Conventional agriculture is a significant contributor to climate change, itself a socially driven ecological phenomenon. Until recently, however, social science has only just begun to engage intensely with the relationship between agriculture and global climate change and also on developing a viable sustainable response thereto. Following, this dissertation is premised on the understanding that sustainability requires an integration of human settlement patterns and sustainable agricultural practices. The dissertation uses ethnographic data about a permaculture community that practices such an integrated existence as a demonstration of permaculture's primary ethic to take responsibility for one's own existence. By asking what it means to say that the residents produce their own lives, the dissertation traces the theoretical and environmental context and structures that shape and are shaped by the intentional community that has formalised itself as a nonprofit organisation with an educational mandate. It explores how these two meet and provides a demonstration of the residents' community-based lifestyle as infused with aspirations to sustainability. This dissertation argues that the residents integrated human settlement patterns with sustainable agriculture through internalising design and building costs, and decentralising agricultural energetic inputs and outputs; and that these activities inserted an ethic of care at the core of the labour activities that constituted the everyday lives of residents. Further, that everyday life there exhibited an aspiration to living sustainably as the grassroots implementation of permaculture's pedagogical ethos of living an integrated existence as a positive response to climate change.

Includes bibliographical references. / The apartheid regime monopolised Afrikanerdom and institutionalised a specific Christian-nationalist Afrikaner identity. In post-apartheid South Africa this identity is no longer sanctioned by the state, and central elements of the identity have become illegitimate - most importantly the racial aspect. It is now up to the individual Afrikaner to negotiate this new space of identifications opened up by the end of apartheid order. Through different kinds of post-structuralist theory this thesis investigates some of the ways in which white Afrikaans-speakers position themselves in this new context. For some the new South Africa means exciting new possibilities but others experience it as a loss of freedom. The analysis pivots around the separatist 'volkstaat town' of Orania, where we find some of the central problems facing Afrikaners in general in terms of identity formation. It is argued that although Orania is radical in its claims, it is nonetheless one of the actors in the discursive battles of redefining Afrikaner identity. However, in the context of radical change and indecision, it is but one among many other attempts of redefining Afrikanerdom, many competing voices are heard and boundaries of identity are constantly contested and redrawn.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 67-71) / Experts in both the line-fisheries and fisheries science sectors specialise in tracking the movement of fish. The knowledge thus gained is integral to both fishing practice and fisheries research, yet the two have often been posited against each other on opposite sides of a spectrum. This dissertation problematises the modernist divide between two different ways of knowing the sea by looking at the points of partial connections between them. It aims to perhaps change the conversations about ways of knowing the sea, so that different sectors may be able to collaborate in research with a view towards positively influencing management decisions. Skipper's logbooks represent one of the primary points of connection between two of the pivotal actors in the line-fishery and offer insight into how communication between them is currently characterised.

This is a story about the struggle to become. In detailing the everyday lives of a group of young men from Khayelitsha, this story provides a context for (or entry point into) a wider discussion about a generation of youth who have been born into precarious social environments bereft of toeholds on the ladder to social adulthood. These youth must attempt to come of age and live respectable lives within a politically saturated predicament of bleak prospects and socio-economic exclusion. Yet this is not a story of despair, but one of aspiration. It is an ethnographic account of what Patrick Chabal refers to as ‘the politics of suffering and smiling’: a delineation of dream and drama (Gondola, 1999) amidst precarity. Despite exclusion from the realms of work and power these young men jettison despondence, drawing on association to partake in theatres of sociability that provide them with new contexts for social mobility. It is within these novel ‘hierarchies of being’ (Fuh, 2012) that they are able to position themselves as eminent social actors (i.e. the dream) by acquiring valuable social capital through strategic performances of ritual and repertoire (i.e. the drama). By presenting a detailed ethnographic description of the theatres of sociability in which these young men enact their incarnation of eminence, this dissertation contributes to an emerging perspective on the role of association in the social fantasies and possibilities of youth in precarious situations. In this regard the primary goal of this dissertation is to provide an optic into young people’s navigation of precarity, focusing on how they draw on association to reconfigure the geographies of exclusion and inclusion as they chart trajectories from social dereliction to psychosocial redemption.

This thesis follows the trajectory of donated breast milk as it leaves the dyadic mother-child relationship and is reconfigured through a series of transformations as bodily fluid, food, or medicine, depending on its context and the practices and discursive structures that seek to stabilise it as a particular object. Research was conducted between November 2014 and May 2015 in Cape Town, South Africa, including interviews with eleven donating women and eight weeks of participant observation at a level two maternity hospital. Donors use a rhetoric of 'saving babies', the effect of which is to deny the social tie between donor and recipient, or the potential for consubstantiation. Technologies play a crucial role in aiding the milk's transformation as it follows its trajectory through four nodal points (expressing and storage, pasteurisation and testing, packaging, and prescription) from donors' homes into the clinical setting, where it is framed in terms of safety and risk. Care enters into the constellation of relations that the milk ensures in unexpected ways and figures into the ways the milk is distributed in the hospital. Thus, donated breast milk shifts back and forth between being a bodily fluid, food, and medicine as its trajectory takes it through different constellations of saving, motherhood, technologies, care, safety, risk and medical authority. Different techniques foreground particular properties of the milk, as ultimately a set of moral decisions converges around saving, securing and sustaining life, materialising relationships and forming the milk form one entity into another and back again.

