She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2003. Her research interests cover: Africa and more specifically South Africa, cities, space, globalization, political economy, occult economies, neoliberalism, Marxism, anthropology of finance, as well as questions of aesthetics, including the literature and cinema of South Africa. Makhulu is a contributor to Producing African Futures: Ritual and Reproduction in a Neoliberal Age (2004), and New Ethnographies of Neoliberalism (2010). She is a co-editor of Hard Work, Hard Times: Global Volatility and African Subjectivities (2010).