Vernacular Regeneration: low-income housing, private security and urban transformation in inner-city Johannesburg

The thesis examines the process of urban regeneration currently underway in inner-city Johannesburg, paying particular attention to the roles social and private housing developers and privatised security services are playing in shaping the area. It also examines the lived reality of regeneration and focuses on the experiences of tenants living in newly-renovated residential buildings. It is based on a qualitative study involving interviews with various actors involved in regeneration and housing provision, including government officials, employees of agencies financing housing projects, housing providers, security and urban management personnel and tenants. It also draws on ethnographic accounts derived in the course of fieldwork. The thesis demonstrates the duality of the goals and agendas which the regeneration process is attempting to fulfil, and concludes that it is a contradictory, vernacular process. It shows how housing providers attempt to meet the demands of a market-based approach to housing and regeneration as well as respond to the social concerns and requirements which define the area. Drawing on the work of Lefebvre and Bourdieu, the thesis expands on the concepts ‘spatial habitus’ and ‘spatial capital’ to give theoretical structure to the discussion and demonstrate the mutually- determining relationship between habitus and space. Moving from the discursive realm to everyday reality, the effects urban management and security practices are having on the area and the ways people experience it are analysed. Urban management is also shown to be serving dual purposes, making the area safer but resulting in differential access to security and new boundaries of exclusion. Lastly, the significance of regeneration is analysed from tenants’ perspectives, accounting for the variety of ways it both facilitates as well as hinders their rights to the city and experiences of urban citizenship, making it a transformative and developmental but also exclusionary and restricted, and thus vernacular, process

Habitus, spatial capital and making place: Housing developers and the spatial praxis of Johannesburg’s inner-city regeneration

This paper presents a sociology of housing developers, stressing the contingent, socially and spatially embedded nature of their practices. It complicates prevailing views of developers and demonstrates how urban development is, in fact, a spatial praxis requiring adaptability and capacities to adjust dispositions and practices to suit the particular environments in which it takes place. A growing body of work tries to understand the motivations and practices of property developers. While this has contributed to understandings of developers’ networks, the ways they understand their roles and the ways different national or regional contexts shape approaches, it largely lacks a spatial perspective, and does not account for the contingency, fluidity and adaptability of developers’ actions. Most importantly, it does not theorize how experiences in space shape practices. Developers are still largely presented as powerful actors who are able to exercise domination over space in relatively straight-forward, linear ways. In contrast, in this paper I demonstrate that developers are influenced by competing dynamics and agendas, and actively adapt their strategies and activities in accordance with the demands and realities of particular places. Building on the work of Centner (2008)and Marom (2014), the paper further develops the concepts ‘spatial capital’ and ‘spatial habitus’ and attempts to use them to make sense of the practices of property developers and affordable housing providers working in inner-city Johannesburg

An Intersectional Understanding of African Graduate Students\u27 Experiences in U.S. Higher Education

The adjustment of African international students in the United States may be different from the experiences of international students from other regions as African students are considered racial/ethnic minorities in the U.S. who can be exposed to racism, nativism, and other discrimination. This study focuses on the structural systems impacting African international graduate students in the U.S. and the intercentricity of various forms of opportunities and oppressions impacting their experiences. Findings revealed four themes: (1) Assumptions made by American Peers and Faculty (2) Adjustment Challenges Situated within Campus Systems (3) Campus Internationalization Rhetoric (4) Conflicting Worldviews. While these themes illustrate how students’ experience negative social positioning and other challenges on their campuses, they also demonstrate students resisting marginalizing experiences

Citizens and exceptions: illegal immigration, citizenship and the state: does the theory of the state of exception provide a useful framework for examining how citizenship is understood, constructed and regulated in contemporary South Africa?

Citizens and Exceptions is a theoretical examination of South Africa’s current approach to immigration and citizenship. The work utilises Agamben’s theory of the state of exception to analyse the laws and policies put in place to regulate immigration in South Africa and to examine the methods and practices used to enforce these laws. It also studies the xenophobic riots of May 2008 from this perspective. This is done in order to understand the discourses, practices, and modes of state power at work in the immigration sphere. The underlying theme in the work is based on Schmitt’s assertion that the norm depends on the exception. Thus, a study of illegal immigration in South Africa – the exception – provides a lens through which the norm of citizenship can be understood. For Agamben, the state of exception is ‘a legal no-man’s land’ in which law and illegality blur. The current South African state’s approach to immigration constructs illegal immigrants as exceptions and places them within this no-man’s land. This is done in several ways, which are explored in this work. At the same time, the establishment of a boundary, of an exceptional category, gives form to another category, that of citizenship and the nation. This is asserted in the thesis, and is done through the use of the state of exception, as well as Foucault’s concepts ‘governmentality’ and ‘biopolitics’. All of these are revealed as informative concepts through which contemporary citizenship, immigration regimes, and processes of population production can be understood. At the same time, flaws within these concepts are exposed and discussed

Everyday security: privatized policing, local legitimacy and atmospheres of control

This paper examines the tactics, underpinning logics and forms of legitimacy through which urban security is produced and maintained in a volatile urban environment. I argue that urban security relies on subtle, mundane practices, in addition to the use of force. Drawing on original empirical research carried out in inner-city Johannesburg, the article makes a novel contribution by combining literature from policing and security studies with work on gentrification, ambient power and the privatization of public space. Overall, the article aims to emphasize the ways in which social and spatial realities shape security and policing practices, and broaden our understanding of the rationales, logics and meanings of urban security, particularly in volatile, conflictual urban spaces (mostly, but not exclusively) in the Global South

Closing Information Gaps in Kakuma Refugee Camp: A Youth Participatory Action Research Study

This study explores the role of academic and social support on young people’s educational pursuits in Kenya’s Kakuma Refugee Camp. Pairing ethnographic methods with youth participatory action research, we find that support often manifests as abstract, decontextualized encouragement with little grounding in the educational opportunity structure. We argue that this motivational discourse generates information gaps, fueling aspirations that neither prepare youth for understanding, nor navigating the constraints they will encounter. In response, we designed a social media platform orienting Kakuma youth to the opportunity structure, while encouraging them to set realistic goals and plan accordingly. Designing a resource by, for, and with Kakuma youth, we illustrate that refugees have the rights and means to access information on which their everyday well‐being and futures depend. This study illustrates that critical understanding of local and global opportunities can empower, rather than demoralize, young people as they shape their futures in exile.HighlightsEducational support has limited value when decontextualized from opportunity structures.Critical understanding of opportunity constraints can empower, rather than demoralize, youth.Balancing hope and critical awareness is a central challenge in participatory action research, and in settings of forced displacement.Refugee youth advocate for their right to information on which their well‐being and futures depend.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/147082/1/ajcp12277_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/147082/2/ajcp12277.pd

Roots & Routes: A re-imagining of refugee identity constructions and the implications for schooling

The ways in which refugees are assumed to adapt to United States society have serious consequences on their enjoyment and fulfillment in their schooling experiences. This is further compounded by the incorporation of refugees under a more general umbrella of immigrant studies. Here, excerpts are shared from an experiential study of fifteen adolescent Bosnian female refugees in New York City schools to articulate an alternative identity paradigm, roots & routes, which captures the ways in which refugees consciously balance their ethnic and new national identities in understanding themselves, their lives, and how they represent themselves to others. This paradigm enables a more holistic view of refugee experiences in schools. It allows one to see the individual experiences of refugees who are often high academic achievers and assumed by their teachers to be adapted while actually still reporting relatively high rates of isolation