Africa Table: Graduate Research Showcase - Anirudh Sankar & Mpho Molefe

Session Title 1: “Provisional Belonging in South African Literature”

Session Description: What does it mean to belong as a “South African” in the post-apartheid moment? Nationalist discourses have presented the dawning of democracy as marking a new time where everyone belongs as a citizen. The country’s literature, however, has long complicated this story by exploring the ways in which the settler colonial and apartheid past continue to mark the present, impeding a true sense of belonging for all. Analyzing post-apartheid South African historical fiction, I explore how South Africa’s recent decades have been marked by texts that offer what I call “provisional belonging” rather than a stable notion of belonging. As a way of conceptualizing belonging, provisional belonging’s temporal ‘tentativeness’ – its existence in place of something better – is meant to destabilize a belonging defined in terms of arrival when present conditions of ongoing structural inequity make that arrival impossible in South Africa. 

Session Title 2: Why Knowing Why Matters: Learning Beyond Prescriptions in Ugandan Agriculture

Session Description: Agricultural extension services play a central role in introducing smallholder farmers to technologies developed in labs and research stations. Yet the dominant mode of extension remains prescriptive: farmers are shown what works, but rarely why it works. I discuss a field experiment in Uganda that moves beyond this black-box approach by sharing the underlying agronomic logic, bringing farmers in on the science rather than only the recommendation. This shift improves how farmers reason and adapt to situations where recommendations no longer fit.

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Speaker 1 Biography 1: Mpho is a PhD candidate in the Stanford Department of English with a minor in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CSRE). She is a 2025-2026 Susan Ford Dorsey Africa Innovation Fellow at the Center for African Studies. Mpho fosters intellectual community within African Studies at Stanford through her work as a co-coordinator for the 2025-2026 Interdisciplinary Humanities Africanist Writing Group, an academic group supported by the Office of the Vice Provost for Graduate Education’s Student Projects for Intellectual Enhancement (SPICE) grant. She has supported equitable, inclusive, and research-based teaching throughout her own practices as a graduate instructor in the English Department and in her work as a Graduate Teaching Consultant (2023-present) and Graduate Teaching Consultant Coordinator (2024-2026) with the Stanford Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL). Before coming to Stanford, Mpho earned a BA in English at Yale University.

Speaker 2 biography: Anirudh Sankar is a sixth-year PhD student in Economics at Stanford and a 2025–26 Susan Ford Dorsey Innovation Africa Fellow. He was previously a Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellow. His research, informed by psychology, cognitive science, and anthropology, examines how knowledge and learning shape development, with a focus on smallholder farmers in Africa. Throughout his PhD, he conducted qualitative interviews in Uganda to understand how farmers learn and deliberate about technologies, which laid the groundwork for his field experiment. He holds two prior degrees in mathematics: an M.Math from the University of Waterloo and a B.S. from the University of Chicago.