At the December meeting – as many South Africans prepared themselves for bounty of the festive season – the Local Food Governance Community of Practice (CoP) at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), four women shared sometimes emotionally charged accounts of their daily struggles to provide even modest meals in their homes. While they were at the meeting itself, the women’s stories took the form of ‘digital stories’, short ‘films’ created with the Sustainable Livelihoods Foundation.
The paltry child support grant of just R430 a month is insufficient to significantly impact malnutrition rates among South Africa’s children, and it’s time for President Cyril Ramaphosa to step in and do something about it. That was the message to the President ahead of his State of the Nation Address (SONA2020) from the Centre of Excellence in Food Security (CoE-FS).
Applications are invited from South African PhD humanities graduates for the position of postdoctoral researcher in a Trans-Institutional Critical Food Studies Research Programme.
A gentle prod for scholars to learn more about a problem by working with and learning from ‘stakeholders’ who aren’t academics. To reimagine that relationship would demand that scientists move outside of their comfort zones and skillsets. But that normally proves easier said than done, and frustrating. The end result of which is that scientists then fall back on tried-and-tested means of producing knowledge, argue the authors of a paper titled ‘Making Sense Together’, citing their work on food security in the Western Cape.
08h30, 21 November 2019, Life Science Auditorium, UWC
Food studies in South Africa and elsewhere in Africa tends to focus more on hunger-related and nutritional issues, rather than on broad humanities-oriented, socially determined ways of considering how human beings relate to or experience food.
World science day for peace and development takes place on 10 November.
Africans must work together to develop scientific and technologically advanced solutions to eliminate barriers and advance sustainable development across the continent.
We are wasting our time talking about living wages and inspectors and new technologies. We need to talk about the fact that our government has sold the livelihoods of ordinary people to big corporates.
The lives of Charnell Jantjies and Rozeanne Booysen was changed almost immediately after telling their heartbreaking stories at the National Conference on the Future of Farm Workers in South Africa, thanks to a determined community activist.