Loren B Landau
Biographic Data
| ID | 95754 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Loren B Landau |
| GIVEN NAMES | Loren B |
| FAMILY NAME | Landau |
| SIGNATURE | LANDAU L B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of the Witwatersrand |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 459 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Pre-criminalizing race and space: Knowledge, migrant immorality, and Europe’s strategies for chronoscopic containment
Finding Ways through Eurospace: West African Movers Re-viewing Europe from the Inside
This is a book of stories: stories of people from Africa who have made their way to Europe; stories about how they move, how they make their lives, and how they engage with the spaces and people ar
Coercion or the social contract? Covid 19 and spatial (in)justice in African cities
Capacity, Complicity, and Subversion: Revisiting Collaborative Refugee Research in an Era of Containment
Shallow Solidarities: Space and Socialities of Accommodation and Exclusion in Nairobi and Johannesburg
In Rongai, Kenya and Katlehong, South Africa, two mobile, peri-urban areas, socialities are being shaped by a usufruct ethics: a means of establishing communal logics and rights to space aimed at achieving protection and benefit without communal membership or community cohesion. The resulting modes of mutual accommodation are consequently shaped by spatial circumstance and pragmatic concerns rather than claims for ownership, representation, or cu…
Introduction: Forging a Study of Mobility, Integration and Belonging in Africa
This is an era in which varied forms of human mobility are redefining the meanings of home, community and belonging across the world, giving rise to novel forms of membership. This chapter argues that the experiences of Africans moving within the continent provide valuable insights into these memberships and the practical and ethical foundations on which they rest. It outlines the volume’s various case studies and highlights their contributions t…
I Want to Go Home Forever: Stories of becoming and belonging in South Africa’s great metropolis
Southern Urbanism, Legalization, and the Limits of Migration Law
As a relatively well-defined subset of global migration law, refugee law and policy present important sites for contestation, agenda setting, normative pronouncements, and symbolic action. They are also an effective test of whether formal state obligations—in this case those outlined in the 1951 UN Refugee Convention—translate to protection in the weakly legalized environments in which most of the world's refugees reside. This essay asserts that …
Forging African Communities
This book draws renewed attention to migration into and within Africa, and to the socio-political consequences of these movements. In doing so, it complements vibrant scholarly and political discussio
No borders: The politics of immigration control and resistance
This is an era of resistance. Or, rather, it is an era in which millions dissatisfied with current socioeconomic and politic orders of inequality and exclusion have called for resistance. King’s bo
Misreading Mobility? Bureaucratic Politics and Blindness in UN Migration Reports
Privilege and precarity: Public scripts and self-censorship in shaping South African social science
South African social science’s close relationship with politics and policy have long provided a source of vitality and intellectual direction. Although one of the field’s greatest strengths, intimacy with socio-political and economic transformations engenders solipsism and stagnation. Ironically, it also compromises scholars’ political autonomy and intellectual ethics by blinding analysts to the emerging socio-political formations which will shap…
The Means and Meaning of Interculturalism in Africa's Urban Age
Beggaring belonging in Africa's no-man's lands: Diversity, Usufruct and the Ethics of Accommodation
In the migrant rich peri-urban sites of Rongai, Kenya and Katlehong, South Africa, social engagements are being shaped by usufruct ethics. The resulting modes of mutual accommodation are shaped by spatial circumstance and instrumental, pragmatic concerns rather than claims for ownership, representation, or cultural hegemony. In Kenya, ‘being cosmo’ enables residents to brace themselves against ethnicised violence and exclusion while opening space…
Becoming 'Cosmo: Displacement, Development and Disguise in Ongata Rongai
Ongata Rongai, a rapidly growing, ethnically heterogeneous community on Nairobi's urban periphery, has remained remarkably convivial in a country so frequently defined by conflicts over land and belonging. Bolstered by a distinct set of political logics and social practices, many of the site's multi-ethnic residents overtly reject the validity of ethnic violence and politics with reference to an explicitly articulated universalist inclusivity rar…
Urban Refugees and IDPs
This chapter examines the displacement of urban refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs), arguing that what has changed in the past decade is not displacement itself but who academics, policymakers, and practitioners choose to see as displaced. It considers how urban refugees are framed in current debates and discusses issues of protection and assistance raised by displaced persons moving into/through the highly informalized environments …
Religion and the foundation of urban difference: Belief, transcendence and transgression in South Africa and Johannesburg
