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- Convenor:
-
Anna Selmeczi
(University of Cape Town)
Send message to Convenor
- Stream:
- Social Anthropology
- Location:
- Appleton Tower, Seminar Room 2.06
- Sessions:
- Thursday 13 June, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel focuses on pedagogies that facilitate research through encountering everyday practices of inhabiting African cities. How do we teach embodied methods and foster experiential learning? And, what can these tell us about the multiple, intersecting publics of African cities?
Long Abstract:
This panel focuses on pedagogical practices that facilitate research in and writing about spaces of everyday life found through encountering daily practices of inhabiting and building African cities. We invite papers that explore and account for forms of teaching and learning that experiment with a variety of ways of knowing the city and that facilitate modes of engaging the richness of experiences and stories of cities in Africa. How do we 'know' and research the abundance of encounters that everyday life in the urban setting offers? How do we find ways to teach techniques of reading and understanding variegated mobilities, senses and sensations that structure and disrupt 'the public'? How do we facilitate the development of an ethos, mode and sentiment of research (Dewsbury 2009) that, instead of seeking to provide an authentic representation of practices and situations, embraces the risks and possibilities of experimentation through immersing ourselves in the rich sensible fabric of the city? Aiming to theorize African cities creatively, the panel embraces experimental pedagogical practices that center the situatedness of our knowledge and reflect on the multiple, intersecting publics central to everyday life in African cities.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 13 June, 2019, -Jennifer Hart (Wayne State University)
Paper short abstract:
Based on experiences with the Accra Wala digital mapping project, this paper explores the ways that digital tools present new forms of connectivity between the often distinct categories of teaching and research, researcher and subject, academy and public, local and global.
Paper long abstract:
Based on experiences with the Accra Wala digital mapping project, this paper explores the ways that digital tools present new forms of connectivity between the often distinct categories of teaching and research, researcher and subject, academy and public, local and global. As a digital mapping project that seeks to engage and archive the life of the street in Ghana's vibrant capital city through an interactive map of its trotro (public transport) system, Accra Wala presents multiple layers of interactivity and audience. While the field of digital humanities is notably collaborative and interdisciplinary, the work of creating digital project remains largely academic, mimicking in many ways a more conventional research model. By embracing a much longer process of development, Accra Wala has generated a number of strategic partnerships that blur the boundaries between research, teaching, popular culture, and activism. I argue that this sort of model suggests exciting new possibilities for rethinking how we do research and teaching in/about African cities in ways that are interdisciplinary, collaborative, inclusive, and open.
Bradley Rink (University of the Western Cape)
Paper short abstract:
Reflecting on an undergraduate human geography module, this paper highlights the role of learning through mundane mobility and encounters. Using autoethnographic student essays, this paper considers the link between the theory and practice of encountering publics in an African city.
Paper long abstract:
This paper reflects on pedagogies of urban encounter in an undergraduate human geography module at the University of the Western Cape called GES225 Space, Place and Mobility in Southern Africa. While the module focuses on mobilities theory and its application toward understanding the shaping of space, place and subjectivity, the broader aim of the module is to engage students with the contemporary African city, its complex fabric and diverse publics. Teaching and learning activities include student-generated knowledge through reflections on everyday mobility in the form of autoethnographic essays. Using examples from teaching and learning activities in the module, this paper considers the role of mobile diaries as a link between theory and practice, where the latter serves as a means of illuminating and demystifying the former. Results from learning activities exemplify the innate understanding of critical concepts in mobilities studies, including the experience of movement, its meanings, and practices within the context of the African city.
Sophie Oldfield (Cornell UniversityUniversity of Cape Town)
Paper short abstract:
This paper reflects on 'Running the City', a course that draws on running as a mobile participatory approach to research, and as a creative lens on the city, its generative rhythms, its gritty realities and inequalities, and its public possibilities.
Paper long abstract:
This paper reflects on 'Running the City', a course based at the African Centre for Cities, which explores running, as a voluntary, mass participatory, collective urban practice. Through participating in running club training and running races in different parts of Cape Town, my students and I explored running as a lens on the city, its built environment, its roads and alley ways, as a creative way to track city mobility and movement. In this mix, running proved a generative way to map ordinary city objects, which constitute the fabric of the city and its visible and invisible borders. At the same time, running as a practice is relational, bound up in the body, its rhythm and movement, as well as a collective practice, a public expressed in city running clubs and road races. Drawing on field notes, interviews, photographs, and artefacts, and their intertwining in a collective course exhibit, the paper reflects on running as a lens on the African city, its generative rhythms and movement, its gritty realities and inequalities, and its public possibilities.
Chrisantha Chetty (Durban Shopfitting & Interiors)
Paper short abstract:
This paper is based on a performative tour of the Makers Precinct in Johannesburg. It may be used to take a self guided tour of the area and includes reflections on its evolving pedagogical practices and the value of ephemeral processes as opposed to physical interventions in urban public spaces.
