Thembi Luckett

Body mapping is an intimate cartographic process that involves tracing the body and exploring one’s embodied experience. This visual, arts-based process is highly reflective, designed to empower communities to express and share stories – often those difficult to utter. Steeped in various activist and feminist traditions, body mapping is also a practice of care. It is not just about producing a map but is also about coming together to tend to the body and build solidarities to generate change. Our article seeks to expand creative conversation around the value of body mapping for geographers as both a research method and pedagogical tool which may enable multiple bridges to be crossed: activist and academic, generational, and linguistic. This article centers body mapping where it was first articulated as a research method – South Africa – and reflects on a 3-day workshop with the Waterberg Women Advocacy Organization to map the gendered impacts of extractive industries. By insisting o...

Marapong, "place of bones", is situated in the shadow of the coal-fired Matimba Power Station and Grootegeluk coal mine in Lephalale, northern South Africa. Marapong was named after the bones of a local woman, Salaminah Moloantoa, which were found during the development of Grootegeluk in 1973. That same year her bones were buried on Naawontkomen farm where she had lived. Thirty-four years later with the construction of coal-fired Medupi Power Station, Moloantoa's bones became the site of industrial construction again in this current iteration of extractivism. Working from two provocations that emerged during fieldwork-we are dead here and the mines turn our lives upside down-I relocate social death and its relation to different kinds of violence that constitute racial capitalism in this city of coal. In so doing, I engage with literature on Afropessimism, the black radical tradition, and land and ancestral struggles and argue for reconceptualising social death as grounded in place and time rather than a totalising ontological condition. Such a rereading emphasises relationality and the processes of contestation over land, life, and death, that open up futures beyond that of bones becoming coal for fossil fuel development.

Southern Africa is understood to be a climate change hotspot, with youth and children most likely to be affected. The region has already suffered climate variability, with increased occurrence of floods and droughts, which are expected to escalate in the future. Despite the fact that young people in the region are central to ecological and social justice debates, they are often depicted as uninterested and excluded from policy and decision- making spaces – especially those living in global and urban peripheries. In this article, I speak to the nexus of youth, social and environmental justice, and climate politics. I do so by unpacking the everyday concerns and negotiations of youth activists in the urban periphery of Lephalale in Limpopo, South Africa – not typically seen as an urban centre or a site of youth politics. Lephalale is viewed as a future hub of power generation in South Africa, the rapid growth of the town being based on the expansion of coal extractivism. The complexit...

What does it mean to be human? This question has plagued the thoughts  of  people  over  centuries  and  will  continue  to  do  so.  Margaret Archer attempts to grapple with the nature of our humanity in Being Human, the  third  volume  in  her  ambitious  five  volume  series  theorising  agency, culture and structure within a realist framework. I choose to focus on this book  because  it  lays  the  foundations  of  agency  and  what  it  means  to  be human, which allows Archer’s subsequent empirical and theoretical inves-tigation of the ‘internal conversation’. This essay reviews her undertaking to  theorise  humanity  and  to  re-establish  human  causal  powers  in  social theory in the face of postmodernity’s ‘death of the subject’. I critique the power  of  Archer’s  theory  from  an  eclectically  informed  position,  includ-ing gender studies, poststructuralism and embodiment theories. Archer’s authoritative position is somewhat destabilised by making visible her lack of consideration of intersubjectivity, language and the complex nature of power in her endeavour to retain a human-istic subject.

In 2015, the local municipality of Lephalale in the Limpopo province of South Africa heralded the town as “the new Johannesburg” and the “future hub of power generation in South Africa.” The growth of the town is based on the expansion of coal extractivism in the area. The construction of the Medupi coal power station is celebrated as “creating a better life for all” despite the destruction and dispossession left in the wake of this resource extractivist mega project. China Miéville argues that this current period of global capitalism is the utopia of corporations and, therefore, a time of apocalypse or dystopia too. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s explication of modernity and global capitalism through the city, this paper explores themes such as catastrophe, fragmentation, marginalisation, alienation and commodification. Benjamin brings to the fore contradictions of the dys/utopia of modernity through the city. This paper draws on ethnographic research in order to excavate the fragments of possibility for alternative futures in everyday life in the dys/utopia of corporations in the urban development of Lephalale.

Throughout history there have been dreams, visions and hopes for a utopian world. The history and presence of politics in South Africa abounds with moments and movements of pushing beyond and resisting 'a dog's life'. Integral to pushing beyond for a better world, are education and learning processes and practices, albeit in different shapes and forms, with varying intensities and power. This paper seeks to trace certain popular education practices that have and continue to deepen the struggle for an alternative South African society. The paper highlights the shifts and changes in popular education in response to the ebbs and flows of political struggle and movements. It is based on research entitled 'Re-membering traditions of popular education'-a recovery of popular education practices from the past that may have been forgotten and reconnection with present forms of education, organising and action. As a renewed working class movement is regrouping and growing in response to the ongoing structural violence of neo-liberal economic policies and state violence, this paper argues that popular education can play a role in contributing towards building this and other movements. Popular education can foster critical analysis in order to understand the context more deeply, name the enemy and foster openness and hope in searching for and imagining a collective alternative. This paper is part of a 3 year research project entitled 'Re-membering Traditions of Popular Education', which aims to uncover and recover forgotten traditions of popular learning and education in South Africa. 'Re-membering' suggests two things: firstly, a process of casting one's mind to call up something that may have been forgotten, a finding and retrieving in order to reveal, a recollection, uncovering of something that was neglected or no longer recognised as being there. Secondly, remembering suggests an act of connecting what has been severed, a re-attaching, a putting together what has been kept apart and re-establishing of relations between parts that belong together. The project aims to shed light on processes of activist education that