Bibliography: pages 179-183. / The Western Province Council of Churches (WPCC) is an ecumenical organisation based in Cape Town which promotes ideals of justice. From 1971 to 1995 it was a branch of the South African Council of Churches. The WPCC regards itself as a non-governmental organisation (NGO), and it is part of the NGO sector. It is funded by foreign donor agencies. This thesis studies the transformation of the WPCC as an organisation. This occurred as a direct result of the political transition in South Africa between 1990 and 1994. The main forces pressing change upon the WPCC during this period were: (i) its commitment to retain relevance in a changing political and social environment according to the principles of contextual theology; (ii) its need to adapt its mode of operation following considerable changes in the context of its work; and, (iii) the most powerful force, the influence of foreign funding agencies upon the nature of its activities.

Includes bibliography. / The objective of the study is to look at the social impact of development in relation to the relocation of people from an informal settlement to a formal settlement. This is demonstrated by illustrating how the context and flexibility of space influences the social and economic life of people. I show how the spatial flexibility with in, and the context of, an informal settlement enabled people to strategise around their living environment for their survival and well being. This contrasts with the disruption and disturbance to social and economic life in the formal settlement to which they were relocated. Evidence for my argument emerges from fieldwork carried out in the Western Cape between March and June 1997, firstly in the Marconi Beam informal settlement and secondly amongst the same people in their new formal settlement, Joe Slovo Park.

Includes bibliographical references / The interests of this thesis lie in the way in which solidarities are imagined within the South African feminist movement, one which is deeply conscious of the intersectional nature of gender and of the politics of sexuality as part and parcel of any analysis of social justice concerns. Theoretically informed by the work of Castells, Hassim, and other theorists exploring the dynamics of ‘movement building,’ the thesis focuses upon the discourses of solidarity used within one particular feminist organisation as it imagines new alliances. The organisation (Sonke Gender Justice Network) concentrates on the work of transforming violent hegemonic masculinities and plans to develop programmes working with new partners whose work focuses on justice and the lives of transgendered, lesbian, gay, and intersex people and communities (‘LGBTI’). The research draws on qualitative data drawn from interviews with Sonke staff and on the researcher’s own experience as an intern within the organisation, and analyses the material in order to explore the shape and implications of discourses on new alliances. The conclusions of the thesis speak to the complexities of imagining solidarity across differences of theory, identity, and experience.

This thesis attempts to investigate the topic of 'community' boxing gyms in the city of Cape Town. Broadly, it asks the question: what is it about boxing (and particularly boxing) that seems to dictate its co-occurrence with scenarios of social precarity? To answer this question, the study uses ethnographic methods to consider questions of socio-political history, precarity, embodiment, structural violence and physical violence. In the final analysis, the thesis argues for the clear benefit of having community boxing gyms in South African informal settlements or other typically violent locales. Research was conducted at two boxing gyms in the Greater Cape Town area.

Includes abstract. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 78-82). / This dissertation looks at the Marine Living Resources Act of 1998, the manner in which it has been conceptualised and the way that this has influenced its implementation. The focus of the investigation is the historic fishing village of Kassiesbaai on the Cape's south coast, looking at the ways in which discursive differences play out between resident longterm fishermen, the government officials who introduced the new legislation and those who are tasked with implementing it, and a group of marine fisheries experts and researchers who have, or have had, influence over the policy process. Eight weeks of fieldwork were undertaken in Kassiesbaai January to March 2007, focussing on the longterm resident fishermen and their families. Observation, interviews, informal discussions and everyday interaction were the primary methods of data collection, supplemented by archival and publications research. The second phase of research involved further follow-up visits and interviews and correspondence with relevant parties in Marine and Coastal Management and scientists working in the marine fisheries sector. It is argued that the failure in this instance of these three groups to successfully engage with one another over the issue of marine resource management stems from the lack of trust between these groups, exacerbated by the variant ways in which central issues are framed by each. The primary difference concerns the manner in which the ocean is imagined. A filrther discrepancy concerns temporality, the manner in which time is conceptualised and actions scheduled or expected due to respective conceptions. The third main discrepancy which affects the process is the values that are attributed to the ocean by those who use it and speak of it. T heritage status of Kassiesbaai is discussed, and the conclusion drawn that while it is imperative to value the historical nature of the village and its residents, plans for their present and future must not suffer for it. From here, the possibility of dialogue is investigated in order to plot a path towards successful socio-ecological development that will both protect the biological stability of the sea and the socia-economic well-being of the impoverished community of Kassiesbaai.