You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The primary goal of this study is to present the results of a comprehensive scope of key opportunities and challenges for harnessing migration for inclusive growth and development at the regional level in Southern Africa. The main objectives were as follows: Provide an overview of regional migration stocks and flows identifying regional trends, drivers and impacts from existing research literature and official data; Profile migrant characteristics at the regional level including demographic composition, types of migration and occupational profile; Examine the relevance of multilateral, continental and regional migration instruments, policies, protocols, agreements and forums with a view to i...
Reports of natural disasters fill the media with regularity. Places in the world are affected by natural disaster events every day. Such events include earthquakes, cyclones, tsunamis, wildfires – the list could go on for considerable length. In the 1990s there was a concentrated focus on natural disaster information and mitigation during the International Decade for Natural Disasters Reduction (IDNDR). The information was technical and provided the basis for major initiatives in building structures designed for seismic safety, slope stability, severe storm warning systems, and global monitoring and reporting. Mitigation, or planning in the event that natural hazards prevalent in a region ...
South Africa is recognized as a site of both political turmoil and natural beauty, and yet little work has been done in connecting these defining national characteristics. Washed with Sun achieves this conjunction in its multidisciplinary study of South Africa as a space at once natural and constructed. Weaving together practical, aesthetic, and ideological analyses, Jeremy Foster examines the role of landscape in forming the cultural iconographies and spatialities that shaped the imaginary geography of emerging nationhood. Looking in particular at the years following the British victory in the second Boer War, from 1902 to 1930, Foster discusses the influence of painting, writing, architecture, and photography on the construction of a shared, romanticized landscape subjectivity that was perceived as inseparable from "being South African," and thus helped forge the imagined community of white South Africa. In its innovative approach to South Africa's history, Washed with Sun breaks important new ground, combining the persuasive theory of cultural geography with the material specificity of landscape history.
Today’s environmental problems—climate change, loss of biodiversity, polluted air, land, and water—all have their origins to a greater or lesser extent in how we have lived, played and worked. At a time when societies are confronted with the often dramatic consequences of past choices made in the fields of energy, technology, industry, agriculture, urbanisation and consumption, we need a history that casts more light on the ways in which unsustainable human-nature relationships came into being. This means forging stronger connections between social and environmental history. Common Ground opens up a dialogue between two sub-disciplines that to date have remained largely parallel endeav...
Developing regions are set to account for the vast majority of future urban growth, and women and girls will become the majority inhabitants of these locations in the Global South. This is one of the first books to detail the challenges facing poorer segments of the female population who commonly reside in ‘slums’. It explores the variegated disadvantages of urban poverty and slum-dwelling from a gender perspective. This book revolves around conceptualisation of the ‘gender-urban-slum interface’ which explains key elements to understanding women’s experiences in slum environments. It has a specific focus on the ways in which gender inequalities are can be entrenched but also allevi...
This book endeavours to take the conceptualisation of the relationship between transnational remittance exchanges and gender to a new level. Thus, inevitably, it provides a number of case studies of relationships between gender and remittances from around the world, highlighting different processes and practises. Thereby the authors seek to understand the impact of remittances on gender and gender relations, both at the sending as well as at the receiving end. For each case study authors ask how remittances affect gender identities and relationships but also vice versa. By itself this already adds a wealth of insights to a field that is remarkably understudied despite a volume of studies on ...
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Landlocked and surrounded by South Africa on all sides, the mountain kingdom of Lesotho became the world's first "water-exporting country" when it signed a 1986 treaty with its powerful neighbor. An elaborate network of dams and tunnels now carries water to Johannesburg, the subcontinent's water-stressed economic epicenter. Hopes that receipts from water sales could improve Lesotho's fortunes, however, have clashed with fears that soil erosion from overgrazing livestock could fill its reservoirs with sediment. In this wide-ranging and deeply researched book, Colin Hoag shows how producing water commodities incites a fluvial imagination. Engineering water security for urban South Africa draws attention ever further into Lesotho's rural upstream catchments: from reservoirs to the soils and vegetation above them, and even to the social lives of herders at remote livestock posts. As we enter our planet's water-export era, Lesotho exposes the possibilities and perils ahead.
The chapters in this book reflect on the practice of using narratives to understand individual and social reality. They all reveal dimensions of the same concrete reality: contemporary society of Central South Africa. Except for two, all the chapters originated from research in the program The Narrative Study of Lives, situated in the Department of Sociology at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa. Each chapter opens a window on an aspect of everyday life in Central South Africa. Each window displays the capacity of the narrative as a methodological tool in qualitative research to open up better understandings of everyday experience. The chapters also reflect on the epistemological journey towards unwrapping and breaking open of meaning. Narratives are one of many tools available to sociologists in their quest to understand and interpret meaning. But, when it comes to deep understanding, narratives are particularly effective in opening up more intricate levels of meaning associated with emotions, feelings, and subjective experiences.
Using comparative cases from Guinea, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, this study explains why some refugee-hosting communities launch large-scale attacks on civilian refugees whereas others refrain from such attacks even when encouraged to do so by state officials. Ato Kwamena Onoma argues that such outbreaks only happen when states instigate them because of links between a few refugees and opposition groups. Locals embrace these attacks when refugees are settled in areas that privilege residence over indigeneity in the distribution of rights, ensuring that they live autonomously of local elites. The resulting opacity of their lives leads locals to buy into their demonization by the state. Locals do not buy into state denunciation of refugees in areas that privilege indigeneity over residence in the distribution of rights because refugees in such areas are subjugated to locals who come to know them very well. Onoma reorients the study of refugees back to a focus on the disempowered civilian refugees that constitute the majority of refugees even in cases of severe refugee militarization.
The apartheid era in South Africa lasted more than 40 years. It was marked by political repression and the attempt to create a homogeneous "white South Africa", which meant excluding the non-white majority population. The establishment and maintenance of white supremacy in South Africa by colonialism and, since 1948, grand apartheid was not only the result of racist regulations and laws, but also followed a "scientific" logic to justify the resettlement and expulsion of South African blacks.The history of South Africa from 1948 to 1994 can also be seen as the history of a major society-spanning project; an attempt to build a "modern" state on the basis of racial segregation. This work investigates the factors that make it possible to stabilize a policy based on virtually impossible prerequisites over four decades: Ethnic categorization, territorial planning and "environmental protection measures".