The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the pre-existing vulnerability of the small-scale fisheries sector in South Africa and exposed the structural inequalities and ongoing injustices facing this sector. The failures within the fisheries governance and management system linked to the slow pace of implementing the Small-scale Fisheries Policy of 2012, have further exacerbated their vulnerability. This paper explores the immediate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the small-scale fisheries sector and exposes how governance failures within the fisheries sector have increased their vulnerability. Restrictions on fishing activities and mobility, closure of conservation areas, unfair fines and arrests, loss of markets and barriers to sale of fish products as well as lack of access to water, have had significant impacts on small-scale fishers and coastal communities. The lack of social protection and the limited emergency relief provided by government further exacerbated their precarious position. Despite their vulnerability, fishers have demonstrated a measure of resilience, supporting those in need with food, lobbying government to amend restrictions and recognise their rights, and challenging efforts to fast-track development and exclude their voices. The crisis has highlighted an urgent need for broad, national level transformation to deal with the poverty and injustices facing poor coastal communities, as well as fisheries-specific policy reform.
Urban sustainability and justice depend upon the flow of water across complex urban space. Yet, the characteristics of urban space produce a fragmented sense of our water resources. Cape Town, South Africa, the context of this research, is one such city whose water challenges have been exacerbated by climate change-induced drought, to the extent that the city nearly shut off the water running to residents' taps. This context presents a particular challenge for the focus of this special issue, transformative and transgressive learning, an emerging arena of thought and practice concerned with learning processes that might foster more sustainable socio-ecological relations. The empirical material for this research draws from 12 arts-based inquiry workshops run with youth in an environmental organisation over four months, exploring a local water crisis. The data were generated through an engaged arts-based research process. The paper traces how transformative and transgressive learning in the context of urban water crisis might be characterised as making (non)sense by bringing the empirical material into dialogue with five entry points of transformative and transgressive learning literature rooted in Freirean educational praxis. This paper crafts and engages the concept of making (non)sense, a way of thinking about qualities and processes of learning praxis that responds to the wicked sustainability challenges we face today, particularly in terms of a Global South perspective. I argue such a praxis needs qualities and processes that disrupt and trouble the norm in the context of the socio-ecological challenge of urban water.
Drawing on the working lives of popular educators who are striving for socioeconomic and socio-ecological justice, we demonstrate how popular education is a form of care work which is feminised, often undervalued and unrecognised as highly skilled work. It is relational work that aims to forge solidarity with communities and the environment. Given the state of the planet, the radical transformations that are needed, and the future projection of ‘work’ as including the care economy in large measure, we argue that popular education is a generative site for further exploration of research into work and learning. However, to move popular education as work from the margins means to rethink the current economic system of value. Addressing the contradiction that undervalues work for life/living, popular education engages transformative action motivated by a deep sense of solidarity and a focus on imagining alternatives as an act of hope.Keywords: work and learning, popular education, care work, solidarity
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