Because of tectonic shifts in South Africa's political economy, overlapping, often translocal, systems of exchange, meaning and privilege are transforming the country's post-imperial order. In the 'estuarial' zones where various demographic and ideational currents converge to create spaces of ongoing flux, religion serves as a mechanism of exclusion and a means of place making. In almost all cases, the historical privatization of religion among t…
Conviviality, Rights, and Conflict in Africa's Urban Estuaries
Varied forms of mobility are rapidly transforming communities across the world. In Africa's cities and urban peripheries, the results of human movements include ever more diverse sets of new arrivals living alongside longer-term residents as they seek protection, profit, and passage elsewhere. Some move on and others return home, while still others shift within in search of new opportunities or security. In the absence of muscular state instituti…
Race Trouble: Race, Identity and Inequality in Post-Apartheid South Africa
Kevin Durrheim, Xoliswa Mtose and Lyndsay Brown, RACE TROUBLE: RACE, IDENTITY AND INEQUALITY IN POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011, 234 pp., $70.00 (hard)/$69.99 (e-book
Cape Town After Apartheid: Crime and Governance in the Divided City
Bridges to Nowhere: Hosts, Migrants, and the Chimera of Social Capital in Three African Cities
Interest in migrant social networks and social capital has grown substantially over the past several decades. The relationship between "host" and "migrant" communities remains central to these scholarly debates. Recently urbanized cities in Africa, which include large numbers of "native-born" or internal migrants, challenge basic presumptions about host/migrant distinctions informing many of these discussions. Using comparable survey data from Jo…
Passage, Profit, Protection, and the Challenge of Participation: Building and Belonging in African Cities
Tactical Cosmopolitanism and Idioms of Belonging: Insertion and Self-Exclusion in Johannesburg
Research amongst immigrant groups in Johannesburg points to the emergence of distinctive ways of negotiating inclusion and belonging that transcend ethnic, national or transnational paradigms. Confronted with new South African nationalism, a restrictive immigration regime and xenophobia, immigrants have reacted with what we term ‘tactical cosmopolitanism’ to negotiate partial inclusion in South Africa's transforming society without becoming bound…
Who to Blame and What's to Gain? Reflections on Space, State, and Violence in Kenya and South Africa
The ethnically and xenophobically motivated violence in Kenya and South Africa in the first half of 2008 has raised questions about its causes, the role of the state and the reality of current African societies. This article therefore analyses this violence, stating that although the violence in both countries had historical origins, there were also fundamental differences regarding the reasons for and the objectives of the violence. As a result,…
Living Within and Beyond Johannesburg: Exclusion, Religion, and Emerging Forms of Being
Drawing on original survey data and interviews, this article explores forms of exclusion, solidarity, and mutual recognition taking shape in Johannesburg among the city's new arrivals and long-term residents. It begins by highlighting three aspects of migrant life in central Johannesburg that situate affiliations with religion, kin, and space. The first is the relative absence of a self-defined and dominant host community; the second is the prese…
The Dual Imperative in Refugee Research: Some Methodological and Ethical Considerations in Social Science Research on Forced Migration
Social scientists doing fieldwork in humanitarian situations often face a dual imperative: research should be both academically sound and policy relevant. We argue that much of the current research on forced migration is based on unsound methodology, and that the data and subsequent policy conclusions are often flawed or ethically suspect. This paper identifies some key methodological and ethical problems confronting social scientists studying fo…
Tactical Cosmopolitanism and Idioms of Belonging: Insertion and Self-Exclusion in Johannesburg
Research amongst immigrant groups in Johannesburg points to the emergence of distinctive ways of negotiating inclusion and belonging that transcend ethnic, national or transnational paradigms. Confronted with new South African nationalism, a restrictive immigration regime and xenophobia, immigrants have reacted with what we term ‘tactical cosmopolitanism’ to negotiate partial inclusion in South Africa's transforming society without becoming bound…
Transplants and Transients: Idioms of Belonging and Dislocation in Inner-City Johannesburg
South Africa's economic and political liberalization have engendered new patterns of immigration and urbanization that find South Africans and foreign migrants converging on the streets of inner-city Johannesburg. As they interact, citizens and non-nationals have developed competing idioms for relating to one another and the space they share. For South Africans, this often means appealing to a nativist idiom that locates commonality amidst an all…
Protection and Dignity in Johannesburg: Shortcomings of South Africa's Urban Refugee Policy
