Alexis Hieu Truong  0:05  
Hi everyone. Welcome back to Uncommon Sense, coming to you from the Sociological Review Foundation, a charity where we believe that sociology is for everyone and that getting it out there into the world really matters.

Rosie Hancock  0:17  
In other episodes of this show, we've taken on heaps of different terms and given them a sociological twist. So, among them, we've looked at care, desire, we've done love. And today we're doing another one, seemingly in that same vein, I guess: maternal. Alexis, I'm going to revert to our old way of doing things and ask what that term evokes for you?

Alexis Hieu Truong  0:38  
Hearing that word really, like for me, maybe the expression, you know, like maternal instinct, like that would be something that evoked from that. But concretely, like, when I think about that it brings me to when our first son was like born, and the first time we went out of the hospital, it was like around Christmas time, and I had to put him into the car seat. We were with the whole family, and I remember, like, my mum, my partner's mum, my partner saying, like, oh, this is how tight you should, should put the baby in, right? But yeah, that's the kind of memory that comes back to mind. How about you Rosie?

Rosie Hancock  1:18  
Well, yeah, I think it brings up parenting stuff for me as well, as a mother. But just that idea, when I think about being maternal, it's just that really cliched stuff, right? Being warm, being caring, being dependable. But I think the point today, though, is to get past those cliches. So we're with the sociologist Babalwa Magoqwana, who is the director for the Centre of Women and Gender Studies at the Nelson Mandela University based in Gqeberha, which is formerly Port Elizabeth in South Africa. Babalwa's been working on a research project titled Maternal Knowledge Histories and the Sociology of the Eastern Cape. She's interested in the meaning of sociology, anthropology, African languages, gender studies and literature, and she's going to help us look at maternal in a new light today.

Alexis Hieu Truong  2:04  
Hi Babalwa.

Babalwa Magoqwana  2:04  
Hi Alexis, hi Rose.

Alexis Hieu Truong  2:06  
To get going, can you tell us a bit about the institute where you're based and – as a part of that, like – what kinds of questions occupying you and your colleagues at the moment?

Babalwa Magoqwana  2:25  
One of the projects that we're dealing with is try and centre African women's biographical and intellectual histories. As you know about the struggle of South Africa, broadly, the anti-apartheid struggle, the anticolonial struggle was always based sometimes on narratives of heroic men. So, some of my colleagues and I have kind of built on the projects that had started before by other African scholars or women scholars or feminists across the globe to say that, how do we pull together a systematic picture? You know, encourage biographies for these women who are involved in the struggle. Sometimes they are not heroic at all, just mundane experiences of the struggle. So those are some of the, that, that is one of the kind of all encompassing project that we're involved in today. But there are other projects that we do, also touching on the issues of violence. As you know, one of the things that South Africa seem to be exporting the most, in terms of how it's viewed, is the kind of violence that has kind of grabbed our country. So we do focus also on gender-based violence, because we do believe that it does limit the citizenship of women and children. So those are some of the projects that we are working on currently.

Rosie Hancock  4:02  
So, a lot of your work considers the notion of maternal – but before we get into how you use that word in an academic sense, I'm really curious to know what the word meant to you growing up, before you became a sociologist. As I understand it, your grandmother was a key figure in your thinking.

Babalwa Magoqwana  4:22  
Yes. So I was brought up by my grandmother. My mother used to work in, we call them in the kitchens, as a domestic worker, but my mother was the one who was at home mostly. So we grew up with her and lots of our grandmothers in the, in the village. So she was one of the most influential people in what I do, how I do and how I think. She passed away in 2005, so what I know and how I know what I know, I always kind of credit her because that is the first person who kind of taught me how to write, taught me how to read. I always credit my grandmother as one of the people who did not just induce a confidence to, to speak in my own language, confidence to speak my mind, but also the ways of teaching that I've adopted almost comes from like storytelling, expansion of imagination in different ways. So I'm not saying that she was a professor. No, she was not. She was just a loving, beautiful, elderly woman who didn't have much, but could share so much on what she had in terms of knowledge, in terms of – given the socio economic conditions, obviously, that we were in. So, she did all of those things. So, for me, those are some of the principles and those are some of the ways of knowing that when I got into my project later on in life, I just felt like maybe this part of life for a young person is missing within what we deem as knowledge.

