Haunted Walks of District Six: Propositions for Counter-Surveying

Abstract

This article traces a pedagogical trajectory in South African higher education that started in engineering education and leads to walking-as-research. Situated on District Six, a well-known site of apartheid forced removals, a cartographic and diffractive methodology is utilized to trace the development of this pedagogy, as well as walks that have emerged out of mapping the site by means of geographic information system (GIS). We develop propositions related to a practice we call counter-surveying, and we trace two walks of District Six with people who are connected to the site. Recognizing the hauntological power of walking, we walk into the past and diffractively read the walks together with South African history, geomatics education, and posthumanist theory. Premised on relational ontologies, we attend to the ghosts of District Six and explore different ways of interrogating issues of land and education, while opening up a space for Otherness.

The Subjectification of Black Engineering Educators: A Posthumanist Cartography

“…The interviews form part of an assemblage of data, together with our own experiences and desires, our institutional contexts, moods, and silences. We are committed to be “for some worlds” (Motala & Bozalek, 2022, p. 254) and foreground the Black experience. Following Tuck’s (2009) desire-based research, we do not want our work to account only for “loss and despair, but also the hope, the visions, the wisdom of lived lives and communities” (p. 417).…”

“…We question representation’s influence on the subjectification of engineers, yet some of our work has benefited from the logics of representation. For example, Siddique’s “counter-surveying” methodology (Motala & Bozalek, 2022) uses modern land surveying techniques to mark out the locations of houses that were demolished by apartheid forced removals, yet the intention and manifestation of counter-surveying is different. Counter-surveying is similar to Tuck’s (2009) desire-based research, which, instead of focusing on the documentation of damage, is “concerned with understanding complexity, contradiction, and the self-determination of lived lives” (p. 416).…”