Professor Monique Marks is the Head of the Urban Futures Centre (UFC) at the Durban University of Technology (DUT) which is based in the Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment. She is one of DUT’s researchers, having won a number of prestigious awards for her research and engagement work. Through her work, and the work of her team at the UFC, she has raised the public profile of DUT as a research oriented university that is serious about impacting the lives of the most vulnerable.
Prof Marks, together with Prof Faizal Bux, is the highest rated researcher at DUT. She has a B2 rating indicating that all her peers evaluate her as having substantive international recognition. This is evident from the many international boards that she is a part of, her leading role in drug policy interventions globally, and her appointment as a visiting research professor at the Australian National University. Back home Prof Marks is the Chair of the Human Science Research Council (HSRC) Press and runs several platforms related to urban design, urban safety, and drug use disorders. Prof Marks is also one of the directors of the Bellhaven Harm Reduction Centre (BHRC) which provides medical and psycho-social services to 200 homeless and low-income people with a drug use disorder daily. The roots of the BHRC is in COVID-19 when Prof Marks and her colleague, Mr Michael Wilson, were asked by the then Deputy Mayor to establish a withdrawal management programme for homeless people during lockdown. This was established in the underground parking lot of Moses Mabhida Stadium, providing medical services to roughly 400 homeless people going through forced withdrawal.
This intervention led to the eThekwini Municipality providing a building and support for a full time harm reduction centre in Durban. Prof Marks and her team at the UFC were awarded the HSRC/USAF Inaugural Team Award for Outstanding Contribution by the Social Sciences and Humanities to Society.
Prof Marks works closely with Dr Kira Erwin, with whom she started the Urban Futures Centre in 2014. Dr Erwin has placed DUT on the global map for her work in environmental justice. She and her team have developed a world leading model for zero waste management in the informal business sector. Dr Erwin has also done extensive work on ocean economies, surfacing the stories of fisher folk and their contribution to the maintenance of healthy ocean spaces. “We have been assisting waste pickers in the informal economy, assisting communities in various neighbourhoods around. We’ve been working with the Botanic Gardens in taking waste from the Warwick area into the Botanic Gardens to feed into the biodiversity, which we have at the Botanic Gardens. Dr Erwin and her team recently did a workshop on composting and zero waste. Initially, we had planned for 50 people, but we had over 200 people coming for it, even from as far as like Amanzimtoti down the South Coast. I think the Urban Futures Centre has developed itself as the leading experts around zero waste and composting both collectively and in our own home,” Prof Marks added.
There are a range of other socially impactful projects that Prof Marks and her team engage in. As she put it: “We have this ability and commitment to urban social problems. Some are short term projects and others long term. But all are focused on surfacing and collaboratively responding to ‘wicked’ social problems in ways that are innovative and inclusive’. Prof Marks is aware of the significant press coverage that the Urban Futures Centre has brought to DUT. It signals the university as responsive, social justice oriented, innovative, and knowledge building. This has not gone unnoticed by the DUT community and management. As Prof. Marks notes: “The Urban Futures Centre walks off with at least a couple of awards at the DUT Award events. Whether it’s community engagement or whether it’s research events or Data Day. We also have a lot of partners that we bring into the university both from government; and international academics and our practitioners, which allows the Urban Futures Centre to make the borders or the boundaries of DUT far more permeable and therefore meeting the sort of intention of DUT to be responsive to society and to be firmly embedded within the communities in which we are located,” she said.
A question posed to Prof Marks, on her journey into researching and how it all began. For Prof Marks, when she had started out studying as a social worker, which was her initial degree, she wanted to be a practitioner.
“I did not particularly want to be an academic. I got into academia which happened at a very young age. I really enjoy the writing process. I enjoy the ability to change the way that I think and of other people, so it’s very much for me about theorising stories and making stories come alive, but using them as ways of changing society in positive ways. I see myself on one hand obviously as an intellectual but very much embedded as a storyteller and that’s what I really do,” she stressed. Prof Marks conveyed that in the storytelling she is going to be writing on oral histories of heroin users with a medical colleague called Professor Andrew Scheibe.
We asked Prof Marks what a usual day in her life looks like, apart from being a mother and having an equally busy partner, Dr Mario Shonga who is an emergency medicine doctor. Prof Marks shared that maintaining good mental and physical health is very important to her. She does yoga and Pilates alternatively every day, making the point that no matter how busy our lives are, we should all be prioritising physical activity.
She reflected on just one day as an example of how she spends her time. On the 1st of August 2023, she began the day cooking a healthy evening meal at 6am. She then had an 8am meeting with a network of Australian scholars and harm reduction advocates. This meeting’s purpose was to organise an event to be held in Canberra in November 2023 for the Police Federation of Australia. This is in response to the decriminalisation of all drugs in the Australian Capital Territory. At 9am she had a meeting with her colleague, Prof Andrew Scheibe, a public health specialist. She and Prof Scheibe are co-authoring an oral history book on opioid substitution therapy. At 10am she ran a meeting with DUT Alumni, Corporate Affairs, and the Drama Department to discuss working with Cape Town based film makers who are producing a film about Whoonga. The main site for the film is the Bellhaven Harm Reduction Centre, and the film producer, Lee Doig, trained as a filmmaker at DUT. At 13:30 she met up with colleagues from the Networking HIV and AIDS Community of Southern Africa (NACOSA) to plan the installation nationally of sharps disposal bins designed by the final year DUT Mechanical Engineering students. These mechanisms will allow for the safe and convenient disposal of paraphernalia, like needles and syringes, by injecting drug users. Her final meeting for the day was to finalise a short course to be offered by the UFC on creative methodologies. She then turned to doing some writing tasks before her 18:00 Pilates class.
Asked if this number of daily tasks and events exhausts her, Prof Marks replied that to the contrary ‘it is energising’. It makes each day meaningful and allows for connection – something she feels is fundamental to mental health. She added that she is grateful to her team at the UFC for their support, forward thinking, and commitment to engaged scholarship. She particularly mentioned Dr Erwin, Dr Jennifer Houghton and Dr Sogen Moodley. She also noted that the work of the UFC would not be possible without their administrator, Ms Tharsnie Ramasami.
Asked for a three liner of advice to DUT colleagues she said: “Stay curious and always connected to partners that can activate project work. Collaborate when writing and keep grounded by engaging with people and communities who showcase what it means to survive in harsh social circumstances. And don’t be afraid to reinvent yourself.”
Pictured: Professor Monique Marks
Waheeda Peters