Since the end of apartheid, South African cities have become destinations for refugees and asylum seekers from across Africa. In line with its constitutional commitments to human rights and dignity, South Africa has enacted a refugee policy intended to maximize freedom and protection by promoting refugees' temporary integration into local communities. In doing so, the law guarantees freedom of movement, access to many social services, and rights …
Living Within and Beyond Johannesburg: Exclusion, Religion, and Emerging Forms of Being
Drawing on original survey data and interviews, this article explores forms of exclusion, solidarity, and mutual recognition taking shape in Johannesburg among the city's new arrivals and long-term residents. It begins by highlighting three aspects of migrant life in central Johannesburg that situate affiliations with religion, kin, and space. The first is the relative absence of a self-defined and dominant host community; the second is the prese…
Conviviality, Rights, and Conflict in Africa's Urban Estuaries
Varied forms of mobility are rapidly transforming communities across the world. In Africa's cities and urban peripheries, the results of human movements include ever more diverse sets of new arrivals living alongside longer-term residents as they seek protection, profit, and passage elsewhere. Some move on and others return home, while still others shift within in search of new opportunities or security. In the absence of muscular state instituti…
Beggaring belonging in Africa's no-man's lands: Diversity, Usufruct and the Ethics of Accommodation
In the migrant rich peri-urban sites of Rongai, Kenya and Katlehong, South Africa, social engagements are being shaped by usufruct ethics. The resulting modes of mutual accommodation are shaped by spatial circumstance and instrumental, pragmatic concerns rather than claims for ownership, representation, or cultural hegemony. In Kenya, ‘being cosmo’ enables residents to brace themselves against ethnicised violence and exclusion while opening space…
Bridges to Nowhere: Hosts, Migrants, and the Chimera of Social Capital in Three African Cities
Interest in migrant social networks and social capital has grown substantially over the past several decades. The relationship between "host" and "migrant" communities remains central to these scholarly debates. Recently urbanized cities in Africa, which include large numbers of "native-born" or internal migrants, challenge basic presumptions about host/migrant distinctions informing many of these discussions. Using comparable survey data from Jo…
Displacement, Estrangement and Sovereignty: Reconfiguring State Power in Urban South Africa
Academic writing often portrays migrants as either passive victims of violence and aid recipients or as courageous heroes facing horrific indifference and hazards. This article recodes them and their activities as potent forces for reshaping practices of state power. In this depiction, displacement also becomes a lens for re-evaluating the nature of sovereignty in urban Africa. Through its focus on Johannesburg this article explores how migrant c…
Forging African Communities
This book draws renewed attention to migration into and within Africa, and to the socio-political consequences of these movements. In doing so, it complements vibrant scholarly and political discussio
Who to Blame and What's to Gain? Reflections on Space, State, and Violence in Kenya and South Africa
The ethnically and xenophobically motivated violence in Kenya and South Africa in the first half of 2008 has raised questions about its causes, the role of the state and the reality of current African societies. This article therefore analyses this violence, stating that although the violence in both countries had historical origins, there were also fundamental differences regarding the reasons for and the objectives of the violence. As a result,…
Coercion or the social contract? Covid 19 and spatial (in)justice in African cities
Pre-criminalizing race and space: Knowledge, migrant immorality, and Europe’s strategies for chronoscopic containment
Becoming 'Cosmo: Displacement, Development and Disguise in Ongata Rongai
Ongata Rongai, a rapidly growing, ethnically heterogeneous community on Nairobi's urban periphery, has remained remarkably convivial in a country so frequently defined by conflicts over land and belonging. Bolstered by a distinct set of political logics and social practices, many of the site's multi-ethnic residents overtly reject the validity of ethnic violence and politics with reference to an explicitly articulated universalist inclusivity rar…
Religion and the foundation of urban difference: Belief, transcendence and transgression in South Africa and Johannesburg
Because of tectonic shifts in South Africa's political economy, overlapping, often translocal, systems of exchange, meaning and privilege are transforming the country's post-imperial order. In the 'estuarial' zones where various demographic and ideational currents converge to create spaces of ongoing flux, religion serves as a mechanism of exclusion and a means of place making. In almost all cases, the historical privatization of religion among t…
Misreading Mobility? Bureaucratic Politics and Blindness in UN Migration Reports
Challenge without transformation: Refugees, aid and trade in western Tanzania
Through a comparison of two rural Tanzanian districts, this paper traces the effects of a humanitarian influx - the arrival of refugees and international relief - on the economic practices of the host population in one western Tanzanian district (Kasulu). It argues that, despite popular and Government claims to the contrary, there is little evidence that the influx has effected a transformation of citizens' economic lives. While changes in exchan…
