Hannah Dawson

Hannah Dawson is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Johannesburg. She has a DPhil in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford, and an MPhil in International Development from the same institution. Her research grapples with the social, economic, and political shifts stemming from mass unemployment, and the ways in which the future of work and welfare is being imagined – and transformed – in South Africa. She is the author of Making a Life: Young men on Johannesburg’s urban margins (Wits Press, 2025).