General seminar arrangements in 2025
- WISER's TRUST seminar is hosted on-line every Wednesday afternoon at 16:00 - 17:00 SA during the teaching semester | For information about WISER's PLANT LIVES seminar, please follow this link.
- Please register on Zoom in advance of the meeting on this link.
- Participants must should please read the paper below prior to the seminar, which is typically available by the Friday preceding the seminar.
Hospitality without hosts: Mobility and communities of convenience in Africa's Urban estuaries
New immigrants and the recently urbanised increasingly co-occupy estuarial zones
loosely structured by state social policy and hegemonic cultural norms. In these
zones, hyperdiversity, transience and transgressions are becoming the norm. Amid
the fluidity and fragmentation, novel modes of accommodation are emerging, double
helix like, with ever evolving forms of exclusion. Using examples drawn from rapidly
expanding African cities, this paper reveals cracks in the conceptual foundations on
which integration debates are normally premised. The first is a clear distinction
between hosts and guests. The second is migrants’ goal of joining a place bound
community. The article concludes by outlining a range of emerging communities of
convenience— tactical cosmopolitanism, a form of ethnic consociationalism and
market-based multi-culturalism—shaped more by pragmatic responses to quotidian
challenges in particular sites than political imagination or policy.
