Elizabeth Hull (Incoming Fellow 2024-25)

Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Chair of the Food Studies Centre, SOAS University of London

At SCAS, Elizabeth Hull will be working on a book tentatively titled Beyond Crisis: Navigating Volatility in
South Africa, investigating people’s experiences of “polycrisis”, a term conveying the cascading effects of
multiple systemic crises across social, economic, and ecological terrains. South Africa has faced a series of
critical events since 2020, beginning with Covid-19 and subsequent government controls that caused job losses,
food supply collapse, and escalating hunger. The subsequent food and fuel price hikes and political instability
led to the July 2021 “unrest” — violence and looting that left over 350 people dead. Since then, severe flooding
and frequent power outages due to failures in the state-owned energy supplier have disrupted livelihoods in un-
precedented ways. Behind this lies a crisis within the governing African National Congress as the prospects of ungovernability and electoral decline loom.

As these events send shockwaves through rural economies, people continue to secure food and income for their
families, reacting, adapting, and shaping their situations. The book explores how these strategies are worked out
during successive crises and weakening governing institutions. Rather than explain the diverse origins of events,
it draws on long-term ethnographic research with research collaborator, Khulekani Dlamini, to explore how they
are understood and navigated by people, situating experiences within deeper life trajectories. These stories reveal
a disjuncture between how crisis is represented and how it is experienced.