Alexis Hieu Truong  4:22  
And like, hearing you speak, I was wondering, like, how did maternal appear to you at first, like in sociology, like, what was maybe the mainstream notion of maternal that you encountered? Where did it come from? Yeah, like, we, we ask because reading your work suggests that there's like a disjuncture between the collective memory of students and academics and maybe the formal sociological narratives, that be the case?

Babalwa Magoqwana  5:09  
I do agree with you on that one. When we get introduced into sociology, mostly – I'll speak of South African universities – we tend to be introduced to the white man triad – Marx, Durkheim, Weber – that becomes the kind of the lineage of sociology within South Africa, and I can say even the continent as well. And that is not accidental, obviously, because sociology as a discipline, it is a result of a particular kind of a European social condition. But when you grow up within sociology, and as a post grad, you start finding yourself, like you have to change yourself to fit into sociology. So sometimes, because of the dominance of this kind of this lineage of the European modernity, you then tend to feel like, oh, okay, I have to apply this but it doesn't really fit really well. That's why I'm saying that the collective imagination of the student might be disconnected because of a particular kind of history that they're coming from. So for me, when I was saying that, when I write about that, I say that maybe if the students begin to question, let's make an example, sociology of family, how family is described or imagined within sociological texts to be something that only constitutes – in South Africa, we've got only 23% of our population has nuclear family. I might be wrong, but I think it's, it's around that. So, when the idea of family in sociological texts is normalising a nuclear family, then the student begins to be like but it doesn't really feel like what I'm used to. So at home, I've got my great grandmother or my grandmother, my uncle, my aunts, my mother, my dad, you know, and my cousins. So there's a, all of a sudden, a kind of a disjuncture. So I wanted to bridge the disconnect between what the students know and what is already existing in text.

Rosie Hancock  9:17  
So I mean, it's, it sort of sounds like you're talking about what, in sociology or other academic disciplines we might give a fancy name of epistemology, right? That there are these, there are these, right, you've just talked about the, what you could call this the sociological canonical way, or, like, Western modernity way of, of how we think about the world and that there's a bit of a disjuncture in your life and in your students' life, and I think that that seems to be a theme in this, in your work on maternal as well. Like I think we're going to be returning to phrases like maternal ways of knowing or maternal knowledge today, and we wanted to make sure that right at the top of the show we kind of, we ask you what you mean by that very, very clearly. And perhaps also, if you could give us an example as well, I know that you worked on a project a few years ago on umakhulu, which means grandmother in, in one of the languages.

