Prof Joy Owen
Associate Professor- Anthropology
Prof Owen’s primary research love is African transnational migration. Her monograph entitled ‘Congolese social networks: Living on the margins in Muizenberg, Cape Town’ detailed the lives of transnational Congolese migrants resident in Muizenberg in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Joy’s work hones in on the complex ways in which African transnational migrants create and maintain belonging in post-Apartheid South Africa. Focusing particularly on social networks, Prof Owen demonstrates how contingency, strategy, love and habitus support onward migration (or not).
A second research flirtation is embodied critical pedagogy that recognizes students as knowledge holders and producers through their experiences prior to and during higher education. Students are critical teaching and learning collaborators in classroom spaces, however defined. ‘Just Joy’ described by one of her supervisees as an invisible pioneer merging both head and heart in her teaching, as she encourages students to become critically conscious of the world they have inherited and are creating, and the ways in which all forms of oppression can and need to be collectively addressed.
Prof Owen’s work, inclusive of her research, teaching and administrative work, unobtrusively pulls apart academic and social binaries making the world safer for the appreciation and celebration of difference – the primary marker of humanity.