REGISTRATION
INFORMATION
World University Rankings - Top 600

DISCUSSING URBAN POLITICS AT DUT

DISCUSSING URBAN POLITICS AT DUT

The Durban University of Technology hosted the Urban Futures Centre on Thursday, the 10th of September 2015 at Steve Biko Campus.
The discussion topic was Contours of Urban Community politics, presented by Dr Obvious Katsaura from Wits University in the Department of Sociology. The discussion  highlighted the social contradictions and fragments characterising the South African politics and society.  The embedded societal fractures of ethnicity, racism and classism, amongst others were also discussed.
Dr Katsaura spoke about  that the history of apartheid and its  dispossession in a a context of migrancy, racism , and classism and how these have a tendency to be incarnated and re-performed in spaces of community politics.

Dr Katsuara said that “I know there is a lot of literature out there in urban politics, a lot of it in South Africa has focused on different aspects, a lot of literature focus on local governance but they are very little ideas that has mobilised community politics, this idea is unique because it enable me to understand what is happening in the neighborhood at a  local level. It helps me to understand how people organise themselves with government or beyond government,”Dr Katsuara said.
Dr Obvious Katsaura teaches in the Department of Sociology at Wits University and is a research associate of society, work, and Development Institute (SWOP) at  Wits. His research interests are in Urban and regional sociology, with a focus on urban politics and governance, urban ethnopolitics, urban violence, religious urbanism. His currently a fellow of the Volkswagen Foundation’s Postdoctoral Programme in the Humanities in Africa, where he holds a grant project titled “Violence and Enchanted Urbanism.”

Through this project, Dr Katsaura uses the case study of Johannesburg to explore the mediatory role of religion and rituals in mediating people’s experiences of unpredictable and violent urban environments.

-Pictured: Dr Obvious Katsaura

-Mxolisi Ntanzi

 

No comments