Asanda-Jonas Benya

While at CASBS, Asanda-Jonas Benya plans to complete her book which is an ethnography of the lives of women miners. The central question she attempts to answer concerns how women miners understand themselves and in turn construct their gendered subjectivities within the masculine underground mining culture. The book is an interdisciplinary response to absences, invisibility, erasures, and silences that mark mining scholarship. It is her attempt to re-claim women’s stories and ‘mark’ their presence in South Africa’s large scale industrial mines. Most importantly, it is an attempt to demonstrate the ways in which women make sense of who they are in this space that has been marked by masculinity. Empirical data she relies on is from her ethnographic fieldwork where she took on a job as a miner, spending over a year working underground as a panel and winch operator and living with mineworkers.

Benya is a senior lecturer in the department of sociology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her research interests include gender, labour and social movements, human rights and social justice in mining communities. She has published in labour and feminist journals. She is the STIAS-Iso Lomso fellow at CASBS and was a writing fellow at JIAS in Johannesburg (2024) and an inaugural Atlantic Fellow for Racial Equity (AFRE 2018-19). An interview on her work can be found on Spotify using this link.