Something new from the South: community, work, and family in South Africa

ABSTRACT

The relationships that hold community, work, and family together are globally diverse. This complexity is not always acknowledged, and the importance of local context and understandings are often missed. For the field to advance, new perspectives must be welcomed as they will shift boundary conditions of what is positioned as privileged. This will open space not only to add empirical richness but invites theoretical innovation. This paper draws on emerging theory from the global South. Southern theory holds the promise of new ways of understanding community, work, and family, not just as an add-on where Southern examples are provided. Taking account of global knowledge inequalities that have occasionally marginalised perspectives from the periphery, we can now develop new research agendas, new concepts and lexicons, and reframe research questions. These may disrupt what is currently assumed to be the status quo and provide scope for fresh questions and new answers. Putting Southern theory into practice in my own research on supporting breastfeeding at work among low-income mothers in South Africa, helped to emphasise the salience of context. I suggest an agenda for community, work, and family research that gives emphasis to the importance of location and the inequalities in knowledge production.

KEYWORDS:

• Southern theory
• work-family
• post-colonial
• South Africa
• global South
• breastfeeding at work

Acknowledgements

This publication is based on research that has been supported in part by the University of Cape Town’s Research Committee (URC), the Cape Higher Education Consortium (CHEC-WCG Research Programme) and the National Research Foundation of South Africa (NRF) Thuthuka grant, number TTK160524166043. I would like to thank Anna Borg and the Conference committee for their kind invitation to Malta to present the keynote. My sincere appreciation goes to Robert Morrell for his insightful comments on the keynote and this manuscript, as well as to the anonymous reviewers for their feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Ameeta Jaga (PhD) is an Associate Professor of Organisational Psychology in the School of Management Studies at the University of Cape Town. In Spring 2020, she was a Mandela Mellon Fellow at the Hutchins Centre for African and African American Research, Harvard University. Her research focuses on the work-family interface relating to culture, race, class, and gender. More recently she is using Southern Theory to prioritise context in work-family research while underlining global inequalities in knowledge production. Her current research projects deal with understanding how gender equality (via breastfeeding at work) is understood in twenty-first century South Africa.

Additional information

Funding

This publication is based on research that has been supported in part by the University of Cape Town’s Research Committee (URC), the Cape Higher Education Consortium (CHEC-WCG Research Programme) and the National Research Foundation of South Africa (NRF) Thuthuka grant number TTK160524166043.