Blair Rutherford

My ethnographic research began in southern Africa, initially in Zimbabwe concerning commercial farm workers and then in northern South Africa concerning migrant Zimbabwean workers in the border-zone. I examined the economic strategies, institutional arrangements and the constitutive cultural politics shaping current and former farm worker strategies to access resources, particularly land, during the land redistribution exercises in Zimbabwe and deepening political and economic crises in these southern African nation, including Zimbabweans working on and around northern South African farms.

More recently, I have been engaged with two research projects with research from Carleton, other Canadian institutions and from African universities and organizations examining gender and artisanal and small-scale mining in Sierra Leone, Mozambique, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and DRC, which has entailed my carrying out ethnographic research in Sierra Leone and Mozambique.

For more information on our current interdisciplinary research see Artisanal Mining and Gender in sub-Saharan Africa.

I also carried out a small research project in 2020-21 with Doris Buss (Law and Legal Studies, Carleton), Aisha Ibrahim (University of Sierra Leone), and Sarah Kinyanjui (University of Nairobi, Mombasa campus) called “Attending (to) Class: An intersectional study of COVID-19 Adaptation in Canada, Kenya and Sierra Leone Universities.”