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Malawi is a landlocked country in Southern Africa with a population of 17.5 million. It has taken great strides in addressing disability inequality in recent years. Despite this, Malawian trade unions, educators and disability activists report wide‐reaching disability discrimination at an infrastructural and individual level. Situated at the intersections between disability studies and medical sociology, alongside work of postcolonial and Global South scholars, this article highlights how neo‐colonial and Anglocentric dominant framings of disability do not necessarily fit the Malawian workforce, as they ignore cultural and structural differences in the causes and maintenance of ill health and disability. Building on interviews with workers with disabilities, trade unionists, educators, government representatives and disability activists in Malawi's two biggest cities, the article emphasises the need to address specific local contexts; while policy asserts a model of social oppression, in practice, disability inclusion requires recognition of the social determinants of disability and inequality, and the economic, political and cultural context within which disability resides. Sharing co‐designed approaches to engaging with disability definitions, stigma, language, infrastructure and resources, this article highlights the necessity of grounding disability and medical sociological theory in localised framings and lived experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops an analytical framework for the sociological analysis of the clash of economic ideologies. The framework is then used to make sense of the economic debate in South Africa in the 1990s. The argument is that, following Karl Polanyi, we must treat economic life as 'embedded' in social life; that is, economic action is a form of social action. However, the notion of 'embeddedness' must not blind us to the tendency in all economies, especially contemporary market economies, for economic motivations to become differentiated from the rest of our lives. Accordingly, the framework developed through a critique of key assumptions of neoclassical economic theory attends to both the embeddedness and the differentiation of the economic element. Having established a framework of analysis, I apply it to the debate in South Africa about the most relevant frame- work for economic policy in the post-Apartheid economy. The article traces the gradual move of the African National Congress (ANC) away from statist economics to a much more market-oriented policy and shows how this reflects the ANC leaders need to balance the demands of their constituency's (embedded) conception of rationality against the potential investor's more mainstream conception of economic rationality, which is itself embedded in prosperous communities with property and skills. A similar analysis is applied to the development of the economic policy of the ANC's rival, the former ruling National Party (NP). The NP advocates an economic policy framework based on an individual self- reliance and 'free' markets, that is, on an individualistic calculative rationality similar to that of the neoclassical textbooks. However, the NP too has to pursue politics and they, although rather differently from the ANC, have sought to reconcile individual maximizing rationality with the collective rationalities of the oppressed black communities in order to win maximum support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the confrontation between the Tswana of Southern Africa and Britishers, the nonconformists of the London and Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Societies. The author has traced out a colonial encounter when two systems of meaning and action, one imperial and expansive and other local and defensive begin to engage with one another reaction, and in the expressive manipulation of language. The interplay, of course, was between two parties of incommensurate power, this being reflected in the fact that the evangelists were acutely aware of their capacity to make history. Self-evidently, colonial conquest is much more than a reflex of processes material and military, political and economic, processes now thoroughly apparent. By such humble means did the first colonial agents structure the looking-glass world of the frontier, in which the European imagination projected itself onto alien ground so as to claim that ground as part of itself. By equally humble means did the native inhabitants of this world express their misgivings, foreshadowing their complex reactions to their state of colonization.