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Juxtaposition and Value: Critical Approaches to the Water-Energy-Food Nexus


  • Fort Hare Staff Centre, University of Fort Hare Alice campus. Dikeni, EC, 5700 South Africa (map)

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  • 14:00-16:00 Opening Session

    • Introductory remarks: Professor Lenore Manderson (Wits) and Professor Eileen Moyer (Amsterdam)

    • Opening remarks and introduction of Vice-Chancellor: Professor Niel Roos, Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences & Humanities, U Fort Hare

    Welcome: Professor Sakhela Buhlungu, Vice-Chancellor

    Keynote: Dr Thozama April-Maduma: “Decolonizing the archive”

    Walkabout of the collection: Thozama April-Maduma and Lenore Manderson

    Walkabout of The Abyssal Zone: Christine Dixie


    16:00-17:00   Reception

  • 9:30 – 10:30 Intersections and the WEF Nexus

    Chair: Professor Coleen Vogel

    Panelists: Andries Bezuidenhout, Lenore Manderson, Eileen Moyer

    10:30 Morning coffee/tea

    11:00-12:30 Food and the WEF Nexus: Production, retail and access

    Chair: Professor Lenore Manderson

    • Dr Luvuyo Wotshela (land ownership)

    • Professor Michael Aliber (agriculture and land)

    • Vijay Makanjee (land and food production)

    • Professor Muna Simatele (food and pricing)

    12.30-13:30 Lunch

    13:30-15:00 Insights from the field:  Ignite format -- 20 visual slides, 15 sec. each

    Chair: Professor Andries Bezuidenhout

    Panelists:  Dr. Nirvana Pillay, Dr. Blessings Kaunda, Andisiwe Maxela, Lucy Khofi, Amanda Mokoena, Emily Ragus, and Sibonile Maphosa

    15:30-15:30 Afternoon coffee/tea

    15:30-17:00 Energy, Water and Just Transitions: Transdisciplinary     Approaches on Climate Change

    Chair: Eileen Moyer

    • Professor Coleen Vogel – Just Transitions

    • Memory Reid & Linda Musariri – Energy Transitions

    • Associate Professor Priscilla Monyai, Communities, innovative water management, and governance – Free State and Eastern Cape

    • Professor Oghenekaro Nelson Odume, Director, Institute for Water Research, Rhodes

  • 09:30- 15:00

    Chair: Marius Marais 

    Professor Sylvester Mpandile: Publishing for WEF Nexus Impact

    Professor Lenore Manderson: Publishing Strategies for Early Career Social Scientists

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about the colloquium and exhibition

The WEF Nexus – interconnections between water, energy and food – has largely been the subject of research attention in relation to policy, governance and intersectoral engagement. In South Africa, and globally, researchers have concentrated on technical and technocratic questions, emphasising the quantification of resources. Communities, livelihoods and local environments have rarely figured in this work, whether due to perceived irrelevance, lack of interest, or by being ignored. The WEF Nexus approach makes certain assumptions about the nature of the state – it is seen as an instrument of delivery, and delivery failures are seen as lapses of coordination and communication, rather than as outcomes of struggles over power and resources. WEF Nexus also often fails to account for, let alone foreground, questions of the environment and land, including struggles of control over and access to land as central to WEF resource security. Hence the need to understand WEF outcomes as part of a broader political economy. Eco-Imagining engages with this technocratic literature from the point of view of people’s lived reality, to challenge and enrich existing frameworks. Using a transdisciplinary approach, and inclusive and community-based approaches, we examine issues around water, energy and food security, and changes in these domains that people experience in the context of social, economic, environmental and climate change. Juxtaposition and Value brings together environmental and biological scientists, humanities scholars and the creative arts.

The exhibition and colloquium reflects our concern with inequality and insecurity, now and historically, as these affect access to water, food, energy, and other resources such as land. In the exhibition of our own work, and the photographs, prints and other art work, and the ethnographic items we have selected, we juxtapose images, compare and contrast; through this approach, we draw attention to the differences in values between communities and the state. The methods we have used in the projects highlight our approach to knowledge production, raising questions too in terms of how values determine the direction of policies and programmes related to basic resources. The exhibited material includes expressive and representational media by professional and community artists and by people in their everyday lives – painting, printing, drawing, photography, video, sound, and domestic objects. We include posters of two doctoral research projects which provide examples of juxtaposition, and the lack of value given to equity when people lack resources. We include also community artwork from another doctoral projects.

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September 1

Exploring the Water-Energy-Food Nexus and Climate Change through a Case Study of Energy Insecurity in the Urban Context

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Next
April 1

Engaging Communities for Just Climate Futures: Perspectives from South Africa.