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 critically 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 (summa cum laude) in Geography at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in South Africa where she was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow. She was recipient of the Stanley P. Jackson Medal awarded by the School of Geography Archaeology, and Environmental Studies to the Top graduating student in the Geography Honours program in either the Faculty of Humanities or the Faculty of Sciences.
She is completing her doctoral dissertation in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford under the advisory of Professors James Ferguson, Miyako Inoue, and Thomas Blom Hansen. In 2024-25, she is a Susan Ford Dorsey Innovation Africa Fellow at the Center for African Studies also at Stanford University. While at Stanford, Venolia has been a Graduate Fellow at the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society (2020-2021) and Co-Coordinator of the Science and Technology Studies Workshop (2022-2023). She is currently also a graduate employee at the Center for Global Ethnography at the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRiSS) where she coordinates writing workshops for doctoral candidates in the San Francisco Bay Area.