Rutendo Hadebe

Current Fellows: History Department, PhD

Rutendo Hadebe is an Andrew Mellon Doctorate Fellow whose research interests range from migration, belonging, and feminist theory to politics. Currently her research work focuses on the performance of citizenship by naturalized citizens from other parts of post -colonial Africa within the South Africa’s territorial space. By using a migration lens, Rutendo’s work explores how citizenship and nation state are experienced and performed by naturalized citizens and juxtaposes these with the judicial expectations of this duality. Her methodology constructs migrant narratives as a critical knowledge canon, which allows for gleaning of knowledge that can begin to disrupt universalized notions of citizenship and nation-state. Her research method consists of in-depth interviews with naturalized migrants residing in the cities of Cape Town and Johannesburg.