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Time

8. Dec 2022
kl 11:00 - 12:00

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Zoom

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WEBINAR - Resilience, adaptation and incompleteness: water scarcity in Khayelitsha, Cape Town

This event is part of the Engaging Sustainability webinar series, hosted by the Department of Global Development and Planning, University of Agder.

Time

8 Dec
kl 11:00 - 12:00

Add to calendar

Place

Zoom

Registration deadline

No deadline specified

Minga Mbweck Kongo (HUMA, University of Cape Town) will talk about informal settlement residents' resilience and adaptation to the water crisis in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, drawing from his long-term ethnographic work.

The event will take place online via Zoom. You need to complete this registration form to receive the Zoom details.

ABSTRACT

Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2017 and 2021, this talk focuses on some of the key issues faced by informal settlement residents of Khayelitsha, Cape Town, as they adapted to a prolonged water crisis while trying to ensure their basic livelihoods. Residents’ resilience continues to shape how water is distributed, accessed and used in informal settlements. These processes are analysed within the broader context of the critical water crisis that South Africa has been facing and continues to face. The study critically engages with the concepts of water scarcity and incompleteness. It is challenging to define scarcity, as several factors determine whether an environment can be classified as water scarce. However, the concept of scarcity limits the focus on physical shortages of water and people’s water access, and does not encompass the broader social relations that emerge around water scarcity issues. To move beyond this narrow understanding, I draw on anthropologist Francis Nyamnjoh’s theorisation of incompleteness as an open-ended epistemology of togetherness and conviviality that fosters the release of human potential and inspires creativity in the midst of hardship.

SPEAKER BIO

Minga Mbweck Kongo UCT

Minga Mbweck Kongo is an anthropologist and postdoctoral fellow at HUMA – Institute for Humanities in Africa at the University of Cape Town. He works on water sociality, mobility, urbanism, illness and climate change. His recently completed PhD research focused on the water crisis in Khayelitsha, Cape Town. Kongo’s publications include works on water and sanitation inequality in Africa, resilience and water scarcity in Khayelitsha, and car guards in South Africa. His forthcoming book is titled Belonging and uncertainty: an autoethnographic account of a car guard in South Africa.

(Photo: fieldwork in Khayelitsha, Cape Town; credit: Minga Mbweck Kongo)