Race Trouble: Race, Identity and Inequality in Post-Apartheid South Africa
Kevin Durrheim, Xoliswa Mtose and Lyndsay Brown, RACE TROUBLE: RACE, IDENTITY AND INEQUALITY IN POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011, 234 pp., $70.00 (hard)/$69.99 (e-book
Privilege and precarity: Public scripts and self-censorship in shaping South African social science
South African social science’s close relationship with politics and policy have long provided a source of vitality and intellectual direction. Although one of the field’s greatest strengths, intimacy with socio-political and economic transformations engenders solipsism and stagnation. Ironically, it also compromises scholars’ political autonomy and intellectual ethics by blinding analysts to the emerging socio-political formations which will shap…
What Role Can History Play for the Newly Urbanized Women of Kenya and Tanzania
No abstract
Fear in Bongoland: Burundi Refugees in Urban Tanzania
The Dual Imperative in Refugee Research: Some Methodological and Ethical Considerations in Social Science Research on Forced Migration
Social scientists doing fieldwork in humanitarian situations often face a dual imperative: research should be both academically sound and policy relevant. We argue that much of the current research on forced migration is based on unsound methodology, and that the data and subsequent policy conclusions are often flawed or ethically suspect. This paper identifies some key methodological and ethical problems confronting social scientists studying fo…
Challenge without transformation: Refugees, aid and trade in western Tanzania
Through a comparison of two rural Tanzanian districts, this paper traces the effects of a humanitarian influx - the arrival of refugees and international relief - on the economic practices of the host population in one western Tanzanian district (Kasulu). It argues that, despite popular and Government claims to the contrary, there is little evidence that the influx has effected a transformation of citizens' economic lives. While changes in exchan…
Protection and Dignity in Johannesburg: Shortcomings of South Africa's Urban Refugee Policy
Since the end of apartheid, South African cities have become destinations for refugees and asylum seekers from across Africa. In line with its constitutional commitments to human rights and dignity, South Africa has enacted a refugee policy intended to maximize freedom and protection by promoting refugees' temporary integration into local communities. In doing so, the law guarantees freedom of movement, access to many social services, and rights …
Transplants and Transients: Idioms of Belonging and Dislocation in Inner-City Johannesburg
South Africa's economic and political liberalization have engendered new patterns of immigration and urbanization that find South Africans and foreign migrants converging on the streets of inner-city Johannesburg. As they interact, citizens and non-nationals have developed competing idioms for relating to one another and the space they share. For South Africans, this often means appealing to a nativist idiom that locates commonality amidst an all…
Displacement, Estrangement and Sovereignty: Reconfiguring State Power in Urban South Africa
Academic writing often portrays migrants as either passive victims of violence and aid recipients or as courageous heroes facing horrific indifference and hazards. This article recodes them and their activities as potent forces for reshaping practices of state power. In this depiction, displacement also becomes a lens for re-evaluating the nature of sovereignty in urban Africa. Through its focus on Johannesburg this article explores how migrant c…
Who to Blame and What's to Gain? Reflections on Space, State, and Violence in Kenya and South Africa
The ethnically and xenophobically motivated violence in Kenya and South Africa in the first half of 2008 has raised questions about its causes, the role of the state and the reality of current African societies. This article therefore analyses this violence, stating that although the violence in both countries had historical origins, there were also fundamental differences regarding the reasons for and the objectives of the violence. As a result,…
Living Within and Beyond Johannesburg: Exclusion, Religion, and Emerging Forms of Being
Drawing on original survey data and interviews, this article explores forms of exclusion, solidarity, and mutual recognition taking shape in Johannesburg among the city's new arrivals and long-term residents. It begins by highlighting three aspects of migrant life in central Johannesburg that situate affiliations with religion, kin, and space. The first is the relative absence of a self-defined and dominant host community; the second is the prese…
Passage, Profit, Protection, and the Challenge of Participation: Building and Belonging in African Cities
Tactical Cosmopolitanism and Idioms of Belonging: Insertion and Self-Exclusion in Johannesburg
Research amongst immigrant groups in Johannesburg points to the emergence of distinctive ways of negotiating inclusion and belonging that transcend ethnic, national or transnational paradigms. Confronted with new South African nationalism, a restrictive immigration regime and xenophobia, immigrants have reacted with what we term ‘tactical cosmopolitanism’ to negotiate partial inclusion in South Africa's transforming society without becoming bound…
