Current Research Projects: Melusi Nkomo is presently engaged in two concurrent endeavors. The first is the conversion of his 2018 PhD dissertation into a book monograph.  The project, titled "The Edges of Platinum: The Making and Unmaking of Migrants' Social World on South Africa's Platinum Mines," examines the social organization and culture of low-ranking, often marginalized black mining workers' communities in South Africa's platinum mining regions after apartheid (post-1994)—these communities are indeed integrated into the larger capitalist economy. The book project depicts their uncertainty—despite their extreme marginalization and the uncertainty of their jobs, livelihoods, and life in general—as cultivating a particular social and political consciousness and praxis that shapes daily actions and alternating class and nonclass forms of identities, subjectivities, ritual, desires, and collaborations among individuals and groups. Nkomo is discussing a potential publication with the acquisition’s editor for anthropology at the University of California Press. The acquisitions editor has given the book proposal a favorable review.

The second project, which has received generous support from the Africa World Initiative, is a collaborative edited book project with Dr. Brooks Marmon from Ohio State University and Dr. Lotti Nkomo from Walter Sisulu University in South Africa. The co-editors are currently discussing the potential publication of the book, "The Individual in Zimbabwe's Liberation Struggle from the 1960s to the 2000s," with De-Gruyter-brill publishers in Germany. The book will examine Zimbabwe's decolonial and democratic struggle history and politics through individual actor biographies rather than institutional and collective perspectives. The protagonists examined in the collection are artists, writers, politicians, and activists, particularly emphasizing less well-known individuals. The editors deliberately refrained from including well-known Zimbabweans, such as Dambudzo Marechera, Robert Mugabe, Joshua Nkomo, and Tsitsi Dangarembga, whose stories have been previously recounted several times by other researchers. Instead, they concentrated on lesser-known but influential figures in Zimbabwe's society and political landscape. Nkomo facilitated a Writers' Workshop with 15 participants at Walter Sisulu University (Mthatha Campus) in Mthatha, South Africa, from April 26 to April 27, 2024. 

Milestones: On January 23, 2024, Nkomo was invited to present his research at The Africa Institute seminar in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. The event was part of The Africa Institute's series of lectures and workshops on the study, research, and critical thinking of African studies. The research is based on the ethnography of politics in Zimbabwe’s artisanal and small-scale mining regions. It focuses on the poor townships (urban residential areas), rural, and other communities whose youth routinely encounter violence, untimely deaths, or near-death experiences, which confound and influence the kind of politics they can engage in.

The same research was presented at Princeton University on March 27, 2024, under the auspices of the Program in African Studies and the Africa World Initiative. The work is part of Nkomo’s ongoing ethnographic interests in African politics, labor/work, and their intersection with cultural and social activities, particularly in extractive (mine) contexts.

A reworked version of the presentation was recently submitted as a manuscript titled “State Cynicism, Violence, Deaths and the (im) Possibility of Politics in Zimbabwe” to the journal American Anthropologist. Another manuscript, “Small Gold and Small Grain

”: Social Reproduction, Labour Exchanges, and Dependencies in Zimbabwe’s Resettlement Areas,” examines how labor power is culturally and socially reproduced and acquired in the same context dominated by artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM), is being revised for publication in the Journal for Peasant Studies later this year. 

Teaching and Conferences: Nkomo will participate in two virtual conferences in autumn 2024 and one live conference in winter 2024. He co-organized the panels in which he will participate at 1) the African Studies Association-UK at Oxford-Brookes University in England, from August 29 to August 31, 2024; 2) the German African Studies (VAD) at the University of Bayreuth, from September 30 to October 2, 2024; and 3) the African Studies Association (ASA) in Chicago, IL, from December 12-14, 2024. The panel topics are derived from his extensive studies on political life, informal labor, and the mining communities in southern Africa. 

In Fall 2024, Nkomo will instruct an undergraduate course called "Contemporary African Politics and Society: Ethnographic Reading, Thinking, And Writing." The course, cross-listed in the Department of African American Studies, the Program in African Studies, and Anthropology, attempts to develop students' reading, writing, and critical thinking skills regarding African politics and society. It will highlight the diversity, complexity, and heterogeneity of African thought, practices, and experiences, as well as the wide range of local and global factors that influence or are influenced by them. The course is taught in a hybrid lecture and seminar format, and it further teaches students that many phenomena and experiences, no matter how distant they may seem, are much closer to us than we realize and that our reality is far from being simply black and white or right and left. Instead, it is a complex tapestry woven from a myriad of impressions. It takes seriously the novelist Chimamanda Angozie Adichie’s advice that presenting a single story on any issue is detrimental to our way of perceiving and acting in the world.