Call for papers – Healing and Coping Strategies in African Cities – 15 April 2025


Workshop Healing and Change II: Case Studies of Healing and Coping Strategies in African Cities


Tuesday 15 April 2025, at the French Institute of South Africa, 62 Juta Street, Braamfontein, Johannesburg 2001


Deadline for abstracts submission: March 5, 2025 (see details below).


Workshop Conveners:

  • Dr Duduzile S Ndlovu, University of Johannesburg             
  • Dr Dostin M. Lakika, University of the Witwatersrand/ French Institute of South Africa 
  • Prof Ingrid Palmary, University of Johannesburg     
  • Prof Lorena Nunez Carrasco, University of the Witwatersrand


We invite academics and practitioners to participate in a multidisciplinary workshop exploring life in African cities. In this workshop, we build on the book project Healing and Change in the City of Gold (Palmary, Hamber, and Núñez 2015). The book presented a collection of case studies about the precarity of everyday life in Johannesburg and documented people’s practices of help-seeking, care, support and healing in response to their everyday insecurity. The case studies show how people experience a sense of ontological insecurity that manifests itself in economic, spiritual, psychological and physical ways, thus moving beyond mainstream psychological notions of trauma and healing, and showing how urban life continues within, against and despite this. Furthermore, these urban populations produce, co-create and promote multiple forms within or in resistance to the varying degrees of the state’s presence and influence in the city.

This proposal comes in 2024, nearly ten years after the publication of the book, and much has changed since then. The global pandemic has further shored up the inequalities and precarities present in many (South) African urban centers. Johannesburg has also seen increased urban decay as seen when abandoned buildings have been engulfed by fires, often with fatal consequences. In addition, migration has been taken up in sinister ways in public debate including unchecked xenophobic statements by political leaders. In this workshop, we ask firstly what has changed in the last ten years since the book’s publication. Secondly, we want to explore how we can study urban life in non-reductive ways that do not only focus on people’s survival as has been the case in most postcolonial theorizing. Exploring survival strategies is important due to infrastructural decline, anti-poor bias, legacies of colonialism and or corruption (Guma et al. 2023). But equally people heal, form connections and find meaning in contexts of precarity. We seek to explore not only the material realities of urban life through the experiences of those who live them, but also the imagined future trajectories and their influence on the present.

The workshop seeks to explore if there is a possibility to write about people and places in non-reductive ways that represent the ambiguities, contradictions and tentativeness of contexts and situations. Bringing together case studies of healing and coping strategies in different contexts and different methodological approaches seeking to find the ways people and communities navigate, circumvent and live within the contradictions of socio-economic inequalities, governments that are facing challenges in delivering public services and the increasingly disproportionate impacts of global, socio-political and technological, changes. Writing about precarity and marginal lives tends to assume the conditions are set to shift to a ‘normal’. How do we write and talk about precarity as the norm even though not desired or optimal? And how can we represent the full experiences of people so that their struggles are not the entire story of their lives. The exception is in many cases enduring. The abandoned buildings in Johannesburg, the informal settlement, and the lives of undocumented migrants, among other communities that live in prolonged hardship, are examples. Can we ethically explore and write about the permanence of these ‘exceptions’ as we study urban life?

As the world becomes more connected, and more people traverse the globe, we see in equal measure other people who are locked into their geographic locations (Freemantle and Landau 2022). In a context of forced sedentariness/mobility, what is the future that people imagine? And more importantly, what are the contemporary worlds that people inhabit in their present worlds? How do people create homes and spaces of belonging whether imagined or physical in the postcolonial cities? What do people do to survive the present with its uncertainties, when futures are even more uncertain? Starting with Johannesburg, the workshop invites interventions that reflect on urban life in African cities more broadly. We are interested in submissions that offer novel ways of reading the city such as arts-based methodologies, spatial analysis, narratives, media and other forms to account for how the city is inhabited and how meaning is made, and futures are imagined.

 

We welcome submissions that respond to some of the following questions shaping the workshop themes:

  • What are the possibilities for an exploration of the aesthetics of living in the city as we study marginality and precarity?
  • What standards or metrics can be used to define what is order and what is disorder in spaces of everyday precarity?
  • What are the stories that people tell to survive their presents?
  • What purposes animate their everyday life? 
  • How do people and communities make sense of social inequalities; gendered, economic, and political?
  • In what ways do people and communities make sense of their lives in contexts of social inequalities, urban decay, unemployment and violence?
  • What spaces of sociability, support and meaning sustain their lives?
  • What are the stories that people tell in their everyday practices such as livelihoods, homemaking, leisure, organising of communal activities etc. including creative expression such as music, visual art or performance to survive their presents?
  • What are the everyday practices of healing and reparation that take place in contexts of ongoing violence? Where do people seek comfort and support?
  • In light of the deepening crisis, COVID, water crises, electricity, waves of extreme crises in the midst of everyday precarity – especially in the city. Is Johannesburg still the city of gold?
  • Who has rights to the city and its resources such as water, housing or electricity?
  • In what ways have technologies of security developed and transformed and or reified existing forms of exclusion such as gated estates?
  • How do people navigate the city, and which spaces are accessible or inaccessible to them?

 

Submission formats

We welcome submissions in the following formats:

  • Traditional academic format of book chapters
  • Autoethnographic reflections
  • Poetry 
  • Visual Art

Please send an abstract of no longer than 300 words including a short biographical note of no more than 5 lines to healingandchange2025@gmail.com by March 5, 2025.

 

Find this call in PDF here.