AGITATION is a conference and exhibition, convened and curated by members of Eco-Imagining, a collaborative research project, and the Origins Centre, University of the Witwatersrand.

Agitation as a conference opens at 14:00 on Wednesday 1 October and closes with lunch on Friday 3 October. Over these days, we will consider food, water and energy insecurities, NGO interventions and their successes, limits and challenges, rights to food, water and energy, and ways to address difficulties in realising these rights.

Climate change is a major systems-level agitation, disrupting everyday life at multiple levels. The conference title Agitation was selected to highlight dramatic environmental changes which we are experiencing, and their impact on the availability of and access to key resources, particularly of water, energy, and food. At the same time, Agitation is a call for responsive and responsible action. The uncertainty of climate, basic services and resources, lives and livelihoods all ask us to take seriously our moral responsibility to the planet and each other. The ways in which unpredictability impacts unevenly, widening inequality, places an even heavier obligation on scientists and civil actors alike.   

The conference is paired with an exhibition, also Agitation, on full display until 10 October. A mural guides participants to the exhibition and conference venue. Within the Origins Centre, we include drawings, prints, sculptures, videos, banners, and posters developed by researchers, community artists and others in Durban, Mdantsane (Eastern Cape), Mankweng (Limpopo) and Johannesburg. These works are displayed along with artworks from Hannelie Warrington-Coetzee and Christine Dixie, both of whom have collaborated with the researchers. All these works converse with and sometimes contradict archaeological, material culture and ethnographic objects. These objects enhance our engagement with questions of resource scarcity, complexity, deep history, and loss.

Eco-Imagining, formally entitled Ecological Community Engagements: Imagining Sustainability and the Water-Energy-Food Nexus in Urban South African Environments, is led by Lenore Manderson at University of the Witwatersrand and Eileen Moyer at University of Amsterdam, was funded by the NRF and the Dutch Research Foundation (NWO) as part of a special initiative on the Water-Energy-Food Nexus. The project also includes colleagues from the University of Fort Hare, University of Limpopo, and Rhodes University, together with non-government organisations RULIV, Gender CC, The People’s Pantry, and Maker’s Valley, and for Agitation, with the Origins Centre. Participants include stakeholders from various government departments and specific entities, from non-profit organisations, and other civil society actors, whose policies and program interests extend across the fields of interest of water, energy and food, and around poverty, its alleviation, inequality, and resistance.  

We look forward to your participation