Tawanda joined the School of Applied Social and Policy Sciences in February 2022. Prior to this, Tawanda was a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Limpopo in South Africa. Over the years, he has taught and coordinated a range of modules in Sociology. He holds a PhD in Political Sociology, with a specific focus on popular politics, social movements and the everyday struggles for citizenship in South Africa.  Tawanda’s research and teaching continue to follow this line of training. His PhD dissertation-completed at the University of Hong Kong in 2017- was nominated for a special award. Currently, he teaches Quantitative Research Methods, Classical Sociological Theory, and Sociology of Health and Illness.  Thematically, his research focuses on the following: public social movements, human subjectivity, violence, and the nature of modern politics. Tawanda is interested in engaging with projects, theories, and literature which address these issues. Although over the years his approach to research and scholarship has been mostly comparative and ethnographic, Tawanda welcomes projects (both qualitative and quantitative) that make room for theoretical novelty and methodological innovation.

His research has received funding from several agencies, including the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) and the American Political Science Association.

In terms of research and PhD supervision, Tawanda is keen to establish collaborations and supervise students who work in any of the following thematic areas:

• Popular Politics, Social Movements, and Citizenship
• Agonism, Human Subjectivity and Democracy
• Global and Comparative Politics
• Sociology of Knowledge, decolonisation, and post-colonial theory.