T. O. is a writer, editor, and researcher with an affinity for transformative social research. Currently, he is the Director of Publications at the Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equity, where he serves as editor-in-chief of Moya, a magazine that explores Blackness across space and time. He is also a member of the production team for Race Beyond Borders - podcast, which seeks to open new lines of inquiry about race and Blackness.
T. O. is also a founding member and a Coordinator of Collective Media Cooperative, a platform for innovative projects that agitate for more equitable and democratic economic relations and outcomes in media and publishing. Through the cooperative, T. O. is working on a book based on his AFSEE research on the distinct way Africans have thought about and practised cooperation as an organisational form, an economic strategy and a way of life.
T.O.'s writing on economic and social disparities in post-apartheid South Africa has appeared in various local and international publications. He has also contributed short stories to collections such as the award-winning anthology Queer Africa: New and Collected Fiction. As an editor, he has worked on projects for publishing houses, public sector entities, and international organisations.
As a researcher, T. O. takes a decolonising approach to cooperatives and similar communally owned-and-controlled organisational forms in South Africa, with a Global South outlook. He is interested in ubuntu philosophy, decoloniality, epistemic justice, digital economy, informality, mixed-methods social network analysis, and collaborative autoethnography. T. O. has presented his research at international conferences and contributed a chapter to the Routledge Handbook of Cooperative Economics and Management on moving beyond the Western-centred paradigm in cooperative economics.
T.O. is currently a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of South Africa. He also holds a Master’s degree (with distinction) in Social Policy and Development from the University of Johannesburg.
I am inspired by theories, and by building and testing them in collaboration with people affected. Theories are powerful tools for shaping change. They can spark imagination and guide action. Theories can show us worlds beyond us, beyond here, and beyond now. There is, of course, no such thing as a safe, incorruptible theory. Promising theories must be refined and fought for — not so much for the sake of the theories themselves but for any better worlds they illuminate.T. O. Molefe