Babalwa Magoqwana  10:16  
So for me, umakhulu, which is the depending on which language, sometimes it says elder sister in isiZulu or umakhulu, the grandmother in isiXhosa, in other different indigenous languages they refer to that the elder mother. So that is the person that has kind of helped me make sense, as I said, of the world. So umakhulu for me was a sense making, so that's why I ended up saying it is part of the maternal legacies, because these are the legacies that we sometimes, um, not conscious of that we bring into knowledge. These are the ways of being, of occupying the world, or of negotiating power that we don't know that our mothers and our mothers' mothers have contributed in what we're doing. I often say what I know, the nature of knowledge, or what you call ontology, or what I deem as knowledge, or what I deem as boundaries of knowledge, or how I know what I know, which is epistemology, is bound up to that maternal legacies that I've inherited from my grandmother. So, my grandmother was a sort of an institution of learning for me. A learning space, a space of imagination. We didn't have growing up, obviously, and still in South Africa in rural areas, some children tend to be limited in terms of accessing schooling at an early age. So grandmothers, even today in the rural areas, they are still the kind of the backdrop of those communities in terms of learning. But also what is becoming a problem as well,  the graduate unemployment, people who are unemployed after acquiring, let's say, your first degree, your bachelor's degree. They also tend to depend on the grandmothers in the, in the, in the communities because grandmothers in South Africa, they still have social security. But there's a growing number of young people who don't have access to income. So what Sarah Mosoetsa will call social reproduction of the Black household is still dependent on the elderly grandmothers, because they are what is consistent in the household. If you take it back to the history of the migrant labour system, again in South Africa, where the elderly were kind of people who kept things going when the young ones went to the mines. It's an ongoing institution that, I believe, of learning, but also it's a support structure, and at the very same time, it is what makes us who we are, some of us. And this is not just about rural areas. So that kind of institution, of the maternal kind of a base, is still very much relevant. Let me make an example, Rose, quickly of most of the liberation fighters in South Africa. They tend to reference the grandmothers as the source of history making. If you read biographies of even Steve Biko, I think his son Nkosinathi writes the foreword to say, if it was not for my grandmother, we would not have had this particular book called I Write What I Like, because she was the one who was putting together the speeches for all of us to collate at the end. Even Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, you know, is said to have been influenced by umakhulu, her grandmother, who was teaching her about race relations growing up in the colonial South Africa. So this is, I know it sounds like it's, it's too broad, but at the heart of it is the centering of women's ways of knowing, especially elderly women or senior women, that become part of who we are and what we do in trying to make sense of the world.

Alexis Hieu Truong  14:50 
That's really powerful. And so you were mentioning really a lot of different elements, but even like notions of socialisation, right? So when in a young age, you learn in school like certain things and, and when the notions that you learn are, are sometimes very different than what you're experiencing in your life outside of school and so forth, right, that can lead also to kind of question the ways that you're living, the things that you know and so on. But hearing you speak, it really gives the sense that this production of knowledge is also an imposition, like maybe a colonial imposition. Am I right that your thought has been inspired by reading Ifi Amadiume, like the Nigerian poet and academic?

Babalwa Magoqwana  15:37  
Yeah, no, definitely, definitely, most of my work has been influenced by West African thinkers, Ifi Amadiume at the centre of that. Her work on male daughters and female husbands, it's something that was quite forward thinking. I think the first edition was in 1987 and then the last edition, 2015. She was basically saying that in most of what we deem as universal ways of treating women and all of that, sometimes they are cultural, you know, there's context, there's culture, there's history in understanding gender. So, if you're going to combine gender and sexuality as the same thing, then you're missing the fluidities that sometimes existed within a particular context of which she was studying, the Igbo society in eastern Nigeria. So that, that fluidity is something that was neutralised by the colonial project, that's what she says, that fluidity of gender and sex, where the body did not match the role, in a way, was, was neutralised so that we can have binaries in terms of sex and gender. That thinking was quite forward thinking, because even currently the idea of gender being beyond binaries, it has come into the conversations. So, the African feminists to start thinking and say, but sometimes the body doesn't really match what the responsibility is of that particular body. So just because I'm female, it doesn't mean that, you know, I should be treated in a particular way. So that, for me, was quite eye opening and she was referencing the pre-colonial histories, she was referencing language in that work. She had to do ethnography in this community and some of the documents – that's what Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, in The Invention of Women, says – in the language that she found in the archives, the language that gave women power was neutralised because of sometimes English being as rigid in its categorisation, that's what Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí says. And then you find that even though in the Yoruba language, the king is not really male, then English had to force the king to be male. I'm making examples. So, I think that that kind of thinking actually sparked something with me, and I could relate to that because most of where we grew up in, it was about seniority, age that is not chronological. So we can, we can make an example of when the twins, you know, when they are born, most of the time you think that the first twin to come out is the eldest, but no the first twin to come out is presumed in many African societies to be the youngest, given the fact that the belief is the first twin, or the twin that is left behind is the one that sends the first twin out to check out the coast, basically. So that is seniority that is not chronological. So that's why I'm saying that seniority was not always based on a chronological age. So, so I could relate to that kind of work. It's like the idea of umakhulu, the grandmother. In the Zulu language, ugogo, ugogo is also called the grandmother. Ugogo can be someone who's spiritually called to be Isangoma, being a male. So I can be a male, but being with ugogo as an ancestor, which means the ancestor that has called me is called the grandmother. So spiritually, these, these kind of, the binaries also are complicated. It is that fluidity that I thought is rich from the language, is rich from the histories that these West African scholars are writing about that we could also relate in Southern Africa on.

