Professor Cuthbeth Tagwirei

Cuthbeth is responsible for developing, managing and conducting research work in the areas of communication for social change, social movements and social protests in Zimbabwe, South Africa and the United Kingdom.

Cuthbeth has previously taught courses in English, Communication and Media at Midlands State University and Great Zimbabwe University, both in Zimbabwe. He has conducted research work at the University of Johannesburg and the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa. He has supervised Honours and Masters students on various topics including online protests, social media, communication practices and social change. His research has been published in international journals including Research in African Literatures, African Identities and Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Cuthbeth has hosted and conducted seminars on Apartheid Studies to audiences across the world, including a key-note presentation in Australia.

Cuthbeth’s current research uses Apartheid Studies (AS) - a new framework from the Global South, laid out in Nyasha Mboti’s four-volume Apartheid Studies: A Manifesto - which proposes that inequality, harm, and injustice can exist side by side with their putative opposites such as democracy and development without conflict, in the study of protests. The research explores and identifies the forms, relations, meanings, trajectories, and effects protests take, evoke, and embody as fragments subsisting in a fractured protest universe. Framed through the phrase “Life Goes On” (LGon), the research sheds light on the contradictions, paradoxes and complexities of protests and social movements.

Furthermore, he is currently working on a book entitled Zinyekenyeke: Harm that goes on [as planned], which explores the origins, perpetuation, value, uses, complexities, and texture of a concept called “apartheid harm.” The multidisciplinary book, based on the Apartheid Studies framework, challenges our conventional thinking on topics such as oppression, development, guilt, diversity, agency, decoloniality, freedom and justice.

Cuthbeth currently sits on editorial board of Communicare: Journal for Communication Studies in Africa and the advisory board of Imbizo: International Journal of African Literary and Comparative Studies.