Speakers
Below is the current line-up of speakers.
Tarminder Kaur
Tarminder Kaur is an anthropologist of sports in southern Africa. She is a Research Associate at the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies, University of Johannesburg. She also serves on the executive committee of Sports Africa Network, a prime platform for exchanging ideas, share up-to-date research and knowledge in the field of sports in Africa.
‘Subaltern sports’ best define her research focus. Much of her research takes place among the working-class people in South Africa, studying the meanings they give and convey through sports. Question that guides her research explores, how do people negotiate their subaltern identities through sports? For her doctoral dissertation, she wrote an ethnography of the sporting lives of farm workers of the Western Cape, South Africa. By contrasting farm workers’ everyday engagements with sports and other life-making strategies with the “development” discourses and initiatives directed at them, she illuminates the problematic in claims of sports-for-development. Her postdoctoral research builds on this argument. She has been working on soccer tours in the context of circular labour migration between the Eastern Cape and the Western Cape; cross-country, road-running, and track and field athletics (in the Western Cape); bicycling (in Bloemfontein); and rugby (in Boland/Western Cape). Through ethnography of sports and life-histories of sports enthusiasts, she reflects on topics such as, violence, development, inequality, youth, interpersonal relations, and personhood.
Her research is available in academic publications, including peer-reviewed journal articles, edited volumes, book chapters, and public scholarship (see the list below). Of note, she co-edited: Sports in Africa, Past and Present, with Ohio University Press (2020), which was short-listed for the NASSH Book Prize for the best sports history anthology published in 2020. She is currently writing her first monograph, provisionally entitle: AmaXhosa Maradona.
‘Subaltern sports’ best define her research focus. Much of her research takes place among the working-class people in South Africa, studying the meanings they give and convey through sports. Question that guides her research explores, how do people negotiate their subaltern identities through sports? For her doctoral dissertation, she wrote an ethnography of the sporting lives of farm workers of the Western Cape, South Africa. By contrasting farm workers’ everyday engagements with sports and other life-making strategies with the “development” discourses and initiatives directed at them, she illuminates the problematic in claims of sports-for-development. Her postdoctoral research builds on this argument. She has been working on soccer tours in the context of circular labour migration between the Eastern Cape and the Western Cape; cross-country, road-running, and track and field athletics (in the Western Cape); bicycling (in Bloemfontein); and rugby (in Boland/Western Cape). Through ethnography of sports and life-histories of sports enthusiasts, she reflects on topics such as, violence, development, inequality, youth, interpersonal relations, and personhood.
Her research is available in academic publications, including peer-reviewed journal articles, edited volumes, book chapters, and public scholarship (see the list below). Of note, she co-edited: Sports in Africa, Past and Present, with Ohio University Press (2020), which was short-listed for the NASSH Book Prize for the best sports history anthology published in 2020. She is currently writing her first monograph, provisionally entitle: AmaXhosa Maradona.
Lyton Ncube
Dr Lyton Ncube is Senior Lecturer in the department of Media, Communication, Film and Theatre Arts, Midlands State University, Zimbabwe. He holds a PhD in Cultural and Media Studies from the Centre for Communication Media and Society, University of KwaZulu-Natal (2015). Ncube is a former Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Communication Studies, University of Johannesburg (2016-18). In 2018, Ncube received a Postdoctoral Excellence Award for Outstanding Research and Academic Citizenship at the University of Johannesburg. He was also appointed Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Wits University’s Centre for Diversity Studies (February 2020-February 2021). Ncube is a self-driven and motivated Media, communications and journalism scholar with a keen eye for ground-breaking research. He is comfortable engaging with a diverse range of world-views, and has a very open yet critical and independent mind. His research interests revolves around communication and sports media, sociology of sport; digital fandom, identities and power; political economy of the media. His recent publications explore intersections of digital media, fake news and multiple regimes of truths during the Covid-19 pandemic in Africa. Dr Ncube’s ultimate aim is to join the critical mass of African intellectuals who are making a difference on the continent in the 21st century.
Anima Adjepong
Anima Adjepong is on the faculty at the University of Cincinnati as an Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexualities Studies. They research, write, and teach about identity, culture, and social change and are particularly interested in how cultural struggles can bring about social transformation. Anima is the author of Afropolitan Projects: Redefining Blackness, Sexualities, and Culture from Houston to Accra. They have published widely on sports, gender, sexuality, and race, including in the peer-reviewed journals International Review for the Sociology of Sport, Sport in Society, and the edited books Routledge Handbook of Queer African Studies and the Research Handbook of Sports and Society. Anima is currently working on a project about women's football, gendered nationalism, and state-sponsored homophobia in Ghana.