African Studies Workshop | Harvard University

Kathryn Takabvriwa is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her research centers on policing and citizenship in Zimbabwe, as well as on migration, governance, and the state in Southern Africa. She is interested in the ways people reconcile themselves to the idea of the state and of citizenship in light of histories of state violence. She is working on a book manuscript on police roadblocks in Zimbabwe. The ethnography presents a close examination of encounters between the police and those they stopped along Zimbabwe’s roads between 2012 and 2017, the period during which official police roadblocks proliferated throughout the country. Before her work on policing, she conducted research on xenophobia and local governance with scholars at the African Center for Migration and Society, in Johannesburg. Her next project will examine the ways marriage and mobility are reshaping each other in contemporary Southern Africa. Through this, she will take up questions on the politics of representation and in the role of African fiction in interrogating and generating Africanist theories of power, intimacy, and citizenship. Takabvirwa received her PhD in Anthropology from Stanford, her MA in Forced Migration Studies from the University of the Witwatersrand, and her BA from Yale.