Rosie Hancock  20:34  
Just winding back a little bit, I was so interested to hear you talk earlier about the mothers of anti-apartheid activists, because it reminds me of some recent work by Anna Malaika Tubbs, which similarly kind of celebrated, I suppose, the mothers of Martin Luther King, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and we're going to put the link to that book in our show notes because, you know, this all seems to be riffing on, on a similar theme. Perhaps, it's a trend which would be really amazing if it, if it was to think about how women have kind of contributed to history a bit more.

Babalwa Magoqwana  21:11  
I remember the book and and I think it's something similar. It could be stars aligning globally, people thinking that we are elevating the sons more than the mothers, who actually formed a fundamental value system for the sons to kind of be at the forefront of the struggle. And there is a student of mine that is doing a work on Nonqaphi Nosekeni Mandela, the mother of Nelson Mandela currently, and the argument is similar to what Tubbs is saying about, sometimes the mother-son relationship could allow the son to be heroic, but also, as I'm saying, it's not just about the son's story, but it's also about non-heroic ways of doing things by the mother as well. Not that we're trying to be either/or, because sometimes we know that motherhood, because of how people have termed it as oppressive and how it has been used by misogynistic world, to say that it's demeaning to women. And then maybe as feminists globally, we're like, no, we don't want to be associated with motherhood, which is different in this part of the world because sometimes – I think Oyěwùmí writes about, there's a book that is called What Gender is Motherhood? And using, again, the Yoruba societies to say motherhood is not supposed to be gendered. It's supposed to be communal, it's supposed to be inclusive, it's supposed to be life preservation and sustaining. But because the modern world has reduced motherhood to one person, it is deemed as oppressive. But we know that within the struggle in South Africa against apartheid, motherhood was one of the systems that kept families together despite the security police for bulldozing houses, killing families and all of that. So I understand the kind of dicey relationship that feminists have with motherhood, because it tends to reduce women to a particular identity, which is dangerous, because if we don't also de-gender motherhood, then it means women will continue doing the household chores, being at the back, being in the private, being, you know, all sorts of things.

Rosie Hancock  23:57  
I really love this notion of de-gendering motherhood, because you're kind of getting both to the idea that there are some women who are not mothers, and perhaps do not want to be mothers, but then also mothering, or like maternal knowing, let's say, is also something that is done or performed, or whatever you want to say, by people who are not women as well.

Babalwa Magoqwana  24:22 
Yeah, no, I totally agree with you Rose, because I think in one of the papers I wrote, I talked about how in these multi-generational families, the work of the maternal is done by the uncle. My mother's brother is called in isiXhosa, umalume. Malume is my mother's brother. So umalume, the 'ma' in front of lume, references the mother, you know. So when you're saying umalume, which is the uncle, it means the duty of the uncle, my mother's brother, is to mother basically the children of the sister. But it's just that, because gender and mother would have been kind of collapsed, we have kind of expected less and less of men to do the mothering, you know, which is not supposed to be the case because if my own uncle, in my language, is ought to be my mother, you know, part of the mothering, it means that it is a collective effort. Mothering, or the maternal duty, the maternal is not gendered in the binary sense.

Alexis Hieu Truong  25:45  
In the discussion you've shared experiences of like your, your encounters with sociology and also many examples of diverse contexts, languages and so forth. Babalwa, I know that you speak at times in your works of African sociology, for example, you have this paper with Jimi Adesina, titled Reconnecting African Sociology to the Mother, from 2020. Can we speak of African sociology in general? What are the risks and the gains also in doing so?

