Huddersfield Centre for Research in Education and Society (HudCRES)

Dr James Reid - University of the Western Cape, South Africa.

Dr Jim Reid, Director of HudCRES, has been working with colleagues at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) since 2021. He and Professor Nicky Roman, Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies of Children, Families and Society at UWC are leading research into family capabilities and family wellbeing with rural and urban communities in the Western Cape province. This is a significant collaboration; the concept of capabilities is explicit within South African policy although its utility for families is underdefined and under theorised. Jim’s work in South Africa is supported by a Leverhulme International Fellowship, awarded to him in the summer of 2024, and a South African National Research Foundation grant to Nicky. The partnership aims to make an original contribution through sharing knowledge, experience and skills to co-design a new framework of family capabilities that will be significant across geographical boundaries, disciplines, to the academic world, and to practitioners, policy makers, and the community partners. The research takes a risk by exploring, in the historical and colonial context of South Africa, intersections, including ethnicity, race, and gender, and what families do in moving from precarity to sustainable wellbeing. Jim is also working with Nicky to extend and adapt creative, multi-modal research methods to a South African context.

Jim has been working in Africa since 2019 with both academic and civil society partners. During 2019-2020 he was Co-I on an AHRC funded project, ‘Life-Saving Lullabies to Reducing Adolescent and neonatal deaths in Zambia’, with St John, Zambia. In November 2024 he visited Moi University, Kenya to work with Dr Moses Mutua Mutiso on developing a new partnership for research with families.