Book Launch: Sacha Hepburn, Home Economics: Domestic Service and Gender in Urban Southern Africa (Manchester University Press, 2022)
When:
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Venue:
Birkbeck 28 Russell Square
No booking required
Date/Time: 6 March 2023, 17-18:30 GMT
Location: Dreyfus Room, 28 Russell Square, and online via Teams (using this link).
This event will celebrate and discuss the new book, Home Economics: Domestic service and gender in urban southern Africa (Manchester University Press, 2022), by Sacha Hepburn, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of History, Classics and Archaeology.
Domestic service has long been on the largest forms of urban employment across southern Africa. Home Economics provides the first comprehensive history of this essential sector in the decades following independence and the end of apartheid. Focusing on Lusaka and drawing wider comparisons, the book traces how Black workers and employers adapted existing models of domestic service as part of broader responses to changing gendered employment patterns, economic decline, and endemic poverty. It reveals how kin-based domestic service gradually displaced wage labour and how women and girl workers came to dominate kin-based and waged domestic service, with profound consequences for labour regulation and worker organising. Theoretically innovative and empirically rich, the book provides essential insights into debates about gender, work, and urban economies that are critical to understanding southern Africa’s post-colonial and post-apartheid history.
Dr. Hepburn will offer an overview of her book and converse with fellow historians, Miles Larmer (Professor of African History and Director of the African Studies Centre at the University of Oxford) and Sarah Duff (Assistant Professor of History at Colby College). Questions and broader discussion will follow.
This will be a hybrid event, hosted in person at Birkbeck, University of London and online via Microsoft Teams (accessible using this link). If you have any questions, please contact the organisers at s.hepburn@bbk.ac.uk
Contact name:
Department of History, Classics and Archaeology