Something new from the South: community, work, and family in South Africa

The relationships that hold community, work, and family together are globally diverse. This complexity is not always acknowledged, and the importance of local context and understandings are often missed. For the field to advance, new perspectives must be welcomed as they will shift boundary conditions of what is positioned as privileged. This will open space not only to add empirical richness but invites theoretical innovation. This paper draws on emerging theory from the global South. Southern theory holds the promise of new ways of understanding community, work, and family, not just as an add-on where Southern examples are provided. Taking account of global knowledge inequalities that have occasionally marginalised perspectives from the periphery, we can now develop new research agendas, new concepts and lexicons, and reframe research questions. These may disrupt what is currently assumed to be the status quo and provide scope for fresh questions and new answers. Putting Southern theory into practice in my own research on supporting breastfeeding at work among low-income mothers in South Africa, helped to emphasise the salience of context. I suggest an agenda for community, work, and family research that gives emphasis to the importance of location and the inequalities in knowledge production.