Wounded Heartland: Women and the Quest for Post-Pandemic Recovery in Rural South Africa

This project is based on in-depth ethnographic research in eight villages in the rural Eastern Cape. It focuses on post-pandemic recovery and rebuilding at the household and community level in remote rural communities. The research was undertaken in 2023 and 2024 and is based on a participant observation methodology where researchers lived with host families for 18 months. The result of this work, funded by the Canadian government, has not yet been fully analysed as the project is primarily policy and action-focused. I, therefore, intend to use the time at STIAS to consolidate the archive and develop publications out of this work, together with my co-investigators. One of my main aims is to produce a draft of a monograph which I imagine as a sequel to my 2023 book, Covid and Custom in Rural South Africa. There are several important emerging themes in this work. One concerns the practices and effects of the state in the rural setting, while another relates to the re-emergence of customary practice as an anchor for recovery and rebuilding social cohesion. A third theme in this work is related to the embodied nature of the responses to the pandemic and the extent to which drug use, alcoholism, healing and spiritual renewal implicate the body in the work of coping and repair.