Browsing by Author "Mihalopoulos, Kyra"

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    The persisting conditions of ‘Day Zero’: How chronic crisis challenges media narratives about the Cape Town water crisis
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2021-03) Mihalopoulos, Kyra; Robins, Steven Lance; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Sociology and Social Anthropology.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The Cape Town water crisis of 2017 to 2019 became national and international news due to the risk of a major metropole running out of water. What this portrayal neglects to include is the fact that for a significant proportion of households in the city, ‘Day Zero’ (the day the taps would run dry) was already a daily reality long before the onset of the drought. Traditional media, such as newspapers, radio broadcasts, and television broadcasts, framed the water crisis as the‘great equaliser’. However, when you begin to unpack this narrative and the media coverage around the crisis, the idea of it being a ‘great equaliser’quickly unravels. Developments prior to and during the drought reveals infrastructural inequalities and conditions of living that Vigh (2008) refers to as ‘chronic crisis’. That is, for the vast majority of the poor in Cape Town’s informal settlements, the water ‘crisis’ is experienced not as a singular, extraordinary event, but rather as an enduring, chronic condition which is experienced on a daily basis. Regarded as ‘ordinary suffering’ and unspectacular ‘slow violence’, these communities often have to perpetually struggle to access a basic means of survival under circumstances rendered invisible to a wider middle-class public. In this light, this project aims to show that how we understand the experience of the drought is multifaceted and tied to historic injustice, the presence and absence of infrastructure, and what role media–both traditional and social–played in the crisis. It seeks to show that the narrative of a ‘great equaliser’should be problematized as crisis is not experienced homogenously. This study collected data by conducting in-person formal and informal interviews, doing participant observation, and analysing media documentation to construct an ethnography to highlight the varied experiences of Cape Town’s ‘Day Zero’. In the context of the Kildare Road spring, I highlight how the crisis did not start, nor end, with the ‘Day Zero’ campaign. Rather, it started long before,and is still being experienced.