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Urban Humanities: Storytelling as method: migration, gender and inclusion in Durban

Studio 3 Environmental and Geographical Sciences Building, Upper Campus, UCT, Cape Town

ABSTRACT Storytelling as a form of urban scholarship has the potential for empathetic ways of producing knowledge, understanding, seeing and being in the city. This seminar explores how storytelling in a multitude of forms can be a productive method for data collection, public dissemination and advocacy for social justice. It discusses this based on a year and half long partnership project between scholars and civil society organisations on Migration, Gender and Inclusion in the city of Durban. In this project women’s stories of arriving in the city and making it something like home were positioned at the centre of project activities. Thirty oral histories of migrant women, both South African women living in a Durban hostel and women arriving from the DRC, Zimbabwe, Nigeria and Uganda formed the primary data set. These narratives were then developed into a verbatim theatre performance titled The Last Country that was performed in many different settings around the city. The seminar outlines how the play was both a form of storytelling in itself, making accessible the oral history data to a broader public audience, and a form of data collection through discussion sessions with audience members and city officials. This seminar looks at the learnings and challenges we experienced through being a part of a project built around the idea of sharing stories in the city.   BIOGRAPHY Dr Kira Erwin is a sociologist and senior researcher at the Urban Futures Centre at the Durban University of Technology. Kira's research and publications focus largely around race, racialisation, racism and anti-racism work in South Africa. She is interested in how place identities related to space and the built environment impact on ideas of social difference. Kira makes use of creative participatory methods in her research and engagement projects, and collaborates with colleagues in the creative arts to design forms of storytelling that extend research findings beyond the walls of academia. WHEN: 18 October 2018 TIME: 15:00 - 16:30 VENUE: Studio 3, Environmental and Geographical Science Building, Upper Campus, UCT

Paula Meth — Producing ‘decent’ cities: gender and urban upgrading

Studio 5 Environmental and Geographical Science, Upper Campus, UCT,, Cape Town

Dr Paula Meth is a lecturer in Town and Regional Planning at the University of Sheffield. Her research interests cover the areas of gender and violence, informal housing, crime management, inequality and injustice, governance, local politics and everyday power relations, all focusing on the global South, particularly South Africa,. Her current research focusses on the contributions made by citizens both in challenging and managing social problems but is also in the broader impact of national and global trends towards neo-liberalism and their effect on local participation. Her work is informed by ongoing debates within Feminism and Development Studies, as well as moves within Planning to broaden and re-examine the terms of reference of planners and their relationship with broader society. Also related to this work is an ongoing interest in developing qualitative methodology, in particular making use of diaries to inform the research process. This seminar is presented jointly by the UCT EGS Department and ACC