Tamia BOTES, from South Africa, is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her research is grounded in feminist and decolonial scholarship and focuses on women, care, and gender-based violence in South Africa. She examines how histories of forced removals, apartheid spatial planning, and ongoing urban marginalisation create conditions of heightened vulnerability for women and children, while also giving rise to women-led practices of care, protection, and survival.
Tamia’s doctoral research centers on women’s labor and knowledge in communities where gender-based violence is pervasive and structurally produced. She documents informal and often invisible infrastructures of care, including kinship networks, community-based health practices, midwifery traditions, and everyday forms of emotional and material support through which women mitigate harm and sustain life. By emphasizing care as both a response to and a refusal of gender-based violence, her work challenges dominant approaches that frame violence as individual, episodic, or exceptional, rather than as embedded in broader systems of inequality, neglect, and dispossession.
Her research seeks to contribute to more gender-responsive and trauma-informed approaches to social development, urban governance, and public health. She is committed to producing scholarship that is accountable to the communities with whom she works and that recognizes women’s everyday practices of care as central to the wellbeing and protection of women and children. Her long-term goal is to continue community-engaged research that strengthens care-based responses to gender-based violence and advances social justice for women and children in Southern Africa.
