Browsing by Author "Sen, Anandaroop"

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    An analysis of pornography during apartheid (1948 to 1984)
    (2026) Le Roux, Zack; Sen, Anandaroop
    The nature of what was considered pornographic by Apartheid powers and their response to this material along with its impact and availability, even under censorship, provides an important look at the social conditions surrounding expressions and exercises in human sexuality. This study will address the economic questions of production, distribution and consumption along with the social implications and messaging within pornographic content itself. It will analyse the racialised, gendered and queer aspects of pornography, which are often neglected within these questions surrounding sexuality, focusing instead on the diversity of the lived experiences of sexuality. The racialised and gendered legal policies surrounding the subject matter gives a guideline for the way that pornographic content can be understood within the four decades between 1948 and 1984 that the archival research draws from. The specific aspects of the available pornographic material will be compared to these policies to reconstruct an understanding of the role and impact that it potentially had, tempered by the limitations of archival shortcomings. The thesis will use internal government documents discussing seized pornographic content along with the original text of publications or other pornographic content that can be traced or reconstructed, aiming to mesh the two and build as thorough of a context as possible. The systems of censorship surrounding pornography were linked with the more general methods of policing marginalised bodies, with pornography as a result having the potential to provide a counter to this through expression of greater sexual freedom. This thesis aims to indicate the need and offer a starting archive for more intersectional research of media under Apartheid in general and of pornography specifically as a banned medium with how it relates to legal, economic, sociological and historical aspects of lived experiences; showing that porn, like other forms of media, can both conform to and countermand hegemonic systems.
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    The History of State
    (2019) Sen, Anandaroop; Isaacs, Nicole; Govender, Sameshni; Vallabh, Vimal Thakor; Fleishman, Zachary; Ndlawana, Yonela; Geldenhuys, Marina
    This stop-motion animation illustrates the history of the modern state, explaining how it was shaped by political, philosophical and scientific processes happening as early as the 17th century.
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    The History of Sugar
    (2019) Sen, Anandaroop; Isaacs, Nicole; Geldenhuys, Marina; Govender, Sameshni; Vallabh, Vimal Thakor; Fleishman, Zachary; Ndlawana, Yonela
    This stop-motion animation captures the complex history of the sugar trade, and how it was connected to the slave trade. The video shows the evolution of modern capitalism from the sugar and slave trades.
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    State, law and community in the politics of housing in South Africa: 1990-2000
    (2025) Van Huyssteen, Elsa; Sen, Anandaroop
    The housing crisis in South Africa has over time resulted in the experience of waiting for housing on the part of marginalised communities. Housing policy and politics have accordingly historically constituted a site where state power is both imposed and contested. These processes had their roots in apartheid-era urbanisation policy, but took on a different character during the late-apartheid and early post-apartheid period. This dissertation describes and analyses the experience of waiting, first for democracy and then for housing, both as a passive experience of the power of the state, and as a terrain where state power is resisted, contested and negotiated. The focus is mainly on the period 1990-2000 in the Cape Town metropolitan area, but the research relies on reported judgments of South African courts across the country from 1949 to 2000 in order to trace the changing ways in which different aspects of housing policy and its implementation were challenged over time, in court, by marginalised individuals and communities, sometimes assisted by civil society organisations, legal aid organisations and progressive lawyers in private practice. This is supplemented by the use of other legal documents and case studies recorded by civil society organisations and oral histories that describe the experiences of communities and their lawyers. The aim is to understand the interaction between the state, courts, and community and civil society activism and mobilisation in the shaping of housing policy and its implementation, particularly the impact of the political transition and the resultant constitutional right to housing, which allowed the use of various rights-based strategies, on those processes. The analysis shows that waiting communities are able to engage in a number of quiet encroachments as well as the mobilisation of strategic community agency, and while state power remains ever-present, and courts have an uneven record of challenging that power, in this way communities have the capacity to contest the condition of waiting and improve their access to housing.
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    The African personality: how the OAU and its founding leadership articulated economic unity 1958-1969
    (University of Cape Town, 2026) Sambadzai, Cheryl Nyaradzo; Sen, Anandaroop
    This project returns to the historical moment of African leaders' attempts to institutionalise Pan-Africanism in the mid-20th century. Specifically, it examines how they envisaged the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), later renamed the African Union (AU), as a means of securing unity to foster economic development. Drawing on archival records on the African Union digital repository spanning the early years of the Organisation's founding in the 1960s, my analysis suggests that the founding leaders of the OAU envisioned economic unity through loose economic integration, guided by the notion of an African Personality that functioned more as a discursive tool in their rhetoric than a cohesive, pan-continental, collective identity aimed at radical transformation against the colonial personality. Their administrative and financial limitations were reflected not only in the competing political visions within the organisation but also in their inability to gain significant progress to economically unify. Despite the major divisions, my analysis confirms, as previous scholars have demonstrated, that economic unity was a deeply political and contentious question, epitomised in the constrained role of the Secretary-General and in the isolation of Ghana's president, Kwame Nkrumah. Finally, the absence of women in the OAU's formative years, evident in almost all their documents, and highlighted in this dissertation's coda, reminds us of a foundational limitation in the Organisation's establishment, which limitation was arguably only addressed more than two decades after the Organisation's founding. This failing, at the intersection of gender, economics, and politics arguably still plagues national and continental politics in Africa. Three substantive chapters build the central argument of this thesis. Chapter one examines the rhetorical foundations of the OAU and how its founding leaders articulated their visions for the organisation and the African continent. The second chapter further dissects these visions, focusing on policymaking within institutional frameworks by analysing the OAU's administrative evolution, its "administrative nervous system" (the Secretariat), and its budget. Having established the organisation's administrative capacity, the third chapter builds on this foundation by investigating the OAU's relationship with a pre-established and more robust organisation, the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA). Finally, the coda concludes with a reflection on the role of women in the founding decade through the lens of the social reproduction of labour; social reproduction is the total sum of activities and processes by which human beings are sustained directly and indirectly materially and psychologically.
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    The Public Life of Abortion and the Making of South Africa's Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act
    (2022) Koekemoer, Ronel; Field, Sean; Sen, Anandaroop
    This thesis is a study of the making of post-apartheid South Africa's abortion law, the Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act, 1996. It focusses on how abortion as a public interest issue at the time of SA's transition from apartheid to democracy shaped the arguments, actors and arenas involved in the development of CTOP. This has the broader goal of denaturalising these institutions and evaluating the role of contextual factors in assessing CTOP's institutional legacy on abortion practices and, by extension, access. Aside from a means to terminate pregnancy, in different historical moments and geographical contexts, abortion has had various meanings and represented specific interests. A more recent manifestation is abortion as a complicated and contested subject of public debate. My dissertation establishes what the public life of abortion looked like at the time of SA's transition and how this public life influenced the law and its legacy for reproductive rights and justice. Medical and legal experts, civil society organisations, and aborting women formed a core network of voices that informed South Africa's progressive law. These contexts and publics require interrogation because of how they constructed CTOP as permissive and liberal. The concomitant perceptions of rights, empowerment, and democratic participation overshadowed the tangible ways that CTOP restricts abortion access.