Date of Award

Fall 12-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Political Science & Geography

Program/Concentration

International Studies

Committee Director

Erika Frydenlund

Committee Member

Shanaaz Hoosain

Committee Member

Jennifer N. Fish

Committee Member

Peter Schulman

Abstract

This dissertation asks how women in Khayelitsha make safety in a place where danger has become ordinary and where the afterlives of colonialism and apartheid still determine who waits, who walks, and who arrives home. What began as a study of risk and protection grew into an inquiry about time, dignity, and responsibility. I call the framework that emerged an ecology of violence—a way of seeing how harm gathers across generations and infrastructures, and how care, exhaustion, and survival intertwine within it.

In this ecology, violence is not a single act but a confluence of registers—slow, structural, colonial, and physical. It lingers in the hours women spend walking unlit paths, in the phone that rings unanswered at a police station, in the minutes lost to waiting for food or light. Safety, too, is not a guarantee granted by the state, but something made each day through collective practice. Women patrol, plan, bless, and coordinate; they measure danger in steps and minutes, and their maps become both protection and testimony.

Guided by decolonial, Indigenous, and Black feminist ethics, I gathered data alongside women through interviews, walk-alongs, and participatory visual methods to trace how governance takes shape through care. Their acts of attention—checking doors, watching corners, walking one another home—reveal not only the scaffolding of neglect but also a civic intelligence that redefines what it means to govern.

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DOI

10.25777/chyy-t530

ISBN

9798276040875

ORCID

0009-0004-2943-4336

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