Dr James Musonda

Just Energy Transition Senior Researcher

Dr James Musonda

Dr James Musonda is the Senior Researcher on the Just Energy Transition at the IEJ. He is also the Principal Investigator for the ‘Just Energy Transition: Localisation, decent work, small, micro, and medium-sized enterprises (SMMEs), and sustainable livelihoods project’, covering South Africa, Ghana, and Kenya. James is a winner of the Journal of Southern Africa’s 2021 Terence Ranger Prize for the best article by a first-time author for his article, ‘Modernity on Credit: The experience of underground miners on the Zambian Copperbelt’. In 2020 his article, ‘Undermining Gender: Women mine workers at the rock face in a Zambian underground mine’, in Anthropology Southern Africa, was a featured article in the journal’s centenary edition. James holds a PhD from Liege University. His PhD thesis drew on his ethnography in two mining communities, and on his work as a helper in two underground mines, on the Zambian Copperbelt. His thesis dealt with the question – what does it mean to have a job and be a worker under the neoliberal dispensation? His Master’s thesis explored how mineworkers living in communities located near the mines experience mining pollution. To date, James has published several peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and blog posts on the following themes: family; gender; safety, life and death at work; debt and livelihoods; employment uncertainty; precarious work; elections; trade unions; and Covid-19 care, mourning, and death.

Email: james.musonda@iej.org.za