Disability and social mobility in Johannesburg

Since the end of apartheid, the role of racial categories in the reproduction of inequalities appears to have decreased in South Africa but, the extent of these changes remains debated.

This project aims to renew our understanding of these processes by adopting a transversal approach to understanding post-apartheid society.

To do so, I will attend to the life trajectories of people who live with a physical disability: a departure point that will allow me to engage with individuals from various racial and class backgrounds.As a counterpoint to statistical surveys on social mobility and to the Marxist tradition of social class in South Africa, I will draw on Bourdieu’s multidimensional analysis of the social space to articulate the impacts of racial and social categories, but also of disability and gender, on professional careers.

I will also question how expectations and claims for support impact on disabled people’s careers, based on an analysis of social configurations as forms of interdependency that have ambiguous effects on disabled people’s professional trajectories.

For instance, could the delegation of care to women explain why women with disabilities find work less easily than their male peers?

Therefore, this project also aims to integrate the issue of disability within the study of social mobility.The outgoing phase at the University of Johannesburg will help me foster my knowledge on current social sciences debates in this country, extend my network with local researchers and conduct ethnographic research (60–80 biographical interviews with disabled people and 6–9 study cases of social configurations based on observation and interviews).

In return, the acquired knowledge and the research results will serve as a comparison point during the incoming phase for research undertaken at the University of Liège around work, dynamics of inequalities, and health policies in other parts of Africa.