My current work on
the history of child social welfare builds on my doctoral research
which examined how Afrikaans voluntary women’s welfare organisations
sought to build a blanke (white) Afrikaner volk. I am now
researching the growth of social assistance organisations concerned with
problems of poverty amongst black South Africans, for example how
African women from Durban’s amakholwa (christian) community)
combined such interests with nationalist endeavours.  I am interested in
how bureaucratic correspondence, minutes of meetings, social workers’
reports and individual case histories from children’s court records
enables a  ‘deep history’ of how state officials and civil society
organisations constructed problematics of poverty (for example, the
‘poor white problem’ and the supposed crisis of black urban juvenile
delinquency as articulated in the 1930s). An overriding interest is to
historicise how state bureaucrats, liberal child welfare societies,
white and black members of the newly established profession of social
work and ethnic nationalist women’s societies ‘saw’  gendered familial
networks of responsibility and care in the context of poverty.

My research interests
include aspects of the history of photography in South Africa, and for
the past several years, I have been exploring theoretical questions
prompted by attempts to use photographs as a primary document in
historical research. I am focused my research South Africa’s visual
economy of the early twentieth century. I have published articles that
explore how popular photographies contributed to the articulation of
racialised identities, particularly as regards Afrikaner nationalism. I
have also looked at how, in South Africa of the 1920s and 1930s,
sociologist E. G. Malherbe – as part of Carnegie funded research on
‘poor whites’ – and social anthropologist Ellen Hellman – as part of her
research on African communities living in Johannesburg of the 1930s –
used basic photographic skills as part of their research.

My interests in
public and local urban history led me to work with photographer Jenny
Gordon from 2002, work that resulted in a large photographic exhibition
‘Breathing Spaces: Environmental Portraits of Durban’s Industrial South’
(Durban Art Gallery, 2007). Our book on this project is currently under
review. This project, which focussed on the lives of residents from the
southern industrial basin (Wentworth, Merebank and Lamontville)
combined contemporary landscape, social documentary photography and
portraiture with digital reproduction of personal photographs from local
residents. A strong aspect of my own research for the project has been
to use interviews in order to explore how residents – often the subjects
of the photographs – understand and respond to the photographs. Our
exhibition also showed photographs taken by local residents in workshops
that taught photography. Work in progress are papers reflecting on the
photographies produced and collected as part of this project, and
further interviews that explore local understandings of the photographs.

• Breathing Spaces: Environmental Portraits of Durban’s Industrial
  South (co-written with Jenny Gordon, Rhodes University). Currently
  under review for publication.
• New Strategies for Teaching
  History Multilingually, in Russel Kaschula (ed), Teaching Second or
  Additional Languages in Multilingual Contexts (currently under review)