Browsing by Author "Sen, Anandaroop"

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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 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.