Oda Eiken Maraire

This PhD-project seeks to explore urban enclaving in Johannesburg, South Africa. The project will investigate the dialectic relations between people and the material world as a means to understand how processes of enclaving work to transform urban structures and everyday practices, particularly along gendered lines. In order to examine the sociality dimensions of enclaving the study is specifically concerned with the materialities and aesthetics of enclaving.

The study will also unpack how processes of enclaving are entangled in the cultural legacy of colonial and pre-colonial times. With this focus, the study aims to map out how people from various social groups conceptualize, are influenced by, and influence processes of enclaving in possibly different ways, and thus trace their imaginaries of urban future(s) and how these are interlocked with imaginaries and practices of the past and the present.