Fiona Ross

Fiona C. Ross is Professor of Anthropology and a Fellow of the University of Cape Town. Her work focuses broadly on redress for apartheid and colonial harms. She has published extensively in the fields of transitional justice, urban poverty, medical anthropology. Her work is animated by a consistent question: how do we come to understand and name harm and with what consequences? This has enabled her critically to assess state interventions such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and urban housing projects. Bearing Witness: Women and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission arose from the distinctly gendered patterning of testimony at the TRC's human rights violations hearings. Raw Life, New Hope: Decency, Housing and Everyday Life offers close attention to how everyday life is formed in the press of poverty in a small community that moved from informal housing to state-provided housing on the outskirts of Cape Town. The book has recently been translated into Portuguese by Larissa Nadai and Natalia Corazzo Padovani.
From 'everyday life', Ross’s work has shifted to ‘life itself', developing the work she undertook while holding a Mellon-funded Research Chair. At STIAS, she is working towards developing an ethnographically-informed theory of life and life-giving that does not reduce lifeworlds and relationships to biopolitics or necropolitics.