Flashes, fragments, and the sound bite in writing ethnography

The Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) will host Susan Levine from the University of Cape Town to present this seminar.

Levine will address the grim and intractable realities of exploitation and poverty on farms in the Western Cape, not by way of an authoritative narrative but by way of a series of ‘flashes’ from her research on child labour in the Cape winelands (1997-2015).

She will focus on the writing of ‘flash ethnography’, a concept that she developed while trying to assemble a coherent analysis of child labour over time. 

Her research spans the period from child slavery at the Cape through to intergenerational forms of labour extraction and exploitation in the neoliberal post-apartheid era. At this stage, Levine’s thinking around the work of ‘flash ethnography’ is preliminary, newly imagined, and open to critique.

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