Browsing by Author "Sitas, Friderike"

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    Becoming otherwise: two thousand and ten reasons to live in a small town
    (2015) Sitas, Friderike; Pieterse, Edgar; Daya, Shari
    The past few decades have seen a 'cultural turn' in urban planning, and public art has become an important component within urban design strategies. Accordingly, public art is most commonly encountered in the urban literature as commissioned public sculptures. Simultaneously operating are a range of critical, subversive, and experimental practices that interact with the public space of cities in a myriad of ways. Although these other types of public art projects may have been engaged in the fields of Fine Art and Cultural Studies, this has been predominantly in the global North and they have yet to enter Urban Studies in the global South in any comprehensive way. Through an analysis of three examples from the Visual Arts Network South Africa's 'Two Thousand and Ten Reasons to Live in a Small Town', this thesis argues that experimental, inclusionary and less object-oriented forms of public art offers useful lessons for Urban Studies. The research presented in this thesis involved a qualitative study of: The Domino Effect which followed a participatory process to develop a domino tournament in the Western Cape town of Hermon; Living within History, a performative collage project which explored the local museum archive in the town of Dundee in KwaZulu-Natal; and Dlala Indima which was a graffiti-led Hip-hop project in the rural township of Phakamisa in the Eastern Cape. Each involved affective engagements with the vastly unequal contexts typical of South African public spaces. Although there is an increasing recognition that affect plays an important role in understanding and designing the urban, it is still largely assumed that citizenship is enacted according to rational criteria. The public art of 'Two Thousand and Ten Reason s to Live in a Small Town' demonstrated that affect impacts on how people can access complex spatial issues and perform citizenship. Furthermore, as part of a larger epistemological project of 'southerning' urban theory, this thesis therefore argues that intersecting conceptual threads from three bodies of literature: public space, public art and public pedagogy, is important. More specifically, it demonstrates that public art can harness an affective rationality that may foster alternative ways of knowing and acting in/on the urban, thereby offering public art as a unique pedagogy for exploring and deepening cityness .
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    Improving access to maternal health care beyond health care policy: pregnant women's experience of maternal public health care services in Cape Town, South Africa
    (2023) Rhoda, Bronwin; Sitas, Friderike; Oldfield Sophie
    Unequal access to maternal health care continues to be a concern in South Africa despite the efforts of government and health practitioners to make the system more inclusive and accessible to all women, especially for women who have been previously disadvantaged prior to and during Apartheid. Research in maternal health care has shifted and emphasized the delivery of quality care by medical staff to ensure that the goal of reducing maternal deaths is to improve maternal health care. Despite the global concern and interventions of the local government, many women still experience limited access to quality maternal healthcare services. Waiting for public health care services further highlights women's challenges. There is a need to understand further how waiting impacts the patients' experience and access to care. Acknowledging that gaps exist in the current literature focused on maternal health care, this study employs qualitative research methods to explore pregnant women's experience within the maternal public health care system in the Cape Town Metropole Region. Four specific objectives guided this aim: one, exploring the challenges pregnant women encounter when accessing state maternal facilities; two, exploring the bodily and physical experience of waiting on the delivery of public health care services; three, exploring the vulnerability in waiting through the lens of pregnant women; and four, exploring the relationship of government interventions through waiting. The findings of this research demonstrate that public maternal health care is accessible for most women based on the effectiveness of government policies and interventions. However, medical personnel experience constraints that restrict access to quality care. The challenges associated with waiting and medical personnel continue to impact the perception that women create of the delivery of public health care services. Addressing the challenge of waiting requires policies and interventions to align with expanding human resources to deliver the highest quality services.
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    Memoryscapes of belonging: tracing black women's bodies and interior lives in postcolonial city making
    (2023) Prins-Solani, Deirdre; Sitas, Friderike
    Belonging in the city of Cape Town is a contested and ambivalent terrain. The past spatial injustices of colonial and apartheid rule have left deep scars and practices embedded in the city. Much has been researched and written about the role of women in land and housing struggles in the Cape. However, there is a gap in the understanding of the interior worlds of black women and they access the resources within for navigating and negotiating belonging in their everyday lives. According to de Certeau's belonging refers to an “everyday ritualized use of space, an appropriation and territorialisation” (and) a “process of transformation of a place, which becomes a space of accumulated attachment and sentiments by means of everyday practices” (de Certeau, 1984: p96). Picking up on this notion of belonging, my research aims to recognize, identify and understand meaning and sense making, humour and emotional lives of women. In doing so I was curious as to what these could say about the resources women draw on to navigate their everyday belonging in the city. The thesis focuses on the lives of three women from one family: each representing a different generation (grandmother, daughter, granddaughter). Through engaging the lives of these three women, the thesis explores memoryscapes as that intersection between memory, its tangible aspects such as place, objects and architecture, and that of story. Using narrative enquiry and creative methods of analysis as qualitative research method, the research asks questions about how belonging is negotiated by black women in a postcolonial city. The thesis starts by introducing four strands of literature that inform the research: 1) I engaged with urban studies theory, challenging developmentalist approaches to postcolonial city formation; Rodaway,2002, Middleton, 2017, Lefebvre, 1996, Jeannotte, 2007, ed. Schindel and Colombo, 2014. 2) I argue that was is missing are the everyday, ordinary, and interior lives of women and therefore engage with feminist scholars such as Hartman, 2019, Butler, 2016, Carby, 2019); 3) I introduce how interiority can enrich literature on belonging Hartman, 2019, Carby, 2019; and 4) I introduce why memory work is crucial to this kind of inquiry; (ed) Field, Meyer, Swanson,2007, Said, 2000, Stoler, 2013, Ricouer, 2004, McKittrick, 2007. The thesis then introduces the qualitative approach to the research, paying particular attention to how narrative forms of inquiry Bochner and Riggs, 2014, Gergen, 2009, Rosenwald and Ochberg, 1992 and visual modes of analysis Elliott, 2017, Ingold, 2011, Robertson, 2002, Davis, 2008, Poldma, retrieved 2022, Butler-Kisber, 2010 can enrich urban enquiry. The thesis turns to unpacking the findings through a series of three vignettes entitled ‘I am cheeky you know', ‘umnqusho, amagwinya and tea' and ‘these acts of belonging'. The thesis ends with sharing four key aspects which come to light through the research. The first is that a rich interior life provides a resource for not only coping with life in the city in the everyday, but also strengthens resilience, identity and hence the ability to navigate belonging. The second finding was a set of key strategies deployed by the three women in their navigation of belonging. The third finding is that a process of intersecting story, archival and digital images into a series of collages presented a visual language through which to decode belonging and to make visible the invisible worlds which inform affective relationships, choices and decisions about the city. Finally, it is therefore critical for urban studies to engage more deeply and consistently with the ways in which interiority inform navigation and experiences of belonging in postcolonial cities.