AGITATION, the WEF Nexus and Climate Change in South Africa
- Wits University
Conference and exhibition at Origins Centre will interrogate how water, energy, and food insecurities intersect.
Agitation is a conference and exhibition, convened and curated by members of Eco-Imagining, a collaborative research project, and the Origins Centre, University of the Witwatersrand.
The Agitation conference takes place at the Origins Centre from Wednesday, 1 October, 14:00 until Friday, 3 October, lunchtime. The Agitation exhibition at the Origins Centre is on full display until 10 October. Register at www.ecoimagining.org/events/
Climate change is a major systems-level agitation, disrupting everyday life at multiple levels. The conference title Agitation was selected to highlight dramatic environmental changes which we are experiencing, and their impact on the availability of and access to key resources, particularly of water, energy, and food.
At the same time, Agitation is a call for responsive and responsible action. The uncertainty of climate, basic services and resources, lives and livelihoods all ask us to take seriously our moral responsibility to the planet and each other. The ways in which unpredictability impacts unevenly, widening inequality, places an even heavier obligation on scientists and civil actors alike.
Agitation conference: Wednesday, 1 October, 14:00-Friday, 3 October, closing lunch
Over the three days of the conference, participants will consider food, water and energy insecurities, NGO interventions and their successes, limits and challenges, rights to food, water and energy, and ways to address difficulties in realising these rights.
Programme highlights include:
- Keynote Lecture by Professor Eileen Moyer, University of Amsterdam, on 1 October at 14:00
- Artist, performer and author, Cinga Dyala, will act as MC of the spoken word performances on 1 October at 17:00 and will supplement this with her own work.
- A 90-minute walking tour from 09:30-12:30 on 2 October along the Jukskei River in Alexandra. Community artists working with Hannelie Warrington-Coetzee of the litter trap intervention guide this tour.
- On 3 October, Professor Nithanya Chetty, Dean of the Faculty of Science at Wits, chairs a panel discussion From Knowledge to Action and Justice: What are we doing? Panellists include Wits’ Vishwas Satgar; Alexander Kagaha, Makerere University; Jonathan West, Section 27; Mafoko Phomane, groundwork; and Andries Bezuidenhout, University of Fort Hare.
Agitation exhibition: Wednesday, 1 October-Friday, 10 October
The conference is paired with the Agitation exhibition, on full display until 10 October. A mural guides participants to the exhibition and conference venue. Within the Origins Centre, we include drawings, prints, sculptures, videos, banners, and posters developed by researchers, community artists and others in Durban, Mdantsane (Eastern Cape), Mankweng (Limpopo) and Johannesburg.
These works are displayed along with artworks from ecological artist Hannelie Warrington-Coetzee, an Honorary Research Associate at Wits’ Global Change Institute, and printmaker Christine Dixie, in Fine Arts at Rhodes University, both of whom collaborated with the Agitation researchers.
All these works converse with and sometimes contradict archaeological, material culture and ethnographic objects. These objects enhance our engagement with questions of resource scarcity, complexity, deep history, and loss.
About Eco-Imagining
Lenore Manderson, a Distinguished Professor of Public Health at Wits University, and Eileen Moyer at University of Amsterdam, lead Eco-Imagining, formally titled Ecological Community Engagements: Imagining Sustainability and the Water-Energy-Food Nexus in Urban South African Environments.
Eco-Imagining was funded by the National Research Foundation and the Dutch Research Foundation (NWO) as part of a special initiative on the Water-Energy-Food Nexus.
The project also includes colleagues from the University of Fort Hare, University of Limpopo, and Rhodes University, together with non-government organisations RULIV, Gender CC, The People’s Pantry, and Maker’s Valley, and for Agitation, with the Origins Centre.
Participants include stakeholders from various government departments and specific entities, from non-profit organisations, and other civil society actors, whose policies and programme interests extend across the fields of interest of water, energy and food, and around poverty, its alleviation, inequality, and resistance.