Boitumelo Papane

Fellow: Department of History, MA

Boitumelo M. Papane is a Master Student at the University of the Western Cape’s Political Studies Department and a member of the Social Science Research Council. As a tutor coordinator in the department, her passions have always lied in working with people while engaging in dialogue and academic discourse.

Currently conducting a comparative study on informality as a possible mode for political participation in the African continent, Boitumelo has interests in the ways in which people and the state negotiates governance in an increasingly informal socio-political economy. As the ways of political inclusivity become more a more exclusionary in African Democracies, what does this mean for the invented and invited spaces for political participation? How have those who have been excluded conceptualized their own empowerment and what can these conceptions tell us about sustainable development, state dependency, and the ways of being within the post-colonial? Ultimately leading to a greater project of how political participation ought to be understood in Africa for Africans.