author also seeks to offer a counter narrative to the field of Positive Organisation Scholarship and its drive to primarily…
Embodied Black Rage
Examining two sets of archived materials that include a corpus of narratives that reflect on the period of apartheid in South Africa and posters used by anti-apartheid activists, the paper teases out the operations of racism and the manifestations of rage on the Black body. Critical discourse analysis and affect as theory and method are applied to trace the work of racism and its affective consequences and resistances. Here affect is deployed to …
Reviled Bodies of Knowledge in the South African University
In this paper, I argue that our conception of knowledge cannot be separated from the bodies that are involved in its creation. Resisting the decolonization of the curriculum and how we come to know goes cheek by jowl with which bodies are acceptable and which are unpalatable in higher education. It is not just particular knowledges that are therefore reviled but black bodies that signify those knowledges—that have to fight to belong or are ejecte…
Living through the legacy: The Apartheid Archive Project and the possibilities for psychosocial transformation
The Apartheid Archive Project is an ongoing, collaborative research project that focuses on the collection of personal stories and narrative accounts from ordinary South Africans about their experiences of racism during apartheid. The primary aim of this initiative is to provide a forum for differing sectors of South African society to share and reflect on their past experiences, in the hope that these will offer us an array of alternative entry …
Reading a liberation psychology archive in South Africa
Those working from within the liberation psychology paradigm strive to remould psychology so that it might be put to work for the task of liberation – a task with which most psychologists have, historically, been wholly unconcerned. In practice, liberation psychology tends to be porous, multiple, and under-resourced. Indeed, much of what we might think of as liberation psychology is not referred to as such by its practitioners. Surfacing liberati…
Are we getting socially just pedagogy right? Reflections from social work praxis
This article explores how the teaching of group work field education can be developed through learning communities. The Bachelor of Social Work degree is being revised to include a wider social development focus against the backdrop of increasing socio-economic inequality. Given these changes, educators are encouraged to develop courses that promote active learning to engage students emotionally, cognitively and behaviourally as socially responsi…
The Providence of Review and Writing through Revision
The affective afterlife of naked body protests
In this paper, we explore the afterlife of naked body protests through an examination of interview and archival data from women who participated in various naked protests in South Africa. We engage the emotional outcomes that follow African women’s naked protests. We read black women’s naked body protests through the theoretical lenses of refusal and the affective economies of shame and psychic distress. By examining a data corpus of 16 interview…
Transnational perspectives on Black subjectivity
In this article, five Black researchers bring their insights into conversation about meanings of blackness in contemporary Australia, Jamaica, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. We critically interrogate blackness transnationally and also within the historical contexts of our work and lived experiences. Situated within critical race studies, we draw on multiple theoretical frameworks that seek to preserve the comp…
Outsiders within: Non-conformity among four contemporary black female managers in South Africa
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to foreground non-conformity in organisational life as it relates to black female managers. My intervention here is to problematise organisational theory in relation to its limited ability to engage with affect and to point to a more generative framework. Through centering the body, the author also seeks to offer a counter narrative to the field of Positive Organisation Scholarship and its drive to primarily…
Living through the legacy: The Apartheid Archive Project and the possibilities for psychosocial transformation
The Apartheid Archive Project is an ongoing, collaborative research project that focuses on the collection of personal stories and narrative accounts from ordinary South Africans about their experiences of racism during apartheid. The primary aim of this initiative is to provide a forum for differing sectors of South African society to share and reflect on their past experiences, in the hope that these will offer us an array of alternative entry …
Epistemological resistance towards diversality: Teaching community psychology as a decolonial project
In contexts of political instability and change, the value of disciplinary knowledges and the processes that constituted them is often questioned. Psychology is not exempt from this process. Little South African work has illustrated what teaching for decoloniality may mean in South African psychology. We draw on examples of curriculum design in community psychology from the Universities of the Witwatersrand, South Africa and Stellenbosch, three l…
Transnational perspectives on Black subjectivity
In this article, five Black researchers bring their insights into conversation about meanings of blackness in contemporary Australia, Jamaica, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. We critically interrogate blackness transnationally and also within the historical contexts of our work and lived experiences. Situated within critical race studies, we draw on multiple theoretical frameworks that seek to preserve the comp…
Being black, middle class and the object of two gazes
The growth of the black 1 middle class in ‘post-apartheid’ 2 South Africa has become the subject of scholarly and public interest. Applying elements of discourse analysis to interview and group discussion based data, this article provides a qualitative thematic exploration of two pressures that confront a group of black middle-class professionals residing in Johannesburg, South Africa. The first pressure is the experience of being black under the…
Embodied Black Rage
Examining two sets of archived materials that include a corpus of narratives that reflect on the period of apartheid in South Africa and posters used by anti-apartheid activists, the paper teases out the operations of racism and the manifestations of rage on the Black body. Critical discourse analysis and affect as theory and method are applied to trace the work of racism and its affective consequences and resistances. Here affect is deployed to …
Theorising community rage for decolonial action
Rage is under-theorised in South Africa. This absence is more pronounced in psychological scholarship. This is a remarkable oversight since we have gained infamy as the world’s epicentre of protest action. In this article, I read the landscape of scholarly production to conduct an analysis of how community rage and protests are made sense of. The analysis focuses on work from the past decade as it has been reported that this period has witnessed …
Reviled Bodies of Knowledge in the South African University