Bridges to Nowhere: Hosts, Migrants, and the Chimera of Social Capital in Three African Cities
Interest in migrant social networks and social capital has grown substantially over the past several decades. The relationship between "host" and "migrant" communities remains central to these scholarly debates. Recently urbanized cities in Africa, which include large numbers of "native-born" or internal migrants, challenge basic presumptions about host/migrant distinctions informing many of these discussions. Using comparable survey data from Jo…
Race Trouble: Race, Identity and Inequality in Post-Apartheid South Africa
Kevin Durrheim, Xoliswa Mtose and Lyndsay Brown, RACE TROUBLE: RACE, IDENTITY AND INEQUALITY IN POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011, 234 pp., $70.00 (hard)/$69.99 (e-book
Cape Town After Apartheid: Crime and Governance in the Divided City
Urban Refugees and IDPs
This chapter examines the displacement of urban refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs), arguing that what has changed in the past decade is not displacement itself but who academics, policymakers, and practitioners choose to see as displaced. It considers how urban refugees are framed in current debates and discusses issues of protection and assistance raised by displaced persons moving into/through the highly informalized environments …
Religion and the foundation of urban difference: Belief, transcendence and transgression in South Africa and Johannesburg
Because of tectonic shifts in South Africa's political economy, overlapping, often translocal, systems of exchange, meaning and privilege are transforming the country's post-imperial order. In the 'estuarial' zones where various demographic and ideational currents converge to create spaces of ongoing flux, religion serves as a mechanism of exclusion and a means of place making. In almost all cases, the historical privatization of religion among t…
Conviviality, Rights, and Conflict in Africa's Urban Estuaries
Varied forms of mobility are rapidly transforming communities across the world. In Africa's cities and urban peripheries, the results of human movements include ever more diverse sets of new arrivals living alongside longer-term residents as they seek protection, profit, and passage elsewhere. Some move on and others return home, while still others shift within in search of new opportunities or security. In the absence of muscular state instituti…
Becoming 'Cosmo: Displacement, Development and Disguise in Ongata Rongai
Ongata Rongai, a rapidly growing, ethnically heterogeneous community on Nairobi's urban periphery, has remained remarkably convivial in a country so frequently defined by conflicts over land and belonging. Bolstered by a distinct set of political logics and social practices, many of the site's multi-ethnic residents overtly reject the validity of ethnic violence and politics with reference to an explicitly articulated universalist inclusivity rar…
The Means and Meaning of Interculturalism in Africa's Urban Age
Beggaring belonging in Africa's no-man's lands: Diversity, Usufruct and the Ethics of Accommodation
In the migrant rich peri-urban sites of Rongai, Kenya and Katlehong, South Africa, social engagements are being shaped by usufruct ethics. The resulting modes of mutual accommodation are shaped by spatial circumstance and instrumental, pragmatic concerns rather than claims for ownership, representation, or cultural hegemony. In Kenya, ‘being cosmo’ enables residents to brace themselves against ethnicised violence and exclusion while opening space…
Southern Urbanism, Legalization, and the Limits of Migration Law
As a relatively well-defined subset of global migration law, refugee law and policy present important sites for contestation, agenda setting, normative pronouncements, and symbolic action. They are also an effective test of whether formal state obligations—in this case those outlined in the 1951 UN Refugee Convention—translate to protection in the weakly legalized environments in which most of the world's refugees reside. This essay asserts that …
Forging African Communities
This book draws renewed attention to migration into and within Africa, and to the socio-political consequences of these movements. In doing so, it complements vibrant scholarly and political discussio
No borders: The politics of immigration control and resistance
This is an era of resistance. Or, rather, it is an era in which millions dissatisfied with current socioeconomic and politic orders of inequality and exclusion have called for resistance. King’s bo
Misreading Mobility? Bureaucratic Politics and Blindness in UN Migration Reports
Privilege and precarity: Public scripts and self-censorship in shaping South African social science
South African social science’s close relationship with politics and policy have long provided a source of vitality and intellectual direction. Although one of the field’s greatest strengths, intimacy with socio-political and economic transformations engenders solipsism and stagnation. Ironically, it also compromises scholars’ political autonomy and intellectual ethics by blinding analysts to the emerging socio-political formations which will shap…
Sociology (26 works) · Political science (25 works) · Law (20 works) · Politics (13 works) · Migration, Refugees, and Integration (12 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Migration and Labor Dynamics (10 works) · Geography (8 works) · Urban and Rural Development Challenges (7 works)