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Paper short abstract:

By showing residents' and community activists' discursive and technical attempts to render service delivery in non-exclusive ways, I discuss infrastructural activism and actions as generative of a local energopolitical public that negotiates redistributive politics and justice in South Africa

Paper long abstract:

Since the corporatisation of basic services in Johannesburg during the early 2000's, several social movements formed to address exclusive (under)supply, unjust price systems and billing technologies, or the live threatening dangers stemming from aging electricity infrastructure especially in the marginalised parts of the city. Activists not only channelled disappointments of a postapartheid era, some became (in)famously known for their radical interventions, for example as self-proclaimed "emergency electricians" offering professional yet illegal connections for poor households being disconnected from the grid. They engaged in a discursive battle to decriminalise electricity theft, share and translate relevant knowledge, publicly teach technical skills, and experiment with techniques to manipulate, extend, re-work or "re-appropriate" the public infrastructure, for electricity to them is "a right, not a privilege". While I will show how their skills, practices and repertoires of action are embedded in a local knowledge production that relates to a certain socialisation of a distinct infrastructural public of a township, uniting ethics of repair, the experience of material deprivation and communitarian sense of care, I demonstrate that these residents not only constitute a local energopolitical public that negotiates the conditionality of essential state services, but also actively construct a socio-material base for a more solidary present, alternative to what they perceive as technocratic neglect and neoliberal dismantling of the welfare state. Thereby they purposely collide with material and political ordering claims of the government and enter into a conflict about legitimacy, reparation, justice, acknowledgement, and de/commodification of public goods in post-liberation times.