From university to community - new challenges for associate

New role: Assoc Prof Sophia Oldfield, here with EGS head Prof Michael Meadows, has been named the PERC associate for 2012.

Associate Professor Sophie Oldfield has been awarded an associateship in the Programme for the Enhancement of Research Capacity (PERC) for 2012.Oldfield, of UCT's Department of Environmental & Geographical Science, is succeeding Dr Lesley Green of the Department of Social Anthropology, who was the PERC associate for 2010 and 2011.

As a PERC associate, Oldfield will write a monograph on the politics of grassroots activism, built through a collaborative, community-based research partnership. She will also work on a book that develops an inter-disciplinary conversation about 'city studies beyond the university'.

The award will further allow Oldfield, who has taught at UCT for the past 15 years, to concentrate on her research on urban politics -particularly community and social movement mobilisation, as well as state restructuring.

Oldfield said the position will provide her with an opportunity to "think critically about our travel between 'university' and 'community', to account for activist and practitioner knowledge in our theoretical work, and to reflect on the ways in which both shape our theorisation of the African city and its fraught social and political transformation".