Erin Torkelson

Black Sash Speak Out. Ceres, South Africa. Photo: Leopold Podlashuc

About Me

I am a human geographer interested in the collision between normative assumptions about cash transfers as public goods and the lived experience of cash transfers as private debts in the Global South. My work sits at the intersection of political economy, critical development studies, critical race theory, feminist kinship studies, and postcolonial science & technology studies.

My current project, Who Owes What To Whom?: Cash Transfers as Racial Capitalism in South Africa (under contract with Duke University Press), explores how a preeminent, state-sponsored cash transfer program has become a means of racialized and gendered dispossession in post-apartheid South Africa. I examine the everyday practices by which poor Black South African women navigate their entitlements to social assistance against the pressures of debt built into the payment system.

I am a Lecturer (the equivalent of an Assistant Professor in the US) in the Department of Geography at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa and an Honorary Fellow in the Department of Geography at Durham University in England. In addition to academic work, I have consulted for the Black Sash and Open Secrets on the South African social grant system. In this role, I have presented my research to the Panel of Experts appointed by the Constitutional Court, the National Credit Regulator, the South African Social Security Agency, and the Department of Social Development. I have also published op-eds in Counterpunch, Znet, GroundUp, The Daily Maverick, and The Mail and Guardian, and co-wrote a documentary for Cutting Edge on SABC1.

Photo: Leopold Podlashuc

Selected Publications

Recent journal articles

Erin Torkelson (2022) Deserving and Undeserving Welfare State: Cash Transfers and Struggles for Hegemony in South Africa. Journal of Southern African Studies.

The South African welfare program appeared as if it might suddenly end on 1 April 2017, kicking off a significant public outcry by members of parliament, the judiciary, treasury, media, and civil society. At the time, popular explanations of this crisis contended that grants were about to stop because of corruption. Instead, I argue the welfare crisis extended and amplified the hegemonic struggle within the African National Congress (ANC) between two contradictory neoliberal tendencies, which grew out of the post-apartheid transition: a technocratic neoliberal capitalist tendency and a populist neoliberal capitalist tendency. Adherents of each tendency wielded the discourse of deservedness – common in welfare debates for centuries – against people receiving welfare, but also against the political formations vying to deliver welfare. Each claimed to be more deserving of delivering grants and therefore more deserving of holding state power. Ultimately, the 2017 grant crisis helped lead to a shift in power, shoring up South Africa’s very unequal social formation without addressing the exploitation upon which it was based.

Erin Torkelson (2021) Sophia's Choice: Debt, Welfare and Racial Finance Capital in South Africa. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 39(1).

I examine normative assumptions about cash transfers as public goods and the lived experience of cash transfers as private debts. Policy-makers and social scientists often assume cash transfers are apolitical, value-neutral monetary instruments, which improve upon inappropriate, top-down, universalizing development priorities. Instead, I show how cash transfers introduce their own universals, by imagining liberal sovereign subjects, who use credit and financial markets to manage their own financial and developmental needs. I argue that this narrative elides the deep historical and geographical production of racial difference through debt in South Africa’s Western Cape farmlands. I call this phenomenon racial financial capitalism. First, I trace how coloured people have been racialized through debt for the benefit of capital accumulation across generations. Then, I explore how the contemporary spatial realities of cash transfer distribution continue to racialize grantees as debtors and dispossess them of their social entitlements. Finally, I demonstrate how grantees draw upon transgenerational experiences of debt to demand recognition that they are, and have been, net creditors to the nation.

Erin Torkelson (2020) Collateral Damages: Cash Transfer and Debt Transfer in South Africa. World Development 126.

Over the past decade, two development programs — cash transfer and financial inclusion — have been bundled as part of global development discourse. Despite differences in their purported objectives, cash transfers are increasingly delivered via financial inclusion infrastructures and technologies. One under-appreciated consequence of this bundling is the transference of credit and debt to cash transfer recipients. In this paper, I explore how the South African cash transfer program has incorporated recipients into a highly coercive and monopolistic financial system predicated on proprietary technologies. The proliferation of such technologies enables cash grants to be transformed into collateral for credit and encumbered by debts to private companies. Specialized payment technologies encourage recipients to accept loans and ensure that they cannot default, making cash transfer a new site of risk-free profit. By focusing on the materiality of financial inclusion, I demonstrate how the efficacy of cash transfer programs can be undermined, when debts as well as grants are passed on to recipients.

Named as one of the best social protection papers of 2019 by Ugo Gentilini on the World Bank Blogs.