From 2014-2019, Prof. Manderson ran a five-year interdisciplinary program, Earth, Itself, which brought together scientists across disciplines and art practitioners to explore issues of climate change, ecological crises and sustainability. In addition, in 2018 she produced and curated Watershed: Art, science and elemental politics at Wits, emphasising the power of multidisciplinary collaborations to understand and advocate for water justice. In this presentation, she illustrates the productive ways in which the intervention developed conversations around planetary challenges, and from this, provide examples of how this might work during the collaborative research project in urban and peri-urban South Africa on Water, Energy and Food, entitled Eco-imagining.

Lenore Manderson is Distinguished Professor of Public Health and Medical Anthropology in the School of Public Health, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and from 2014 2019, she was Visiting Distinguished Professor at the Institute at Brown of Environment and Society, Brown University, USA. Her work is concerned with inequality and the social context of infectious and chronic diseases, and has worked and published primarily in Southeast and East Asia and increasingly, South Africa. Her co-edited book Viral Loads: An Anthropology of Urgency in the Time of COVID-19 (2021), describes how, globally, COVID exploited and magnified inequality. She is lead author of the chapter on vulnerability in the second South African Report on COVID. She is an NRF A1 rated scientist, a member of the Academy of Sciences of South Africa, and recipient of the 2023 Bronislaw Malinowski Award for her contributions to solving human problems using the concepts and tools of social science.

The discussion is hosted by the programme on “Ecological Community Engagements: Imagining sustainability and the water-energy-food nexus in urban South African environments” funded by the NVO (Netherlands) and the NRF (South Africa) and is the second of a series of seminars to be hosted by Ruliv and the Department of Development Studies at the University of Fort Hare.