Abstract
Finding new kin and collaborative ways to care about a corner of Joburg offers some hope on this shaky ground of pedagogical practice. Issues considered only marginally important by powerful hierarchies have the potential to create new connections and link up with and gain momentum from unexpected and unusual formations. The reverberations of historical events continue to pervade the Johannesburg landscape but there are hopeful signs of possibility that call from less obvious places. Children conduct research into the meaning of streets and follow the trail of waste as it leaves their dustbin; a bicycle is kitted out with art and gym equipment and moves between early childhood education sites. This is a tracking of the ‘shimmer’ of life found and followed by a crowd of co-researching companions in the desolate post-apartheid ruins that on the surface may appear only as the on-going denial of creativity and abundance.
the child who became a man treks through all of Africa
the child who became a giant travels through the whole world
without a pass
Excerpt from ‘The child who was shot dead by soldiers in Nyanga’
Ingrid Jonker, 1960.
To reopen the future of our planet to all who inhabit it, we will have to learn how to share it again amongst the humans, but also between the humans and the non-humans.
Mbembe (2015).
The whole poem can be accessed at https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/child-who-was-shot-dead-soldiers-nyanga-ingrid-jonker.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
A collaborative art production team led by founders, Marcus Neustetter and Stephen Hobbs founded in 2001.
- 3.
www.payscale.com Accessed January 2021. R5000 is equal at current rates to US$240.90 or EUR 267.26. R7000 is equal to US$475.41 or EUR374.16.
- 4.
Their website is: www.makersvalley.org.za.
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Giorza, T.M. (2021). Public Places as Learning Spaces. In: Learning with Damaged Colonial Places. Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1421-7_9
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