Dr James Musonda is the Senior Researcher on the Just Energy Transition at the IEJ. He is also the Principal Investigator for the ‘Just Energy Transition: Localisation, decent work, small, micro, and medium-sized enterprises (SMMEs), and sustainable livelihoods project’, covering South Africa, Ghana, and Kenya. James is a winner of the Journal of Southern Africa’s 2021 Terence Ranger Prize for the best article by a first-time author for his article, ‘Modernity on Credit: The experience of underground miners on the Zambian Copperbelt’. In 2020 his article, ‘Undermining Gender: Women mine workers at the rock face in a Zambian underground mine’, in Anthropology Southern Africa, was a featured article in the journal’s centenary edition. James holds a PhD from Liege University. His PhD thesis drew on his ethnography in two mining communities, and on his work as a helper in two underground mines, on the Zambian Copperbelt. His thesis dealt with the question – what does it mean to have a job and be a worker under the neoliberal dispensation? His Master’s thesis explored how mineworkers living in communities located near the mines experience mining pollution. To date, James has published several peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and blog posts on the following themes: family; gender; safety, life and death at work; debt and livelihoods; employment uncertainty; precarious work; elections; trade unions; and Covid-19 care, mourning, and death.
Email: james.musonda@iej.org.za
