User:Alexander Kate

Peter (Kate) Alexander (sociologist)
Peter Alexander, now known as Kate Alexander, was born in 1953. She was a leading socialist activist in Britain before becoming an academic and moving to South Africa, where she is one the country’s top sociologists.

Background
Alexander, whose parents were both teachers, was born in Southampton, UK. After education at schools in Stevenage and Havant, she worked with Voluntary Service Overseas, teaching at a rural school in Swaziland (1972-3). As an undergraduate at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) she studied African History and Social Anthropology and was President of the Students’ Union (1975-76). While at SOAS, she joined the International Socialists, later the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP)

Socialist activism
After university, Alexander became a full-time activist. She was national secretary of the Southern Africa Solidarity Campaign; an SWP organiser (including in Southall when Blair Peach was killed there by the police in 1979); treasurer of the Campaign against Racist Laws;  national organiser of the Anti-Nazi League;  and, from 1983 to 1989, a member of the SWP’s executive committee. She mobilised solidarity with British miners during their 1984-85 strike, visited South Africa to make contact with socialists in 1985, organised the party’s annual ‘Marxism’ festival (1985 to 1989), and published Racism, Resistance and Revolution.

Academic career
From 1990-94, Alexander worked on his PhD at London’s Institute of Commonwealth Studies, where she was supervised by Shula Marks. The dissertation was revised and published as Workers, War and the Origins of Apartheid. Next she moved to Oxford University and then, in 1998, to South Africa, first to Rhodes University and then to the Rand Afrikaans University, now the University of Johannesburg. She was Director of the Centre for Sociological Research from 2000 to 2010, when she was appointed as the South African Research Chair in Social Change; the directorship of the Centre for Social Change was added to her responsibilities in 2016. Alexander is best known for her work on class and movements. Her co-authored Class in Soweto showed that ‘affordability’ provided a link between class as consumption and class as exploitation, and that people can have more than one class identity. In 2016, the book won the National Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences Prize for ‘best non-fiction edited book’. In articles, she proposed that South Africa’s community protests amount to a ‘rebellion of the poor’, and argued that ‘the poor’ are separated from workers by their ‘different relationships to the means of protest’. Subsequent research showed the police had misled the public about the number and character of protests in the country, with this eliciting a hostile response.

In 2012, Alexander and two fieldworkers ‘discovered’ and publicised a second massacre site at Marikana, where police had surrounded and killed 17 striking workers. Just over three months later she published a book based on workers’ accounts of what happened. This included a criticism of the National Union of Mineworkers, who threatened to sue for defamation. Alexander and colleagues were also subjected to harassment from, it seemed, the police or state security. Later, she published an article arguing that Marikana was a ‘turning point in South African history.’

Alexander first built her scholarly reputation in the field of comparative labour history. She conducted fieldwork in 8 countries on 4 continents, and published widely. Her most recent publication builds on this earlier research in making a case for the concept ‘classed identity’. The piece appears in a volume on international mining history, which she co-edited.

Recognition
Alexander is rated as an ‘internationally acclaimed researcher’ by South Africa’s National Research Foundation, and she is a member of the prestigious Academy of Science of South Africa. She holds, or has held, fellowships at the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Advanced Studies (Delhi), University of Oxford, University of Kyiv-Motala, Human Sciences Research Council (Pretoria), and the Institute for Human Sciences (Vienna). In 2018, Alexander, then Peter Alexander, requested that he/she be called Kate Alexander in the future, though she still publishes under her former name.

Select bibliography
Making Sense of Mining History: Themes and Agendas (2019). Co-edited with Stefan Berger. Abingdon: Routledge.

‘Frequency and Turmoil: South Africa’s community protests, 2006-2017’ (2018) With 5 co-authors. SA Crime Quarterly 63

‘The use and abuse of police data in protest analysis: South Africa’s Incident Registration Information System (IRIS)’ (2016). With Carin Runciman and Boitumelo Maruping. SA Crime Quarterly 58.

‘Marikana Commission of Inquiry: from narratives towards history’ (2016). Journal of Southern African Studies 42(5).

‘Social Relationships to the Means and Ends of Protest in South Africa’s Ongoing Rebellion of the Poor’ (2014). With Peter Pfaffe. Social Movement Studies 13(2).

‘Marikana, turning point in South African history’ (2013). Review of African Political Economy 40(138).

Class in Soweto (2013). With Claire Ceruti, Keke Motseke, Mosa Phadi and Kim Wale. Pietermaritzburg: UKZN Press.

Marikana: A View from the Mountain and a Case to Answer (2012). With Luke Sinwell, Thapelo Lekgowa, Botsang Mmope, and Bongani Xezwi. Johannesburg:

Jacana Media.

‘Rebellion of the poor: South Africa’s service delivery protests – a preliminary analysis’ (2010). Review of African Political Economy 37(123).

Globalisation and new Identities: a View From the Middle (2006). Co-edited with Marcelle C. Dawson and Meera Ichharam. Johannesburg: Jacana Media.

‘Does China have an apartheid pass system?’ (2004) Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 30(4). With Anita Chan.

Workers, War and the Origins of Apartheid: Labour and Politics in South Africa, 1939-48 (2000). Oxford: James Currey.

Racializing Class, Classifying Race: Labour and Difference in Britain, the USA and Africa (2000). Co-edited with Rick Halpern. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Racism, Resistance and Revolution (1987). London: Bookmarks Publishing Co-operative.