Babalwa Magoqwana  26:18  
No, no, Jimi is one of the people that have really travelled with me and that has inspired the work that I do. One of the key things that Jimi Adesina always talks about – he's currently at University of South Africa, he used to be at Rhodes University, he taught me from the second year up at Rhodes University – and he used to say, most of the time, as scholars, as researchers, we go out in the world looking for something that we already possess. So the ordinary basically. We already have what we're looking for. So also in his recent paper, he talks about going to Sokoto, looking for Sokoto in your pocket. But it's something that is in the, it's in Yoruba language. I can't say it unfortunately. But basically, African sociology ought to know, in my understanding, that you are coming from a particular continent. Yes, it's also a commitment. It's not just a continental geography, but there is a commitment to, obviously, the continental ways of doing things, the values of the continent, the geography and also the liberation of the continent from its, you know, poverty that is kind of crushing in many different ways. But I'm not saying that there's only one Africa, one way of doing things, but there are few things that make the continent similar in different ways. For example, one of the things that we all agree on in, whether you're coming from East to West Africa, Southern Africa, we know that Ubuntu as a philosophy is something that we share. The fact that my personhood is defined by the connection to the community, and also my connection to the community ought to be connecting me to humanity, to broader humanity. So that, that is Ubuntu as a philosophy. I think most of us agree on that. Number two, what ought to differentiate African Sociology from different other sociologists would be the clan system in terms of defining families. Most of African societies in different parts of this continent, they share what it means to be who you are as always connected to your people. I say inverted commas because it means your clans, the groups and the people that have formed you, so the collective that is in you. Whether, for example, my clan name is more important than my surname. Surnames to us are a recent phenomenon, less than 200 years old, so we've always gone by the clan name. So the clan name, whether married or not, remains the same. So I keep that as an identity. My identity comes from those who have gone before me. And number three, in most parts of this continent, we have a cyclical understanding of what time is. So time is not only about me today, it is about those who have gone before and those who are still coming after. And the last one which, the one that I've seen, has been how the society in itself is organised around women. You don't devalue women, even though now it's different. I'm talking about historically. People are going to say, ah, this Babalwa is kind of celebrating something that does not exist. It's not about that. I'm saying that there is an inspiration in the kind of histories that did not devalue women in general, and that we can learn from and also reorganise society so that we can feel safe and not crushing one another. So, yes, there is values, there are philosophies and the ways of organising society and thinking about society that are coming from the continent. However, if you're going to stuck there, to limit to that, then you're going to be in danger, because you have to take that local understanding and have a global interpretation of what that means, so that you can build a global sociology. Because, ultimately, sociology is a global study of society. So whatever, wherever you are, you have to know that, yes, there are differences between Canadian sociology and French sociology, or American sociology and British sociology. However, what brings us together is the common humanity that we're all trying to understand and that we can all learn from these different societies. Otherwise, there's no point of, of us doing this work.

Rosie Hancock  31:33  
And on that note, I have really enjoyed the way in which you celebrate and focus on language from the continent so much in this episode so far, because it's really showing how rich and generative that can be for sociology.

Alice Bloch  31:59  
Hi, it's Alice here. I produce Uncommon Sense, where we're really proud to be approaching our fifth series now. Over the years, as we've met as a team to work out the shows, it's been really interesting to confirm just how generative and creative thinking sociologically can be, and how many themes lend themselves to the Uncommon Sense treatment. Coming up soon, we're going to have shows for you on gifts, inheritance, waiting and hope and much more. And you may not know it, but the Sociological Review Foundation is a charity. We're all about spreading the value of the sociological imagination and showing how sociology really is for everyone. If you agree, and if you have the means to do so, do head to donorbox.org/uncommon-sense. There, you can make a donation, recurring or a one-off, to directly support the making of this show. You'll find more details on that in our show notes. And, in the meantime, head to the Uncommon Sense section on the podcast page over at the Sociological Review website. There you'll find new lesson plans linked to each episode, as well as really great reading lists to support your teaching, support your learning or just your curiosity. Thanks for listening.

