Jack Visser (2025)

My doctoral research looks at movement, compositeness, liveability, and ontologies of the otherwise, with a focus on southern Africa – particularly Nkambeni, a rural area in northeastern South Africa. I’m interested in how shifting human-beyond-human relations – between people, non-human animals, plants, soil, rivers, witches, and dreams – unsettle dominant ontological categories and reveal modes of existence that put pressure on modernist assumptions of fixity, dualism, and linearity. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, I trace how these relations take shape in everyday practices, “hustling,” metaphysical entanglements, and a contingent ethics of collective existence. Together, they offer alternative ways of navigating social and environmental challenges, foregrounding multiplicity, collaboration, and the continual motion through which realities are composed.

I am a recipient of the Cambridge Africa Changemakers Scholarship. Before my PhD, I completed degrees in Accounting and Law at the University of Stellenbosch, and later a BA Honours and Master’s in Anthropology at the University of Cape Town.