Important Dates

Participation in Person: The Colloquium will take place in Seminar Room 0.22 (FZA Building) on the campus.

Participation via Zoom: https://uni-bayreuth.zoomx.de/j/4043557691?pwd=ZKkAXUfXFAWBHadpDQhvaVEn1upkbk.1&omn=65147965137

Meeting ID: 404 355 7691

Passcode: 642384

Büşra Üner – The (Non-)Articulated Movements: Peasant Women's Social Reproductive Labour and the Potential of Ecofeminist-Environmental Solidarities in South Africa Drawing on the case of women’s struggles for water in Somkhele, South Africa

This study aims to discuss why the politics of articulation (Haraway, 1992) between peasant women and ecofeminist and environmental civil society organizations did not endure, and how grassroots movements in a country like South Africa—which has a strong history of antiapartheid social movements—can articulate with global movements today. First, social reproduction—that is, the care work that sustains daily life—plays a significant role in peasant women to form a grassroots movement. Despite the gender relations in their villages, peasant women can protest the coal mine in the hope of accessing water. This protest succeeds in achieving a politics of articulation with the support of civil society. However, when civil society support wanes, these coalitions dissolve; as water needs increase, the time rural women must dedicate to social reproduction grows, and they cannot sustain grassroots movements without support from other actors. At this point, this study argues that the water struggle, which began as a fight for social reproduction, transforms into a daily struggle that leaves peasant women caught between hope and waiting when civil society support is withdrawn. Second, extractivism creates a climate of violence in the village; this climate of violence not only leads to the disengagement of ecofeminist groups from environmental activism but also leaves peasant women inbetween joining the struggle or staying home to continue social reproduction work. In fact, peasant women’s daily lives are turning into a battlefield, and in this daily struggle, women are exposed to the necropolitical violence theorized by Mbembe (2003). At this point, this research reveals that extractivism and the stagnation of struggle cause local community— particularly women who bear the burden of social reproduction—to feel trapped between the fear of death and the will to live. Finally, this research opens up a discussion on how grassroots movements in South Africa can engage with global-scale peasant movements such as La Via Campesina (LVC) and the World March of Women (WMW), as well as feminist movements. In this discussion, there is agreement that issues stemming from social reproduction intersect with environmental issues and can generate a politics of articulation (Di Chiro, 2008). However, it is acknowledged that this is not always possible; while these two issues may intersect at times, as seen in the stagnating struggles of peasant women in Somkhele, a politics of articulation cannot be sustained. At this point, the study emphasizes that local, cultural, place-based, and historical differences are significant in the analysis of solidarity networks and organizations to be established at the intersection of the environment and social reproduction.

Luisa Schneider – Re/Imagining Postcolonial Nationalism(s): Heritage and Memory in Liberia (1960s–2022) Heritage sites function as spatio-temporal prisms through which the past is imagined, negotiated, and contested.

Their histories, access, and representation are shaped not only by state power but also by embedded heritage economies linking personal and collective memory, everyday informal economies, and visitor expectations. This presentation examines how Liberian heritage sites not originally intended as heritage become situational infrastructures through which postcolonial nationalism(s) have been constituted, imagined, and reimagined, as cautious postwar attempts to revive heritage tourism reopen contested questions of the “national” and the “postcolonial”. Based on multi-sited fieldwork, archival research, ethnographic observation, interviews, and netnography, the presentation focuses on two landmark sites in and around Liberia’s capital, Monrovia: the Ducor Hotel, built during the decolonial and developmentalist optimism of the 1960s, reflecting Liberia’s central role in shaping conservative Pan-African regionalism, and Hotel Africa, constructed for the 1979 Organization of African Unity (OAU) Summit amid later shifts toward more radical Pan-African and Afro-Arab solidarities. Yet the 1980 coup, two subsequent regional wars (1989–1997; 1999–2003), and the precarities of postwar reconstruction transformed them into fragmented memory landscapes suspended between ruin, nostalgia, redevelopment, and informal economies of survival and remembrance. Their afterlives illuminate contested understandings of postcoloniality, national selfimagining, and the multiple temporalities through which the nation remembers past futures, forgets, and projects itself into the future. Bringing debates on African postcolonialities into dialogue with Liberian scholarship, the presentation resists assuming a singular Liberian postcolonial moment and instead engages Liberia’s multiple, layered historical trajectories.

