U of T Sociology professor Gail Super has been on research leave this past year, furthering her research and scholarship on penal violence and justice in South Africa.
In December 2023, she travelled to Cape Town to peruse the contents of police dockets pertaining to multiple incidents of lethal collective penal violence which had occurred over a three-month period in 2015 in a Black township in the southern part of the city. From late March through late April 2024, she travelled to Xhora River, a remote, rural, impoverished area in the former Transkei homeland (bantustan) in the Eastern Cape Province, South Africa. Here, she conducted pilot research for her new project “Penal Violence in Spaces of Rural Precarity.” This research was funded by two awards: one from the Research Cluster for the Study of Racism and Inequality at the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies (U of T), and the other from the Research and Scholarly Activity Fund (UTM). It will form the basis of a SSHRC Insight grant which she is currently working on. Super is investigating how crime and conflict are dealt with by state and civilian authorities in the area and how techniques of banishment (from urban to rural areas, and within rural areas) are deployed to deal with alleged criminality. In previous work, funded by an SSHRC Insight Development Grant, Super found that local, non-state public authorities, and/or parents, would sometimes send youth "home" to the Eastern Cape in an attempt to rehabilitate them, to prevent them from being killed by vigilantes, or to avoid the whole family being expelled from the neighbourhood. The new project will track what happens to these youth once they get "home."
During her sabbatical, Super wrote a number of scholarly works for various publications: she wrote an article soon to be published in Social Research: An International Quarterly, a chapter for the Handbook of Politics and Society (Edward Elgar Publishing, forthcoming), and co-authored a chapter for Border Criminologies from the Periphery (Routledge, in press). She also wrote a book review, forthcoming in Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, and worked on a book proposal for her second book. The overarching focus of all of Super’s recent scholarship is on the relationships between law, violence, and punishment in liberal democracies.
We are excited to welcome Professor Super back from her research leave for the 2024-2025 academic year!