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About Elizabeth

Languages: 

Profiles:

Five pillars—thinking, writing, researching, mentoring, and teaching—shape my life. I center my intellectual growth, critical thinking, creativity, and dialogue with others, both in the past and in the wider world.
 

After two decades in academia, I crave air to breathe, space, and the freedom to think. In 2025, I accepted voluntary redundancy from UK higher education. I am now based once again in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, Turtle Island, Canada.
 

I was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, around the time Nelson Mandela was found ‘guilty of treason’ against the apartheid state and sent to Robben Island. My life’s journey took me to England and then to Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. Feminist activism and advocacy brought us (the family) to Maputo, Mozambique, for the 2000 World March of Women.

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After returning from Maputo, I resumed my studies in Political Science, then moved on to International Relations and International Political Economy. In my 40s, I completed my BA, pursued an MPPPA (public policy), and finally earned my PhD in 2012 from Carleton University in Ottawa, with a dissertation titled South Africa in the Changing World Order: Power, Finance, and Society. 

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I was fortunate to hold academic positions at the University of East Anglia in Norwich and at the University of Plymouth, both in the UK. I met extraordinary students and wonderful, wise, humane, warm, and engaged people and colleagues on their own paths of critical thinking and discovery. My life has been immensely enriched by these exchanges. Gratitude.

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But academia increasingly sucked the lifeblood out of me, leaving me less and less time to read, to think, to write. Instead of pursuing the path of a scholar and critical thinker, I became a cog in the British system of privatized and financialized Higher Education. Rounds of redundancy and declining health helped me decide it was time to strike out on my own before I burned out completely. 

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My desire and goal now are to return to thinking, discussing, writing, contributing, revising, questioning, and mentoring seriously (as in doing it full time). 

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And my knowledge that ‘Our Future is African’ shapes my thinking, research questions, and impulse of inquiry.

 

By the way, I just want to mention that I don’t do development studies; Walter Rodney already explained all this to us. Just return the money and the numerous, indeed, untold, wealth and assets that have been pillaged, argued as justifiable theft, for four hundred years, back to African societies. And we will then see how much development will be needed in France, the UK, the USA, and so on. Quite simple, really. But unlikely to happen. So, let’s cut the rhetoric on development and underdevelopment. By the way, I really love what Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley is demanding in terms of recognition and reparations. And her collaboration with Ghana.

 

I am currently and simultaneously reading (in no particular order): 

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