In this paper, I argue that our conception of knowledge cannot be separated from the bodies that are involved in its creation. Resisting the decolonization of the curriculum and how we come to know goes cheek by jowl with which bodies are acceptable and which are unpalatable in higher education. It is not just particular knowledges that are therefore reviled but black bodies that signify those knowledges—that have to fight to belong or are ejecte…
Women bankers in black and white: Exploring Raced, Classed and Gendered Coalitions
Black women constitute the majority of the population but they lag significantly behind white women and other groups in their participation in the labour market. Intersectionality requires that we recognise the differences in experience between black women and white women. This is not for the purposes of what some have called the “oppression Olympics” but to research the stratifications of social asymmetries in a manner that allows for an underst…
Are we getting socially just pedagogy right? Reflections from social work praxis
This article explores how the teaching of group work field education can be developed through learning communities. The Bachelor of Social Work degree is being revised to include a wider social development focus against the backdrop of increasing socio-economic inequality. Given these changes, educators are encouraged to develop courses that promote active learning to engage students emotionally, cognitively and behaviourally as socially responsi…
Tea girl and garden boy” bankers: Exploring Substantive Equality in Bankers’ Narratives
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore what narratives of inequality tell us about societal inequality both inside and outside of workplaces. It illuminates the intertwined fates of social agents and the productive potential of seeing organisational actors as social beings in order to advance resistance and substantive equality. Design/methodology/approach This research empirically examines narratives of inequality and substantive empowe…
Black Death and Mourning as Pandemic
Black bodies have been the site of devastation for centuries. We who inhabit and love these bodies live in a state of perpetual mourning. We mourn the disproportionate dying in our families, communities and the dying in the black diaspora. We are yet to come to terms with the death that accompanied the AIDS pandemic. Tuberculosis breeds in the conditions within which most of us live. We die from hours spent in the belly of the earth where we dig …
Zulu love letter: Drawing in and re-assembling
Watching Zulu Love Letter again in 2020, I was attentive to what the film did to me corporeally. I was curious as to what truths I would be moved to feel in my body. This is my entree to this discu
Retrospective Autoethnographies: A Call for Decolonial Imaginings for the New University
In this article, we present "retrospective autoethnographies" as a methodology for decolonial inquiry/intervention in the context of neoliberal settings, specifically the university. Autoethnography represents that epistemic and methodological space where the personal intersects with the political, historical, and cultural to critique everyday power structures. Instead of inserting the autobiographical past into the present, we write of our prese…
Dog walking: Doing class and undoing anthropocentrism
Beginning with anecdotal accounts about the aspirations of black middle-class people, with dog walking as the point of entry, this study sought to understand the meanings attached to dog walking from the perspectives of ten middle-class black people who walk their dogs. Applying discourse analysis to interview data we found that dog walking is a habituated class performance. While some disavowed the idea of dog walking as a performance of middle …
The affective afterlife of naked body protests
In this paper, we explore the afterlife of naked body protests through an examination of interview and archival data from women who participated in various naked protests in South Africa. We engage the emotional outcomes that follow African women’s naked protests. We read black women’s naked body protests through the theoretical lenses of refusal and the affective economies of shame and psychic distress. By examining a data corpus of 16 interview…
Women’s refusal of racial patriarchy in South African academia
This paper explores the career experiences of women academics at three South African universities. To understand the experiences of women academics, we conducted an intersectional interrogation of the politics and practices of belonging in departmental cultures. The sample consisted of thirty women academics whose interviews were analysed through a discursive thematic frame. We found that while all participants experienced gender-based discrimina…
Conundrums in teaching decolonial critical community psychology within the context of neo‐liberal market pressures
In this paper, we provide empirically informed reflections on the difficulty of undertaking critically inflected, decolonial praxis in community psychology within the overdetermined global order of neo‐liberalism. Using interviews with 10 alumni of the Masters in Community‐Based Counselling (MACC) psychology program at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in South Africa, we extend what have hitherto been largely theoretical debates about t…
Riotous Deathscapes
Autoetnografie retrospektywne, czyli dekolonialny Nowy Uniwersytet
Artykuł prezentuje retrospektywną autoetnografię jako metodologię dekolonialnego spojrzenia na neoliberalne warunki w szkołach wyższych. Autoetnografia jest rozumiana jako przestrzeń spotkania tego, co osobiste z tym co polityczne, historyczne i kulturalne. Ma na celu zakwestionowanie codziennych struktur władzy. Autorzy piszą o pragnieniu utopijnej przyszłości, tworząc obraz Nowego Uniwersytetu. Jako osoby, które doświadczyły dorastania w post-k…
The last professor has gone
What will we do now that the professor has gone? Prof Bhekizizwe Peterson cared beyond the gesture. He may be the last of that school of deep thought and care for ideas and for others. Generations of us whose lives he touched are reeling at the news of his death. We are devastated and left floundering. We fear that the project of scholarly care has lost its last soldier. Prof loved us quietly and he looked at the academy with the eyes of someone …
Black studies and the spirit of generosity
The Providence of Review and Writing through Revision
Reading a liberation psychology archive in South Africa
Those working from within the liberation psychology paradigm strive to remould psychology so that it might be put to work for the task of liberation – a task with which most psychologists have, historically, been wholly unconcerned. In practice, liberation psychology tends to be porous, multiple, and under-resourced. Indeed, much of what we might think of as liberation psychology is not referred to as such by its practitioners. Surfacing liberati…
The operation of ideology in coronavirus vaccine Twitter influencer commentary
The study sought to provide a greater comprehension of the contending discourses and ideologies of coronavirus vaccine acceptance and reluctance in South Africa as revealed by Twitter influencer commentaries. 1 Naturally occurring data generated between February 2021 and February 2022 was collected from Twitter in the form of Tweets authored by South African social media influencers. The paper utilised Fairclough’s model of critical discourse ana…
Sociology (23 works) · Political science (17 works) · Gender Studies (16 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Art (11 works) · Politics (10 works) · History (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Aesthetics (8 works) · South African History and Culture (8 works)