Staff Profiles

Her postgraduate qualifications, including her D.Phil. (Oxford, 1981), are in medieval European history and while she continues to teach and to a certain extent research in that field she has expanded her range of research interests, geographically to South Africa, and thematically to issues of violence, trauma, masculinities, identity and memory, and, most recently, to the cultural contexts of food, cooking, memory, nostalgia and the performance of identity.

A former Deputy Head (Research and Graduate Studies) of Social Sciences, Joan has been a member of the Humanities Divisional Graduate Studies Committee for most of the past decade, and served as Acting Director of the Humanities Graduate Studies Office for twelve months in 2005. For a number of years she was Honours Coordinator for Social Sciences and has been a member of many other committees and working parties from School to University levels, including University Academic Board, Divisional Research and Development Committee, and Courses Committee.

Since 2001 Joan has been a reviewer for the University's Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC) and since 2004 has served as a full member of the HREC, bringing experience and understandings of Humanities styles of research to the committee.

After a long period of focus on violence, trauma, embodiment, masculinities, memory and narrative, using policing in Soweto, South Africa, as the vehicle to interrogate those fields, I have turned to thinking about memory, identity and nostalgia through two projects in which I think about food and its cultural contexts, and about the place of memory in urban lives. I continue to explore gender and narrative and their roles in identity definition, and the construction of memories, nostalgia and both the past and contemporary life in both those fields. In a long-term project I am continuing to research, photograph and write representations of memory, food and nostalgia in France, and I am researching and writing a cultural history of Durban, South Africa, situated in the extraordinary food cultures of a city where chicken curry crosses the boundaries of Indian, Zulu and European, but where the separations mandated by the decades of segregation and then apartheid have left flourishing food networks. And I continue to write up the extraordinarily rich material that my lengthy fieldwork in Soweto has given me.

Book Chapters (Authored, Research Quality)

• Wardrop, J. 2011. Notes from a tense field: threatened masculinities in South Africa. In Living Through Terror: (Post)Trauma, (Post)Conflict and the South, eds Suvendrini Perera and Antonio Traverso, 107-124. London and New York: Routledge.
• Wardrop, J. 2010. The politics of convenient silence in southern Africa: relocating the terrorism of the state. In Contemporary State Terrorism, eds Richard Jackson, Eamon Murphy, Scott Poynting, 104-123. Great Britain: Routledge.
• Wardrop, J. 2006. "The witch. She is in her house"--"We don't have witches here. Not in Soweto" Soweto witchcraft accusations in the transition from apartheid through liberation to democracy. In Witchcraft in Modern Africa/Hexenglauben im Modernen Afrika Witches, Witch-Hunts and Magical Imaginaries/Hexen, Hexenverfolgung und magische Vorstellungswelten, eds Burghard Schmidt and Rolf Schulte, 213-229. Hamburg, Germany: DOBU Verlag.
• Wardrop, J. 2001. 'Simply the Best' The Soweto Flying Squad, Professional Masculinities and the Rejection of Machismo. In Changing Men in Southern Africa, eds Robert Morrell, 255-270. Pietermaritzburg, South Africa and London and New York: University of Natal Press and Zed Books Ltd.
• Wardrop, J. 1998. Soweto, Syndicates and "Doing Business". In War and Peace in Southern Africa: Crime, Drugs, Armies and Trade, eds Robert I Rotberg and Greg Mills, 45-63. Washington D.C. and Cambridge, Mass.: Brookings Institute Press and The World Peace Foundation.

Refereed Articles (Scholarly Journals)

• Wardrop, J, Zappia, T, Watkins, R, Freeman, P, Chapman, R, and Shields, L. 2012. A descriptive study of the experiences of lesbian, gay and transgender parents accessing health servces for their children. Journal of Clinical Nursing 21: 1128-1135.
• Wardrop, J. 2009. Notes from a tense field: threatened masculinities in South Africa. Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture 15: 113-130.
• Wardrop, J. 2006. Private Cooking, Public Eating: Women street vendors in South Durban. Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 13(6): 677-683.
• Wardrop, J. 2004. Thomas V. McClendon, Genders and Generations Apart: Labor Tenants and Customary Law in Segregation-Era South Africa, 1920s to 1940s. Australasian Review of African Studies 26(2): 111-114.
• Wardrop, J. 2004. South Africans Take Stock After Ten Years. Some observations on the 2004 South African elections in KwaZulu-Natal. The Australasian Review of African Studies 26(1): 108-114.
• Wardrop, J. 2002. Fixing a Match or Two: Cricket, Public Confession and Moral Regeneration. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 13(3): 337-348.
• Bonzo, G, Kitson, N, and Wardrop, J. 2000. Talking Food: a conversation about Zimbabwe, cooking, eating and social living. Mots Pluriels et Grands Themes de Notre Temps 15: 1-7.