Presenting new research by SWOP

The first SWOP breakfast seminar was held on April, 6 2018. Breakfast was served at 7:30 before the presentations. Thabang Sefalafala was the first presenter for this semester. He presented his research on "life without work: experiences of unemployment in the dying gold fields of the free state". Thabang stated that his motivation for his research was his concern with how retrenched mineworker deal with a life without wage work. He opened his presentation by unpacking unemployment as economic insecurity, also touching on the perceptions of the value of wage work, masculinity and unemployment as well as the stigma attached to “able-bodied men” receiving grants after unemployment.

Click here to watch full video clip of Thabang Sefalafala’s presentation.

The second breakfast seminar was held on 20 April 2018, it was presented by Melanie Samson, who presented her research on "whose frontier is it anyway? Reclaimer 'integration' and the battle over Johannesburg’s waste-based commodity frontier". Samson uses the term “reclaimers” rather than waste-pickers. Very few call themselves waste-pickers, in Johannesburg the term that is preferred is “reclaimers. Based on the insights from reclaimers, she theorized integration as colonisation.

Click here to watch full video clip of Melanie Samson’s presentation.

The third and last breakfast seminar for the semester was presented by Themba Masonda. He focused his research on the Community Work Programme (CWP). Themba's presentation was on "the organisation workshop (OW): a catalyst for autonomous development from below? The CWP in Munsieville and Bekkersdal". His research was Based on a comparative study, because the research found that the CWP participants in Munsieville tended to possess greater autonomous capabilities in adapting the CWP to respond to local social challenges, as compared to participants in Bekkersdal. The operationalisation of the Organisation Workshop (OW) methodology in Munsieville can help us understand this important variation. Themba Masonda’s full video clip presentation will be uploaded soon.

Dates of the second semester breakfast seminars will be announced soon.