International Fellowships for Early to Mid-Career Urban Scholars from the Global South
Report on Sabbatical: November 2011-July 2012
Shari Daya
In 2011 I applied for and was awarded a fellowship from the Urban Studies Foundation to support an extended sabbatical at Cambridge University. Thanks to the generous funding from the Foundation, I was able to spend around nine months at Cambridge University from November 2011 to July 2012.
While there, I worked in the Geography Department under the mentorship of Professor Ash Amin, the current holder of the 1931 Chair in Geography and Fellow of Christ’s College. This was a valuable opportunity to work closely with one of the most eminent urban theorists and cultural geographers in the world, and to benefit from his feedback on my own work on a regular basis over an extended period.
During my time in Cambridge I met with my mentor, Professor Ash Amin, on an approximately monthly basis. Professor Amin’s regular insight and guidance with regard to my writing were invaluable. He also introduced me to colleagues whose research interests overlapped with my own, leading to several stimulating conversations and at least one plan for a reciprocal visit to Cape Town.
In addition to my research and writing, I attended numerous seminars within the Cambridge
University Geography Department and at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and
Humanities (CRASSH), as well in the Geography Department at University College London.
Highlights included a talk by the artist Ingrid Pollard, whose work I have drawn on in the past to inform my own research and teaching.
In addition to allowing me to live and work in Cambridge, the USF funding enabled me to make use of some of the many scholarly and cultural resources in the east and south-east of
England. I was able to visit several galleries, museums and exhibitions in London and Cambridge, including the Wellcome Trust Gallery, the Fitzwilliam Gallery, and the Cambridge University
Archaeology and Anthropology Museum, all of which enriched not only my general experience of visiting the UK but also the processes of reflecting on and developing my own research.
In February I travelled further afield to participate in a one-day craft symposium in Leicester, at which a diverse range of artists, crafters and academics, as well as curators and other practitioners, discussed their work. In June, I also attended an event organised by the UK Crafts
Council, reporting on their recent publication of Craft in an Age of Change, during which I met a postgraduate student, Helen Fitzhugh, working on similar research to my own, in the area of social enterprise and craft. Both these events were valuable in providing a sense of the debates on craft taking place in the UK, which are very different to those in South Africa but offer useful insights for our own context.

While in the UK I was able to meet several times with Dr Clare Herrick, the UK-based PI on a project with which I have been involved during the past year, on alcohol, development and poverty in the Western Cape, as well as with my UCT colleague Prof Sue Parnell, also on sabbatical in the UK over the same period, who is the South African-based PI on this project.
In June I also met with a colleague from Durham University, Dr Ann Le Mare, with whom I developed proposals related to my work on craft during 2010 and 2011. We had an enormously useful one-day meeting in York, in which we planned future collaborative research. Dr Le Mare hopes to travel to Cape Town in 2013 for this research collaboration, and we will be submitting a funding proposal to the Visiting Scholar Fund at UCT to support this visit.
The main aims for the sabbatical period were (a) the theoretical development of my current research project on the cultural economies of craft in Cape Town, and (b) preparation of publications from primary research conducted during 2010 and 2011. In my application I indicated that I aimed to produce three publications during this time. In the event, I was able to prepare six papers during this period, three of which emerged directly from my research on the cultural economies of craft. The other three papers were outcomes of additional research projects, including the project on alcohol consumption in the Western Cape, in which I have been involved in recent years. The six papers are currently (September 2012) at various stages in the review and submission process, as detailed in the following section.
To conclude, the funding provided by the Urban Studies Foundation was of immense value in freeing me from teaching and administration duties in order to focus on research and writing, and in providing opportunities to make new connections and re-establish old ones. I was grateful too for the speed with which decisions were made regarding the awarding of the money and the ease with which the fellowship was administered. Spending an extended period of time abroad was not always easy but proved to be highly productive, and I returned with a fresh perspective on both my research and my teaching. I certainly gained a great deal, both personally and professionally, from the experience of living and working in Cambridge and London, and am grateful to have had the chance to do so.
Outputs (at September 2012)

Published
Daya, Shari and Authar, Raksha (2012)
Self, others and objects in an ‘alternative economy’: personal narratives from the Heiveld
Rooibos Cooperative. Geoforum 43 (5). 885-893.
This paper, published in a recent issue of Geoforum , explores the personal narratives of 12 women members of the Heiveld, a rooibos producer cooperative in the Northern Cape province of
South Africa. It contributes to the emerging literature in geography and allied disciplines on
‘alternative economies’. The narratives from our interviewees suggest that the literature’s focus on

human development is important; however, they also foreground a theme that tends to be neglected in the alternative economies literature – that of consumption and the possession of material things. We argue therefore that more attention should be paid to the ways in which tangible, material things help constitute the more commonly researched, intangible benefits of alternative economic participation, such as empowerment, dignity, knowledge-sharing and care for others.

