Columbia University Seminars
STUDIES IN CONTEMPORARY AFRICA
invites you to our seminars for AY 2025-26
Please reply to [email protected] to RSVP
While transition-era concessions that protected privileges in South Africa’s formerly white public schools were rationalized on preventing white exodus to private schools, the resulting maintenance of a bifurcated public system has produced a recent boom in “low-fee” private schools driven by Black exodus from township school conditions unconducive to aspirations for social mobility. In this talk, I draw on long-term ethnographic research in and around a low-fee private school in Cape Town’s oldest township to explore the complex maneuvering Black youth and families do to navigate the city’s racialized, competitive marketplace of schools. I show how, in their efforts to work toward competing aspirations for both mobility and equity, Black students and families are burdened with a double bind between school “choice” and education crisis. I argue that the coupling of school desegregation with devolution and marketization has ostensibly deracialized access to privilege without fundamentally dismantling racial capitalism, enabling the persistence of apartheid schooling geography and limiting the redistribution of educational resources, despite the advent of nonracial democracy.
Amelia Simone Herbert is Assistant Professor of Education and Urban Studies at Barnard College. Her current book project is an ethnography that examines how youth, families, and educators navigate the racial and spatial politics of aspiration in the increasingly marketized schooling landscape of Cape Town, South Africa. Amelia’s scholarly, public, and creative writing appears in Comparative Education Review, The Black Scholar, Anthropology News, Cultured Magazine, and A Gathering Together Literary Journal, among others. Her commitment to researching the complex meanings of schooling in lived experiences is fueled by over 15 years of experience as a teacher and teacher educator in K-12 schools in Newark, New York City, and Cape Town.
Photo caption: Mosaic plinth in Langa township commemorating August 1976 anti-apartheid student uprisings, particularly honoring Xolile Mosi, a 17-year-old who was shot and killed by police.
Columbia University Seminar Studies in Contemporary Africa
Co-chairs: Rhiannon Stephens and Casey McNeill
Rapporteur: Mylkah Djacko
Columbia University encourages persons with disabilities to participate in its programs and activities. The University Seminars participants with disabilities who anticipate needing accommodations or who have questions about physical access may contact the Office of Disability Services at 212.854.2388 or [email protected]. Disability accommodations, including sign-language interpreters, are available on request. Requests for accommodations must be made two weeks in advance. On campus, seminar participants with disabilities should alert a Public Safety Officer if they need assistance accessing campus.
Please reply to [email protected] to RSVP
