Venolia Rabodiba

Venolia Rabodiba studies the political economy of regional connectivity in southern Africa. Her PhD research situates unprecedented investments in corridor connectivity infrastructures (formations such as transnational roads and railway networks as well as new border configurations) within the continuous conception and assembling of ‘southern Africa’ as a unified regional polity. She uses a multi-nodal, or a trans-geographical approach to field research to conduct an ethnography of regional integration. By approaching regional integration as more than just a question of economic development, she gains an understanding of the imaginative, affective, socio-economic, and socio-material implications of making regional unity infrastructural. Venolia’s doctoral dissertation is tentatively entitled, Assembling Regional Community: Infrastructural Triumphalism and (dis)Connectivity in southern Africa. Her doctoral dissertation challenges a now-dominant development paradigm which positions infrastructural investment, technological development, and technical expertise as sufficient conditions for the achievement of politico-economic ambitions. 

Venolia received her Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Geography at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in South Africa. She is completing her doctoral dissertation in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford. In 2024-25, she is a Susan Ford Dorsey Innovation Africa Fellow at the Center for African Studies also at Stanford University.