Oda Eiken Maraire

This PhD-project, Making a home: An ethnographic study examining the production of ‘home’ and urban futures in Johannesburg, South Africa, seeks to explore home-making and 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 'home-making'.

The research will investigate how people live in the city and the visions people have for their own future and the future of the city. Questions I aim to explore include: 1) How do people look at the built environment of the neighbourhood and the city? 2) How do people create their home today and how do they imagine their home in the future? With this focus, the study aims to map out how people conceptualize, are influenced by, and influence processes of enclaving in possibly different ways, and thus trace their imaginaries of urban future(s) and their homes and neighbourhoods, and how these are interlocked with imaginaries and practices of the past and the present.