Research Associate Rachel Johnson
Rachel Johnson BA (Sheffield), MA (SOAS), PhD (Sheffield)
Contact Details
Telephone: +44 (0) 114 222 0664
Room: B2 Elmfield Lodge
Profile
After studying for a BA in History at the University of Sheffield between 2002-2005 I went on to receive an MA in Historical Research Methods from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in 2006. Following this I returned to the University of Sheffield History Department to write my PhD entitled, 'Making History, Gendering Youth: Young Women and South Africa's Liberation Struggles from 1976', which I completed in 2010. I joined the Politics Department in late 2009 as the Post-doctoral Research Fellow on the South Africa team of the Leverhulme Programme on Gendered Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament (GCRP).
Research Interests
From a background in the study of colonial and postcolonial history my research interests have lain primarily in the field of South African history. I have researched BA and MA dissertations that were both concerned with the nature of South African nationalisms as political, social, and cultural projects. Since 2006 I have been interested in the specific gender and generational dynamics of the late twentieth century internal political movements against the apartheid government.
My PhD thesis examined the study of a distinct `youth politics´ after 1976 within histories of South Africa´s liberation struggles. The thesis focused upon the local, national, and international spaces available to young African women to articulate political identities from the 1976 Soweto Uprisings, through the township rebellions of the mid-1980s, and subsequently in the post-apartheid transition. I argued for a complex understanding of liberation politics and the production of history as arenas for reifying, contesting and creating gender ideologies.
My focus upon young women was an attempt to move away from the broad national narratives of the liberation struggle and instead to consider the insights offered by a consideration of the day-to-day practices of these political movements and the spaces, places, and character of anti-apartheid political struggles. This included an interest in the ritual, symbolic, commemorative and ceremonial aspects of politics, an interest which I am now pursuing further within the GCRP Programme.
Current Research
The work I am pursuing as part of the Leverhulme Programme on Gendered Ceremony and Ritual in Parliament falls into four broad areas common to the research teams working on South Africa, India and the UK Parliaments. These are: the opening ceremony of Parliament; the role of the Speaker within the institution; disruption in Parliament; and the legislative process.
Journal Articles
- ‘"The Girl About Town": discussions of modernity and female youth in Drum magazine, 1951- 1970’, Social Dynamics, Vol. 35, No.1, (March 2009), pp.36-
50.
Selected Conference Papers
- ‘Home, Street, School, and Prison: spacing and gendering the history of youth political conflict with the apartheid state’. 3rd European Conference on African Studies, ‘Re-spacing Africa’, University of Leipzig, Germany, June
2009. - ‘"The individual and the sayable": on how the oral historian might understand testimony of Apartheid era human rights violations’. Oral History Association of South Africa, 5th National Oral History Conference, ‘Hidden Voices, Untold stories and Veiled Memories’, East London, South Africa, October 2008.