Patricia Pinky Ndlovu – Violence and gender in the minibus taxi industry: a decolonial sociological approach

This thesis explores how violence and gender intersect in the South African minibus taxi industry through a decolonial-sociological perspective. With approximately 15 million daily commuters and around 300,000 workers, the minibus taxi sector forms the backbone of public transportation in post-apartheid South Africa, yet it remains one of the country's most violent and patriarchal industries. Despite constitutional guarantees of gender equality, women constitute less than two percent of the workforce, and those employed face systemic exclusion, dispossession, and various forms of violence. This thesis contends that understanding this reality requires theoretical tools sufficiently deep to analyse the social world it investigates, tools derived not from traditional Eurocentric sociological frameworks but from the decolonial and decolonial feminist intellectual traditions. The study departs from two prevailing trends in existing scholarship on the minibus taxi industry: the reductionist focus on so-called "taxi wars" as the primary or sole form of violence, and the near-total invisibility of gender as an analytical category. Drawing on Quijano's (2000) concept of the coloniality of power, Lugones's (2007, 2010) theorisation of the coloniality of gender, Fanon's (1963; 1967) analysis of the zones of being and nonbeing, and the concept of racial capitalism as elaborated by Robinson (1983) and Terreblanche (2002), the thesis develops a theoretical framework that can hold together race, gender, class, culture, spirituality, and violence within a single coherent analytical horizon. Methodologically, the study employs a decolonial feminist qualitative approach, privileging in-depth interviews, oral testimonies (testimonios), and field observations conducted with 24 participants, including women taxi owners, owner-drivers, traditional healers (sangomas and izinyanga), taxi association officials, and male operators in Johannesburg and surrounding areas. A snowball sampling strategy was employed, reflecting the closed and trust-dependent character of the taxi industry. Data were analyzed using decolonial thematic coding, which attends not only to manifest content but to the silences, contradictions, and epistemological frameworks embedded in participants' narratives. The empirical chapters present three interlocking sets of findings. First, the thesis demonstrates that widowhood in the minibus taxi industry constitutes a multi-layered form of patriarchal violence. Women who enter the industry following the death of taxi-owning husbands face property dispossession, economic marginalization, denial of mourning, and the compulsion to navigate a dangerous masculine domain without preparation or protection. Their narratives reveal the coloniality of gender in operation: the patriarchal structures that dispossess them are simultaneously colonial in origin and culturally encoded, rendering women simultaneously complicit in and victims of the systems that oppress them. Second, the thesis explores the role of spirituality and African belief systems in the industry's culture of violence, a dimension that has been made epistemically invisible by what the thesis calls the "coloniality of spirituality." Findings reveal a complex ritual infrastructure that includes consultations with traditional healers (sangomas and izinyanga), spiritual strengthening through muti, ancestral veneration, and pre-violence ritual preparation by hitmen (inkabi), including those who hire them. This spiritual economy runs alongside and intersects with the industry's formal economy of routes, vehicles, and revenue, forming an invisible foundation from which visible violence emerges. The thesis maintains that neglecting this dimension leads to a systematically distorted understanding of the industry and the ongoing violence. Third, the thesis analyses the coping strategies employed by women in the taxi industry, identifying a range of mechanisms, including the Women's Desk institutional structure, the performance of masculinity, strategic silence, protective alliances with male colleagues, and spiritual practices. Drawing on Nnaemeka's (2004) concept of nego-feminism and Kandiyoti's (1988) theorization of bargaining with patriarchy, the chapter argues that these coping strategies occupy an ambivalent terrain between survival and complicity, individual resilience and collective resistance. The thesis aimed to make four original contributions to knowledge. It is the first study to systematically apply a decolonial feminist framework to the South African minibus taxi industry. It introduces the concept of the "coloniality of spirituality" as a theoretical tool for understanding why spiritual dimensions of African social life remain invisible in mainstream scholarship. It develops a typology of violence in the taxi industry that extends beyond existing accounts. Additionally, it offers the most comprehensive empirical account to date of women's experiences in this sector, highlighting their voices as sites of knowledge production rather than just sources of data. The thesis concludes with a call for a decolonial sociology that listens, that is, a sociology guided not by the imperatives of metropolitan theory but by the lived experiences, knowledge, and aspirations of those on the margins of the social order. Keywords: minibus taxi industry; decolonial sociology; coloniality of gender; racial capitalism; patriarchal violence; widowhood; spirituality; muti; South Africa; violence; coping strategies.