Wits University Press

Politics and Community-Based Research: Perspectives from Yeoville Studio, Johannesburg provides a textured analysis of a contested urban space that will resonate with other contested urban spaces around the world and challenges researchers involved in such spaces to work in creative and politicised ways
This edited collection is built around the experiences of Yeoville Studio, a research initiative based at the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Through themed, illustrated stories of the people and places of Yeoville, the book presents a nuanced portrait of the vibrance and complexity of a post-apartheid, peri-central neighbourhood that has often been characterised as a 'slum' in Johannesburg. These narratives are interwoven with theoretical chapters by scholars from a diversity of disciplinary backgrounds, reflecting on the empirical experiences of the Studio and examining academic research processes. These chapters unpack the engagement of the Studio in Yeoville, including issues of trust, the need to align policy with lived realities and social needs, the political dimensions of the knowledge produced and the ways in which this knowledge was, and could be used.

The contributors to this volume draw on a non-dogmatic Marxist approach to explain the systemic and conjunctural dynamics of crisis inherent in global capitalism. Their analysis asks what is historically specific to capitalism's crises while avoiding catastrophic or defeatist claims. At the same time the volume situates left agency within actual patterns of resistance and class struggle to clarify the potential for transformative change.
The cycle of resistance strengthened by the World Socal Forum and transnational activism is now punctuated by the experience of the Arab Spring, the agency of anti-systemic movements, left think tanks, the Occupy Wall Street Movement, labour unions, left parties in Europe such as Syrizia and Podemos and peoples' budgeting in Kerala, India. On the down side, we are witnessing the waning of the Workers Party in Brazil and serious challenges for South Africa's once powerful labour movement and still formative social justice activism. All these developments are assessed in this volume.
This is the second volume in the Democratic Marxism series. It elaborates on crucial themes introduced in the first volume, Marxism in the 21st Century: Crisis, Critique and Struggle (edited by Michelle Williams and Vishwas Satgar).

Revisits the work of Rick Turner, a South African political theorist, and addresses contemporary debates
Rick Turner was a South African academic and anti-apartheid activist who rebelled against the apartheid state at the height of its power. For this he was assassinated in 1978, at just 32 years of age, but his life and work are testimony to the power of philosophical thinking for humans everywhere. Turner chose to live freely in an unfree time and argued for a non-racial, socialist future in a context where this seemed unimaginable.
This book takes seriously Rick Turner's challenge that political theorising requires thinking in a utopian way. Turner's seminal book The Eye of the Need: Towards a Participatory Democracy laid out some of his most potent ideas on a radically different political and economic system. His demand was that we work to escape the limiting ideas of the present, carefully design a just future based on shared human values, and act to make it a reality, both politically and in our daily lives.
The contributors to this volume engage critically with Turner's work on race relations, his relationship with Steve Biko, his views on religion, education and gender oppression, his participatory model of democracy, and his critique of enduring forms of poverty and economic inequality. They show how, in his life and work, Turner modeled how we can dare to be free and how hope can return, as the future always remains open to human construction. This book makes an important contribution to contemporary thinking and activism where the need for South Africans to define their understanding of their greater common good is of crucial importance.

This fifth volume in the New South African Review series takes as its starting point the shock wave emanating from the events at Marikana on 16 August 2012 and how it has reverberated throughout politics and society. Some of the chapters in the volume refer directly to Marikana. In others, the influence of that fateful day is pervasive if not direct.

An explanation of the New Growth Plan and alternatives to neo-liberal and capitalist development in South Africa
In this second volume of the New South African Review, the New Growth Path adopted by the South African government in 2010 provides the basis for a dialogue about whether 'decent work' is the best solution to South Africa's problems of low economic growth and high unemployment. There are investigations into rising inequality against the backdrop of the failings of Black Economic Empowerment; 'greening the economy', with emphasis on biofuels; the crisis of acid mine drainage on the Witwatersrand; possibilities for participatory forms of government; civil society activism; transformation of the print media and the SABC; the crisis in child care in public hospitals; the relationship between the police and a township community; the problems related to the absence of legislation to govern the powers of traditional authorities over land allocation; and assessments of the state of opposition political parties and the ANC Alliance. Asking whether the New Growth Plan reflects a set of new policies or an attempt to re-dress old (com)promises in new clothes, this volume brings together different voices in debate about possibilities for alternatives to neo-liberal and capitalist development in South Africa.

This edited volume provides an eco-socialist feminist analysis of the current social reproduction debate in South Africa, outlining existing and African alternatives to mainstream liberal feminism.

Presents surveys of the opinions, attitudes and lifestyles of members of trade unions affiliated to the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu). In its analysis, Labour Beyond Cosatu shows that Cosatu, fragmented and weakened through fissures in its alliance with the African National Congress, is no longer the only dominant force influencing South Africa's labour landscape.

An edited and translated edition of South African educationist and politician DDT Jabavu's isiXhosa travelogue; an account of his 1949 journey to India and East Africa.