Rosie Hancock  33:17  
Okay Babalwa, normally at this point in the show we ask our guest to talk about someone who's inspired them in their work. You've already celebrated earlier on, Jimi Adesina, so we're going to put his work in our show notes for this episode. And I know that you speak very, very highly of him and his influence on you. So instead, what we're going to do now is turn to the neoliberal university and think about how the idea of the maternal can be understood within the context of the neoliberal university. Because, you know, there's, there's a more tangible way in which women, some of whom are mothers – no doubt, also grandmothers – are invisible eyes, let's say, in academia, through practical and emotional labour. And it would be really great if you could tell us about your co-authored paper Forced to Care at the Neoliberal University: Invisible labour as Academic Labour Performed by Black Women Academics in the South African University. What is this labour that you're describing in this article? And you know, please feel free to give a shout out to your fellow authors here, and perhaps you could also tell us how you would define the neoliberal university as well?

Babalwa Magoqwana  34:33 
So this is the paper that comes out of a little bit of frustration, you know, with the current university that we have, I think globally for that matter, but mostly in South Africa, because in South Africa there are two things who are pushing, the university's agenda is about transformation, making sure that you change the demographics of the university to reflect the demographics of the country, but also you change the curriculum so that it can reflect the values, the philosophies of the people. And then at the same time, you are now caught with the numbers games that defines the university. You want things for public good, okay, how much? So everything has been, in a way, I think this is what Mahmood Mamdani talks about, the scholars in the marketplace. Everything has been reduced to how much. If you're saying that, you know, I'm trying to provide a nice environment for my students so that they can do well, how much? If you, so, you must quantify almost everything that you are doing in the university daily, even though it's not really important to quantify things when you're talking about philosophy. You can't quantify philosophy. Hence, then, the cutting of funding for certain kind of disciplines, if you're looking at social sciences, humanities, are actually under threat because of this quantification model that is forced globally, basically. So the quantification, we're arguing that doesn't really capture the work that continues. So most of the work remains invisible. So that quantification matrix doesn't really capture the essence of what most of us are trying to do, because you're trying to portray in human beings here, you're trying to make sure that we've got a better society, ultimately, that you don't bruise student to the point whereby they become harmful to others outside the university. So that was the thing about the paper, to say that, no, no, we are not capturing the whole spectrum of performance by academics, especially Black women academics who are relatively new in the system. Because remember, I think even the statistics still say it that less than 2% I think, of Black professors are women, Black women professors in South African higher education. So there are still very few woman academics, especially Black women. So you, they get in as part of transformation exercise of the university, but also they're expected to do this labour that was normally done, because before a student comes into the university, there was like a bridging courses. They're like all supportive infrastructure mechanisms so that people can perform at a particular pace. But now all of those things are gone. We don't have supportive infrastructure before the person starts the first year, so that most of the time the students are not as ready as they supposed to be. So there's a lot of emotional labour, consultations, all sorts of things that you have to do that you can't really say, I saw two students yesterday, and both of them, they wanted me to explain this, and you can't really capture certain things. In as much as I was trying to explain the invisibility of this important labour of creating a culture that is conducive, that is welcoming, that can retain students in the system, but also it was a cautionary tale towards those who think that this work must be done by women only. As I said, this maternal work is not gendered. Also, care work ought to be done by also my male colleagues as well. So because this is part of what we call with Malehoko and Qawekazi as part of our obligation and ethical responsibility to the society. Don't just bring women to throw them back into the dirty work that Glenn Nakano talks about in the Force to Care. Dirty work is not only for women. All of us, we must do the dirty work because the maternal work is non-gendered. All of us have to care.

