Workshop “Healing and Change in African Cities” – 15 April 2025

Tuesday, 15 April 2025 | 9:00am – 4:30pm

IFAS-Research | French Institute,1^st floor, 62 Juta Street, Braamfontein

RSVP here, before Sunday, 13 April.

IFAS-Research, Dr Duduzile Ndlovu (University of Johannesburg), Dr Dostin Lakika (University of the Witwatersrand & IFAS-Research), Prof. Ingrid Palmary (University of Johannesburg) and Prof. Lorena Nunez Carrasco (University of the Witwatersrand) have the pleasure to invite you to the workshop “Healing and Change in African Cities”. The workshop builds on the book project Healing and Change in the City of Gold (Palmary, Hamber, Núñez, 2015), which 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.

Ten years after the publication of the book, the workshop first asks what has changed since — i.e. the impact of the global pandemic in many African urban centers, the increased urban decay in Johannesburg, as seen by abandoned buildings being engulfed by fires, often with fatal consequences, or the place of migration in public debate including unchecked xenophobic statements by political leaders.

Secondly, the workshop will explore the ways of claiming, traversing, ordering and transforming space in African cities and how we can write about people and places in non-reductive ways that represent the ambiguities, contradictions and tentativeness of contexts and situations. The programme brings 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.

Programme:

8.30-9.00am – Welcome Coffee

9.00-9.30am – Introduction

9.30-10.45am – Session 1 – CLAIMING THE CITY: Belonging and Place Making in Urban Centres

Stories about identities, privilege and precarity are overlaid onto the geography of the city. Stories of the past and the present, including in music and other cultural productions,  show  how people imagine the cities they inhabit and their places in it.  The ways people navigate life between the hopes that city life promises and within the Despite the environmental degradation and the precarious conditions to which they are subjected. Their sense of belonging is forged amidst multifaceted adversities through the creation of safe spaces, solidarity networks, and the preservation of cultural identity. In a space marked by uncertainty and exclusion, these strategies are crucial mechanisms for navigating discriminatory spaces, fostering recognition, and affirming both individual and collective identities.

10.45-11.00am – Coffee Break

11.00am-12.00pm – Session 2 – TRAVERSING THE CITY: Defying Exclusion and Resisting Norms

The narrative of African urban life is filled with the poverty, social exclusion and violence that renders urban inhabitants victims of their environments. And yet within these spaces of neglect, violence and exclusion resistance always forms. Sometimes this resistance takes easily identifiable forms such as the well documented service delivery or anti-government protests seen across Kenya and South Africa. More often than not it takes the form of refusing to stay in ones place and insisting on claiming space even when the social order determines that they do not belong there. In these papers we look at the everyday ways that people resist the dominant narratives that seem to determine their entitlements in the city by refusing to remain in their ‘proper’ place. 

12.00-1.00pm – Lunch

13.00-2.15pm – Session 3 – TRANSFORMING THE CITY: Creating Places of Inclusion

Marginalised groups have historically expanded the boundaries of urban regulations and transformed the city to survive and thrive. Urban informal women traders in Mzuzu city in Malawi, make a living selling in the market by manoeuvring through the interstices of law and policing. In the segregated city of Durban during the first half of the 20th century, Black presence could be seen through their role in establishing institutions for their redress and well-being. But inclusion in the city is for many, a continuous struggle. Financial precarity during COVID-19  resulted in experiences of psychological distress for university students, a class of temporary residents living in dormitories in Johannesburg. In Kinshasa, urban subaltern groups’ resilience to marginalisation and multifaceted crises transformed the throwaway economy into a survival economy.

2.45-3.30pm – Session 4 – ORDERING THE CITY: Rituals of Healing in a Context of Urban Chaos

Rituals serve multiple protective functions, including safeguarding individuals, reinforcing social and professional positions, providing healing and restoration, and securing livelihood, particularly in times of uncertainty. Many individuals hold deep-seated beliefs in the efficacy of rituals and continue to perform them as mechanisms for navigating various challenges in their lives and regaining a sense of confidence and resilience. In the pursuit of success, protection, healing, and identity, rituals become integral to individuals and collective strategies of resilience. Moreover, they function as a means of asserting agency over space, resisting alienation, and reaffirming a sense of belonging in the face of socio-political and economic upheaval.

 
3.30-4.00pm – Conclusions