Date/Time
Date(s) - Thu - 10 Sep
12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
Categories
The UFC@DUT will be running its 23nd seminar on Thursday, the 10 September 2015.
Topic : Contours of urban community politics: learning from Johannesburg
Presenter: Obvious Katsaura
Date: 10 September 2015
Time: 12:00 to 13:30
Venue: ESBE Boardroom, L3, S4, S Block, Steve Biko Campus- Entrance from
gate 2.
About the Presentation
Relying on selected ethnographic vignettes, this presentation mobilises a South African case study to unpack the social structuring of urban community politics. My discussion attempts to read the social contours of urban community politics as reflective of, and preconditioned by, the broader socio-spatial contradictions and fragments characterising the South African polity and society — the embedded societal fractures of ethnicity, racism and classism, amongst others. I demonstrate that the history of apartheid dispossession and a context of migrancy, racism, and classism have a tendency to be incarnated and re-performed in spaces of community politics. The Bourdieusian concept of field is deployed to engage a relational analysis of actors’ logics and motives within in the arena of community politics.
Community politics in this case is understood as encompassing community organising, local political action, community governance and community leadership, all happening at the very local or neighbourhood level, mostly informally, but sometimes formally. An examination of the anatomy of community politics in a context where community participation is prominent in development thought and practice is therefore essential (see McEwan 2003; Netswera 2008; Piper & Deacon 2008).
About the Presenter
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 urbanisms.
He is currently a fellow of the Volkswagen Foundation’s Postdoctoral Programme in the Humanities in Africa, where he holds a grant for a project titled “Violence and Enchanted Urbanisms”. Through this project, Obvious uses the case study of Johannesburg to explore the mediatory role of religion and ritual in mediating people’s experiences and imaginations of unpredictable and violent urban environments.
Kindly RSVP to confirm your attendance to UFCadmin@dut.ac.za