Submitted to top-rated journals
Daya, Shari and Wilkins, Nicola (accepted subject to revisions)
The body, the shelter and the shebeen: affective geographies of homelessness in South
Africa.
This paper explores the experiences of homelessness among a group of men in a homeless shelter in Cape Town. Following a recent call for more embodied, affective, emotional and relational geographies of homelessness, we explore how two of our interviewees engage with the different spaces that shape their sense of belonging. The consumption of alcohol emerges from this research as an important factor in understanding the contradictory behaviours and feelings in these men’s daily lives. Damaging their bodies and social relationships, alcohol nonetheless provides a vital sense of belonging by facilitating both a sense of self and connections with others.
Daya, Shari (revision in progress)
Words and worlds: the place of language in non-representational theory.
This paper engages with the burgeoning literature in the social sciences, and especially in geography, on materiality and the vitality of things. It explores the place of language within this literature, specifically its construction as inadequate to an apprehension of the material. Through an analysis of Edmund de Waal’s recent memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes , a text that is explicitly concerned with material things but also with the nature and possibilities of narrative, the paper argues that language can only be thought of as falling short of the material realm if one’s operating theory of language is itself already limited and reductive. It calls for more attentive geographical studies of how the discursive and the material together generate the ‘unfolding’ of the world.
Daya, Shari (under review)
The matter of sociality: how beadwork makes modern Africans.
Most research on African beadwork analyses artefacts in broadly semiotic terms, ‘reading’ the objects as signifiers of gender, ethnic or tribal identities, or of social rank. The kind of beadwork that has become ubiquitous in South African cities in recent years is not easily accommodated within these frameworks, and little research exists on these more modern artefacts. This paper takes inspiration from the emerging literature in material culture studies that conceptualises the power of things as lying less in their ability to refer to social structures and identities, and more in their capacity to generate them through physical encounter and interaction with humans.
Examining the material practices of production and exchange among a disparate group of market

traders in Cape Town, I suggest that contemporary beadwork plays an important role in creating, sustaining, renewing and transforming modern African identities and complex forms of sociality.
Lawhon, Mary; Herrick, Clare and Daya, Shari (under review)
Researching sensitive topics in African cities: reflections on alcohol research in Cape
Town.
Recent African urbanist scholarship has pointed to the need to delve deeper into our understanding of the everyday lived experiences. While this is essential for our understanding of
African cities, researching lived experiences is fraught with methodological and ethical challenges.
This paper is a reflection on conducting research on sensitive topics such as alcohol consumption, based on our experience of undertaking focus groups, interviews and ethnographic fieldwork with a range of individuals and communities in the Western Cape.

Under preparation, targeting top-rated journal
Daya, Shari
Bringing in the social: power and agency in the social enterprise craft sector.
This paper explores the social enterprise sector of the craft industry in South Africa. It argues that although there is growing interest in social enterprise from business and government, the literature on the topic neglects issues of power, identity and agency. Indeed, it seems to assume that social goals, such as those relating to ‘empowerment’, will be met if an organisation is commercially successful. Through an analysis of some of the power relationships in the craft industry, this paper suggests that craft producers can in fact be marginalised, patronised, and objectified by discourses and representations within the sector. It argues that greater attention must be paid to whether and how social enterprises fulfil their social goals.
This paper was presented at ‘Strategies to overcome poverty and inequality: Towards Carnegie
III’, UCT, 3-7 September 2012, and will be presented at the ‘2 nd Graduate School of Business
Conference on the Business of Social and Environmental Innovation: Informal Sector
Entrepreneurship and Social Entrepreneurship’, UCT, 22-23 October 2012. The paper will subsequently be revised and submitted to the target journal .
Shari Daya
University of Cape Town
September 2012