Larissa Johnson

Larissa is a third year PhD student in Music and Africana Studies. Her primary work at present is concerned with some of the ways in which South Africans construct a conceptual framework for, enact, and deprive one another of dignity. She is especially interested in tracing the complex relationships between the dispossession and restitution of land, the formations of spatial racism and its enduring socio-economic and ideological legacies, and ideas of what it means to be human in post-colonial, post-apartheid South Africa. 

Political work guides her intellectual/creative production and her present approach to research and pedagogy— which she believes is the most important intellectual exercise—is a kind of militant multimodality. 

She graduated from the University of Cape Town, South Africa, with a Bachelor of Music in Musicology and a performance specialization in two indigenous instruments, Uhadi and Umrhubhe, and violin. She is—with gratitude for the privilege, and for the multitudes who made sacrifices for my freedom and wellbeing—a Fulbright Fellow (2017-2019) and a recipient of the South African National Research Foundation Doctoral Abroad Scholarship.