About

Adam Ashforth is a Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and serves as the Associate Chair of the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. He has published extensively on state formation and the political implications of spiritual insecurity in everyday life in South Africa. During South Africa's transition to democracy, he spent many years living and writing in Soweto, contributing to his understanding of the region's social and political dynamics. His research interests include responses to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in rural Malawi and ethnic conflict in Kenya's Rift Valley. His notable publications include three books: The Politics of Official Discourse in Twentieth-Century South Africa, Madumo, A Man Bewitched, and Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy in South Africa, the latter of which won the Herskovits Award in 2005.

Research topics

• History
• Geography

Selected publications

• Peter Delius and Daniel Sher, Mokgomana: The Life of John Kgoana Nkadimeng 1927–2020. Auckland Park: Jacana (pb R260 – 978 1 4314 3398 8). 2023, 214 pp.

  Africa · 2024-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Chapter 2 Spiritual Insecurity and AIDS in South Africa

  Berghahn Books · 2022 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Geography
  • History
  PublisherDOI

• An Analysis of the Political Economy of Schooling in Rural Malawi: Interactions among Parents, Teachers, Students, Chiefs and Primary Education Advisors

  2019-05-30 · 21 citations

  reportOpen accessSenior author

  This study provides a rare ground-level picture of the interactions around schooling among parents, teachers, district-level brokers, as well as village chiefs in rural Malawi. Our primary objective is to provide insight into the everyday dynamics of village life surrounding issues of public primary schools and schooling in rural Malawi. Without understanding these dynamics, planning for systemic reform would be futile. In the office of the head teacher in one of the schools we visited, a chart on the wall displayed the Pass/Fail data for the school for the previous year. Of 112 students in Standard 2 who took the end of term test, 86 passed and 26 failed, needing to repeat the grade. For Standard 1, 108 passed and 61 failed. In Standard 3, 135 passed, while 51 failed. For Standard 7, only 65 students took the test, of whom 15 failed. Of the 37 students who sat for the School Leaving Certificate Examination at the end of their eighth year at school, which determines entry to secondary school, only 9 passed. Of these, none qualified for the elite National or Boarding secondary schools. We know of no effective formal channels of accountability for such a massive failure-to-learn within the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology MoEST. At the local level, however, there are two gradations of accountability. First, although parents are rarely willing to make demands on behalf of their children’s education, for fear of reprisal from the teachers; when they do protest, it is around issues of improper use of school funds. Second, collaborations among the Head Teacher, members of the School Management Committee, the chiefs in the school’s area and the Ministry’s Primary Education Advisor, have led to the development of a set of emergent accountability practices at local levels that have the potential to improve the quality of children’s schooling. These relations are the primary focus of this research.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Trials of Mrs. K.: Seeking Justice in a World with Witches

  2018-07-02 · 1 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• The Trials of Mrs. K

  2018-01-01 · 4 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Malawi Journals Project: List of Publications to 2016

  Deep Blue (University of Michigan) · 2017-02-24

  article1st authorCorresponding

  A list of publications by authors using the journals in the Malawi Journals Project.

  Publisher

• When the Vampires come for you: a true story of ordinary horror from Malawi

  Deep Blue (University of Michigan) · 2015-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Peer Reviewed

  Publisher

• NARRATIVES OF DEATH IN RURAL MALAWI IN THE TIME OF AIDS

  Africa · 2015-04-24 · 15 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT The key to understanding the experience of AIDS mortality lies in the stories that people tell each other about those they know who are suspected to have died from AIDS. We use a unique set of texts produced by rural Malawians reporting everyday conversations in their communities. These texts, drawn from the online archive of the Malawi Journals Project, consist of several thousand instances of ordinary people telling each other stories in the ordinary course of their lives. They are a form of insider ethnography, accounts of everyday life written by people immersed in the lives of their communities. Through analysis of these texts, we show that narratives of death are predicated upon the question ‘Who is to blame?’ We argue that a micropolitics of blame arises from practices of narrating death and shapes individual and collective responses to the epidemic. When we pay attention to the details of the production and exchange of these stories, we can see how the fact that narratives of death are predicated upon the question of blame both expresses and produces a desire for justice, both for the righting of wrongs through retributive punishment and for the restoration of harmonious social relations among the living. This desire for justice, we argue, is a central feature of the social impact of AIDS.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Malawi Journals Project

  Deep Blue (University of Michigan) · 2015-09-01 · 1 citations

  datasetSenior author

  For further description of the project, see: Watkins, S. C., & Swidler, A. (2009). Hearsay ethnography: Conversational journals as a method for studying culture in action. Poetics, 37, 162-184. doi: 10.1016/j.poetic.2009.03.002.

  Publisher

• THE MEANING OF “APARTHEID” AND THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF EVIL

  Indiana University Press eBooks · 2015-08-30 · 3 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Peer Reviewed

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Susan Watkins

  3 shared

• Nicoli Nattrass

  University of Cape Town

  1 shared

• Babatunde Lawal

  1 shared

• Ruth Marshall

  1 shared

• Lansiné Kaba

  1 shared

• Mitzi Goheen

  Amherst College

  1 shared

• Deborah Durham

  1 shared

• Corinne Diserens

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Herskovits Award, 2005