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Protest and participation in Cato Manor, Merebank and Wentworth, 15 January |
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Paper: Protest and participation in Durban: A focus on Cato Manor, Merebank and Wentworth
Speaker: Shauna Mottiar
Date:15 January 2014
Date: 12:30-2pm
Venue: CCS Seminar Room
This paper considers how Durban citizens understand protest and what other methods of participation they employ in their pursuit of service delivery, democratic citizenship and social change. It is based on a sample of twenty households drawn from Cato Manor a ‘hotspot’ for ‘service delivery’ protest as well as Merebank and Wentworth situated in the South Durban basin, well known for its civil society / community opposition to local petrochemical refineries. The paper employs theories of ‘invited’ and ‘invented’ spaces of participation and ‘participation as citizenship’ to understand protest and participation among Durban’s low-income urban citizens. It argues that protest and formal participation methods are used in parallel but with differing levels of intensity across communities depending on how people view agency and democratic citizenship. The paper also considers the role of social movements and NGOs arguing that their initiatives to effect ‘transformative’ participation have their limits.
SPEAKER:
Shauna Mottiar is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Centre for Civil Society, School of Built Environment and Development Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal; her doctorate in politics from Wits University addressed local government and civil society relations.
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