Date/Time
Date(s) - Thu - 22 Oct
12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
Categories
Dear friends of the Urban Futures Centre @ Durban University of Technology (UFC@DUT)
The UFC@DUT will be running its 28th seminar on Thursday, the 22 October 2015. Please join us while we learn more about migration, gender and urban governance in post apartheid South Africa.
Topic : Now you see my now you don’t: Migration, gender and urban governance in post-apartheid South Africa
Presenter: Dr Caroline Wanjiku Kihato
Date: 22 October 2015
Time: 12:00 to 13:30
Venue: ESBE Boardroom, L3, S4, S Block, Steve Biko Campus- Entrance from gate 2.
About the Presentation
Contemporary literature on urban Africa is replete with studies that focus on questions of urban governance, service delivery, decentralisation, participatory democracy and institution building. These studies are located within particular regimes of knowledge, which underpin how state, donors, and other modern institutions order and make sense of the city. ‘Getting the city right’ requires the getting the urban institutional frameworks, relationships and processes right. While reading the city in this way is essential, it is largely silent about how urban dwellers order and make sense of the city. It is not that urban residents are ignored in these discourses. Indeed discussions around drawing urban dwellers into decision-making frameworks have become de rigeur in urban institutional and policy parlance. But these processes are framed within the terms and logics defined by the structures and processes set by urban planners and policy makers. As such, while we have a rich understanding of African cities through urban formal institutions and the logic government, we lack in-depth knowledge on urban dwellers’ subjectivities: their ways of knowing and organising the city; and the ways in which their interactions with structural frameworks produce new urban spaces. Drawing on ethnographic data, this article explores migrant women’s relationships and encounters with the state in South Africa’s largest city, Johannesburg. It argues that the everyday lives of migrant women allows us to see that local urban practices are not simply shaped by the formalism of state rules and regulations, or their informal illegal counterparts. Rather, the way migrant women navigate the city, trade on the streets, and interact with the state and other urban actors illustrates that governance is co-constructed by a multitude of regimes, legal and illegal, visible and invisible. Migrant women’s lives collapse the dichotomy of the official and unofficial, governed and ungoverned city in ways that allow us to rethink how we conceptualise Africa’s urban spaces.
About the Presenter
Dr. Caroline Wanjiku Kihato is a Visiting Researcher at the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg and a Global Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, Washington DC. In 2011, she received a MacArthur grant on Migration and Development and spent a year as a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for the Study of International Migration (ISIM), Georgetown University, Washington DC. Her career has involved both teaching and conducting research in the academy and the non-profit sector in South Africa. Between 2006 and 2013 she worked for Urban LandMark as its southern African program coordinator. She was previously a Policy Analyst at the Development Bank of Southern Africa and a Senior Lecturer in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand. She worked for six years as a Policy Analyst at the Centre for Policy Studies. Her research and teaching interests are migration, gender, governance, and urbanization in the global South. She is part of a team developing an assessment tool to strengthen municipal responses to humanitarian crises in Nairobi, Kampala and Johannesburg. She is the author of Migrant Women of Johannesburg: Life in an in-between City (Palgrave Macmillan) and co-editor of Urban Diversity: Space, Culture and Inclusive Pluralism in Cities Worldwide (Johns Hopkins).
Kindly RSVP to confirm your attendance to UFCadmin@dut.ac.za