Kelly Gillespie

I am a political and legal anthropologist with a research focus on criminal justice in South Africa, particularly concerned with the ways in which criminal justice has become a vector for the continuation of Apartheid relations. I joined the UWC department in 2018, prior to which I worked for a decade in the Department of Anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), serving as Head from 2015 to 2017. I completed my PhD at the University of Chicago in 2007 with a dissertation on South African prisons. I write and teach about law and justice, urbanism, sexualities, race and the praxis of social justice. In 2008 I cofounded the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (JWTC), an experimental project tasked with recrafting the work of critical theory beyond the global north. I have been involved in work on the decolonisation of the university in South Africa, supporting student movement activism and disciplinary/curriculum reconstruction. I also work beyond the university in popular education projects supporting a broad range of social justice formations.