Jacob Tagarirofa is a socio-cultural anthropologist who is interested in peace, conflict, and gender in post-war communities. He is a lecturer at Great Zimbabwe University in the Department of Peace, Conflict, and Governance. Some of the modules he teaches include Gender and Conflict; Democracy and Governance; and Religion and Conflict. He is a holder of a Bsc Social Anthropology (Great Zimbabwe University); MA Development Studies (University of the Western Cape, South Africa); Post Graduate Diploma in Higher and Tertiary Education (Great Zimbabwe University). He is currently pursuing his PhD in africa studies at the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies, University of the Free State in South Africa. He was a DAAD Masters Fellow (2010-2011), a SSRC Doctoral Proposal Development Fellow (2019-2020), and currently an SSRC Dissertation Completion Fellow (2020-2021).
Award Information
This is an empirical study of how landmines continue to reshape social space, practices, identities and the security of people along gender lines in Mukumbura due to their co-existence with these objects every day more than three decades after the protracted war of liberation. Their everyday living experiences and narratives are symptomatic of life devoid of security, characteristically gendered and seemingly constrained in terms of social and physical space and practices. I employ the Feminist Posthuman Approach as my analytical framework to espouse the visibly gendered outlook characterizing the current realities and the subsequent epistemological discourse of peace and security in practice and theory as influenced by the 'intra-actions' of humans and objects respectively. My study seeks to explore this epistemological trajectory through the use of novel techniques of analysis in the form of a discursive-materialist analysis of the human-object entanglement, where landmines as objects possess a coercive effect in reconfiguring the everyday experiences and security of the people in Mukumbura in a post-conflict context. This dimension inclines to the Posthumanism or new materialities perspective which engender the object as unit of analysis/actor in human security and peace discourse in post-conflict contexts relative to the traditional realist notion of security-insecurity as a function of humans alone. I will insure the validity of my findings through use of more than one data collection tool. I will also probe further for clarity from my respondents.