Patricia Pinky Ndlovu is a Ph.D. candidate in Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies. Pinky holds an MA degree in Industrial Sociology from the University of Johannesburg in South Africa and has previously conducted research of the perspectives and experience of female taxi drivers in Rustenburg, South Africa. She is particularly interested in gender dynamics in the workplace, decolonial feminist theory, sociology of work in Africa

• Violence and Gender in the minibus taxi industry in South Africa: a decolonial-sociological approach

  My projects looks at the three overlapping/intersecting issues in the minibus taxi industry in South Africa which includes conflict, violence and gender. The two central issues for this thesis is gender and violence. This is so because the minibus taxi industry is one of those sites of patriarchy. Women are struggling to operate within this industry that is characterised by violence and patriarchy. Unlike existing studies, conflict and violence in this proposed study is not reduced to ‘taxi wars’. What is being investigated is the ‘everyday violence’ in its multidimensional form- ‘structural, systemic, symbolic, verbal, cultural, organisational and normative violence’. The hypothesis of this study is that patriarchy, if looked at from a gender perspective is an inherently violent structure of power and its manifestations might be one of the key reasons why women are struggling to enter and operate successfully in this male-dominated industry. Conceptually and theoretically, the proposed thesis will draw from decolonial school of thought which enables diagnosis of systemic and institutional violence including patriarchy. The proposed thesis will also pay attention what Cedric J. Robinson (1983) termed racial capitalism and its patriarchal labour regimes. This is important because it forms part of the overarching systematic and structural terrain within which the minibus taxi industry emerges. Therefore, the overarching objective of the study is to investigate everyday violence in the minibus taxi industry, with a focus on how violence affect and shape the gender dynamics.

E-mail: patricia.p.ndlovu@uni-bayreuth.de