Paper long abstract:
Public Art Tours (PAT) was created by artist and entrepreneur Chrisantha Chetty to invite people on a journey through spaces and times. Important to this is PAT's research on creative and playful ways of learning and doing. PAT wants you to experience the ephemeral city in new and alternative ways, open your mind to possibilities you might have otherwise (dis)missed and challenge your perception of art, space and place. PAT travels to cities around the world documenting existing public art and offering conceptual tours. This involves looking at what is there, (re)presenting this by applying different theoretical frameworks, provoking questions and exploring the complexities of art in public space. In 2018, Public Art Tours performed a tour of The Makers Precinct: an area in Johannesburg including Bez Valley, Bertrams, Lorentzville, Troyeville and Judith's Paarl. The area is being developed into a Makers Precinct and the tour was created specifically to show around representatives from the Johannesburg Development Agency and a group of potential investors. This paper is based on the tour and may be used to take a self-guided tour through the area. The purposely-selected route allows exploration of a possible future of The Makers Precinct in the context of further development. The paper challenges one to use their imagination in approaching physical interventions in the city, and reflects on the evolving pedagogical practices developed through PAT and other projects. It also explores the value of ephemeral processes as opposed to physical interventions in urban public spaces.
Alexandra Halligey (University of Johannesburg)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on my own research practice and theoretical thinking as a theatre maker and urban scholar, this paper considers what theatre and performance as research methods and conceptual lenses might offer to knowing, understanding and working productively with city spaces.
Paper long abstract:
How might we engage everyday life in cities in a way that accounts for it as an embodied, relational practice that is ephemeral through its daily performance but also made durable through its daily repetition? This paper considers my research focus over the last four years which has been to experiment with what theatre and performance might offer to knowing, understanding and working productively with city spaces. As ephemeral, iterative, relational and embodied art forms, theatre and performance suggest themselves as fitting tools for exploring these same qualities in the everyday life of city spaces. Beyond theatre and performance as practical research methods, this paper considers how theatre and performance as concepts afford allusive and fungible lenses for understanding the workings of city spaces so that these spaces might be inclusively and effectively supported through planning, policy making and governance. This paper uses three case studies from my research in inner city Johannesburg: a year-long participatory public art project that was the core of my PhD fieldwork in Bertrams (2015-2016); a 2018 play I devised in collaboration with a company of actors and another theatre designer/director colleague about the role of a heritage building turned art centre in Hillbrow; a collection of short workshops I have run in the last two years with theatre makers and urban planners and designers using the exercises I developed as methods during my PhD to investigate specific urban areas as well as to test and refine the methods themselves.
Temba Middelmann (University of the Witwatersrand)
Paper short abstract:
This paper emphasises experimental practices employed in approaching research on three types of public space in Johannesburg. It explores the relationships between the self and other - and between the private and public - where identities are mutually constituted and our public cultures are shaped.
Paper long abstract:
This paper reflects on research conducted at Constitution Hill, Gandhi Square, and Pieter Roos Park in inner city Johannesburg. The research explores how the histories, management, design of public spaces relate to their use, while this paper emphasises some of the experimental practices employed as part of a mixed-methods approach. These practices arise out of attempts to understand the dialectical triad of the self, others and the collective. This includes confronting subjectivity head-on by including the self as one of the objects of research, which allows drawing one's research practices closer to ones' own everyday life in the city. This facilitates a better appreciation of the interrelations of the self with others, and collectives, and thus how, where and when particular publics are formed, challenged, or fragmented. A great deal of what makes up the public culture of cities is ephemeral. Observation, conversation, walking, and collecting, are all ways of capturing and understanding elements of these ephemeral processes and phenomena. Creative juxtapositions of objects, artefacts and moments with processes and themes can reveal new ways of understanding the city. The inter-relationships between the self and other - and between the private and public - are where identities are mutually constituted and our public cultures are shaped. These relationships are also revealing of how social cleavages and conflicts are manifesting, being managed, and thus also contributing to public culture. This paper articulates some of these relationships in the context of research on three different types of public space in central Johannesburg.
Anna Selmeczi (University of Cape Town) heeten bhagat (University of Cape Town)
Paper short abstract:
This paper draws on the key concepts, methods and experiences of two parallel course modules, centring on ways of teaching and exploring modes of thinking and researching that shift conventional approaches to understanding the life of cities in the South.
Paper long abstract:
This paper builds on and extends the co-authors' conversation on the key concepts, methods and experiences of two parallel course modules based at the African Centre for Cities. Although in different ways and from different vantage points, both modules seek to offer a learning experience and facilitate the development of research practices that together shift conventional approaches to making legible and intervening into the life of cities in the South. Whether with the intention of drawing provocative, experimental and surprising links with urban and planning theory by mobilising arts-focused methodologies, or the aim of rethinking the notion of urban publics via research practices that centre on an increased awareness to the affective aspects of inhabiting, sharing and knowing a city, both modules turn to the arts and aesthetics as the sources and sites of finding non-habitual ways of understanding city-spaces. Core questions that guide the discussion are: How can we learn to think through the arts and expand the lexicon of urban imaginaries? How do we incorporate non-rationalist epistemologies into a discipline so heavily influenced by the imperatives and metrics of tangible development outcomes? How do we learn to pick up traces of urban life and being-in-common that conventional social science and planning methodologies discount, yet which ubiquitously shape our everyday experiences and aspirations? How can/do we evidence new thinking in the terrain of planning and in the life of cities in this era of putative decolonisation?