Dr Elizabeth Hull

Elizabeth Hull is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Chair of the SOAS Food Studies Centre. She received her PhD from the London School of Economics in 2009. She worked as a post-doctoral fellow at LSE before joining SOAS in 2010. Her first book, Contingent Citizens: Professional Aspiration in a South African Hospital, was published in 2017 with Bloomsbury as part of the LSE Monographs Series.

Since 2006, I have been conducting ethnographic research in the province of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. Recent research has focused on diverse livelihood practices in a densely populated rural area where jobs in the formal sector are scarce. This has led to an interest in the feasibility of small-scale farming as a component of livelihoods, and the ways in which formal and informal systems of food production and distribution intersect. A project funded by the Leverhulme Centre for Integrative Research on Agriculture and Health (LCIRAH) and the British Academy explored the links between farming livelihoods and health.

Building on this work, current research considers how South Africa’s ‘cost of living crisis’ is being understood and managed by rural South Africans. A central theme concerns the ways in which familial and social values intersect with fluctuating values for labour, money or food. Food provisioning practices reveal how people navigate and critique a weakening democracy, exposing the limits of a financialized, liberalized food system. In collaboration with Khulekani T. Dlamini, this research is being prepared for a book manuscript provisionally titled ‘The Stomach Cannot be Owed: Food and ‘Cost of Living Crisis’ in South Africa’. 

Based on earlier research, my book ‘Contingent Citizens: Professional Aspiration in a South African Hospital’ (Bloomsbury, 2017; Routledge 2020) explores the ambiguous status of South Africa’s public-sector workers, and the implications for contemporary understandings of citizenship. It focuses on a group of nurses working in a rural government hospital in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, where staff shortages and a high burden of ill-health create severe challenges. The book argues that attention to ideologies of ‘professionalism’ can offer an important perspective on class formation and citizenship. The book manuscript won the London School of Economics First Monograph Competition in 2016.

As chair of the SOAS Food Studies Centre, I co-convene the Food Forum seminar and chair the Centre’s Annual Distinguished Lecture. Beyond SOAS, I sit of the editorial advisory board of Africa: Journal of the International Africa Institute and co-convene the Southern Africa Seminar Series, a London-wide forum for the discussion and dissemination of research in the humanities and social sciences focusing on the Southern African region. I have previously served on the management committee of the London Centre for Integrative Research on Agriculture and Health (LCIRAH) and acted as Book Reviews editor for Africa: Journal of the International Africa Institute. 

Before joining SOAS I worked at the London School of Economics on an ESRC-funded project entitled ‘Investing, engaging in enterprise, gambling and getting into debt: popular economies and citizen expectations in South Africa’. We published the results in a special issue of Africa in 2012 which I co-edited.