Alexis Hieu Truong  39:20  
As we kind of dream what the university could be or should be, right, it allows us to think critically about like we're not just forming, like training, like professionals, right, they're citizens and so on, as you've mentioned. And what you've, everything you've spoken about really brings us back to these ideas of, like, mentorship, care work, and a lot of work that are doing by, is being done by Black colleagues and so on that that is ghost work, right? That is not given credit, given recognition, given remuneration. Yeah, so.

Babalwa Magoqwana  39:56 
You know there's danger in deemphasising teaching, because apparently, you know, teaching supposed to be done by research assistants, you know, student assistants, the professor must focus on professing. And that kind of separates the senior colleagues, the senior professors from the classroom. There's something about experience, let me reference the book that we talked about, Inyathi Ibuzwa Kwabaphambili . You know, it says the proverb, it comes from saying that, you know, the novice, the young people, it's good for them to ask to the wise, the people who have done the work before. So that whole notion of bringing the senior with the young together is actually a necessity for us to sustain the academy, not only as professionals, but also the public nature of what, of the work that we're doing and the importance to the, to bringing up citizens that are grounded. So, for me, that is that is the danger of separating the professor from the classroom.

Rosie Hancock  41:11  
Finally, Babalwa, we've highlighted some of the challenges facing South African sociology today, but could you talk about the particular vantage point that working in South Africa gives you?

Babalwa Magoqwana  41:24  
I think, generally, sociology, as I said – just like any other social sciences and humanities – they are being challenged in different ways in terms of their sustainability or survival in the future, because of people are saying that, you know, I don't really need to go and read Bourdieu anymore, because I can just get AI to tell me what Bourdieu says, okay. Why should I write an essay when the whole machine can just generate that in two seconds. Again, connecting to what I was talking about, in terms of training, the cognitive, cognitive training and writing skills and all sorts of things that are being lost in the shift towards saying we really don't need these social sciences, because these people are just like, just writing text and text, forgetting that sometimes social sciences and humanities, their strength also strengthens democracies. They strengthen social justice causes that the society still needs, and also the kind of students that we, we get out in the world. But sociology in South Africa is still receiving lots of undergraduate students. We are still seeing a growth in terms of numbers. But in terms of the content, the curriculum, I think that we are sitting in terms of gold when it comes to that, because most of what we are now thinking about, when you're talking about decolonising sociology, it's still the works that has been untouched from our own communities, which require some of us as sociologists or anthropologists to take seriously our own communities, so that in terms of knowledge creation, we are sitting on gold, but in terms of the working conditions, there are still challenges. But in general, sociology in South Africa is thriving. It has a good SASA,  South African Sociological Association. It has a journal that is doing well, SARS, South African Review of Sociology. So there's a, there's a lot of work that is being done

Rosie Hancock  43:51  
That is all that we have time for today, Babalwa, but I have so enjoyed this conversation. We've managed to go from this kind of uncommon sense approach to the concept of maternal and I particularly really enjoyed thinking about de-gendering the maternal in that context. But somehow you've brilliantly linked all of this to the idea of a truly global sociology. I think that's just such a valuable conversation for us to be having. So thank you so much for your time today. I've had a great time talking with you.

Babalwa Magoqwana  44:21  
Thank you so much, colleagues. I enjoyed the conversation. And thank you Alice, for your patience. Thank you Alexis, thank you Rosemary. It was really wonderful. An honour to be with you guys.

Alexis Hieu Truong  44:35  
Thanks as ever to all of you who listen and who share the show with your colleagues, your students, your friends, maybe your administrators also. Don't forget, we have a lot of brand new lesson plans ready to be used in the classroom. Just click into the individual episode pages for this show over on the podcast page at thesociologicalreview.org. They're ready for you to use.

Rosie Hancock  44:57  
And those lesson plans really are pretty great. They've been put together by doctoral researcher Isabel Sykes, and they feature activities presented in simple worksheets to support A-level teaching on topics matching AQA and Cambridge OCR syllabuses.

Alexis Hieu Truong  45:16 
Our producer is Alice Bloch. Our sound engineer is David Crackles. We'll be back with you soon. Thanks for listening, bye.