Through engagement with the research coming out of PARI’s programmes, and in collaboration with research centres in South Africa and around the world, our aim is to contribute to the study of the state and state-society relations, in the field of public administration, state governance and sociology of the state.
The Academic Engagement programme curates a sustained and meaningful relationship with academic institutions that are aligned to PARI’s research and objectives. That is, institutions interested in an emancipatory study of the state and public administration. We work to create an academic framework for PARI’s work and to craft new curricula and nurture new scholars in the field. We have collaborated with the Universities of Johannesburg (UJ), Witwatersrand (Wits) and Cape Town (UCT).
Our collaborations include:
PARI has a historical relationship with Wits, with our initial Postgraduate Dissertation Programme and later Organisational and Institutional Studies (OIS) that created a new, multidisciplinary field of study in the School of Social Sciences. Presently, our primary affiliation is with UJ.
Lead: Dr Federica Duca, federicad@pari.org.za
A multidisciplinary approach to the study of the state and civil society in the African continent and beyond.
We hold period workshop series’ to offer scholars, researchers and postgraduate students an opportunity to share their ongoing work, either by discussing work-in-progress or presenting upcoming and new publications.
We welcome research on land, local government and governance, the energy sector, “corruption” and “anticorruption” politics, and theories of the state (though contributions need not focus on these sectors if they are broadly within the theme of the series).
Seminars
Monthly internal research seminar where we discuss and workshop findings, methodologies and challenges of our research programmes; as well as our approach to research and advocacy, to update and keep alive our theory of change.
In 2024 we engage the concept of public participation, its shortcomings, challenges and alternatives.
Reading Group
2024: Making Bureaucracy Work. Norms, Education and Public Service in Rural India, by Akshay Mangla, Cambridge University Press, 2022.
2023: Delivery as Dispossession: Land Occupation and Eviction in the Postapartheid City, by Zachary Levenson, Oxford University Press, 2022.
2022: The Privatized State by Chiara Cordelli, Princeton University Press, 2020.
Writing Group
PARI holds weekly writing sessions and hosts a writing retreat twice per year.
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