Permanent Exhibition: ‘Facing the Heat in South Africa’ Photography Exhibition

 

VENUE: Faculty of Humanities
South West Engineering Building
Ground Floor, Room 18B
Braamfontein Campus East
Johannesburg (JNB), South Africa

This exhibition utilised photography to document 10 years of climate extremes and resistance in South Africa. It maps climate risks we are facing and provides clues for transformative adaptation as part of deep just transitions in communities, workplaces , sectors and in the country. The recent floods and extreme winds and rainfall in parts of the country are a continuity of the 10 year pattern documented in this exhibition. Climate change and injustice is part of lived reality and cannot be denied . This exhibition calls for a societal driven national climate risk assessment and response strategy and a Climate Emergency Social Contract to phase out fossil fuels and accelerate South Africa’s just transition. Climate Justice resistance is showing a way forward if we act now. Take your family, friends and colleagues to this exhibition and also buy the book in leading book stores to deepen your understanding of climate challenges.

 

 

 

 

Inaugural Lecture of Professor Vishwas Satgar

The Coloniality of the Planetary Crisis – Possible Emancipatory Politics and Futures.

The discipline of International Relations has not kept its promise of securing world peace and neither can it grasp the destruction of the planetary commons. It is also steeped in a Western conception of ‘Westphalian’ politics such that it thinks the ‘international’ in ways that perpetuates imperial asymmetries. This critical and decolonial lecture will highlight scalar levels of crisis that take us beyond the ‘national’ and  ‘global’ and will challenge the normalising of planetary crisis by failing power structures and Anthropocene discourses. To meet the challenges of planetary crisis the ‘political’ has to be rethought. This lecture will  highlight the urgency of emancipatory political imaginaries and praxis to secure planetary life.

Dr. Vishwas Satgar is a Professor of International Relations, editor of the democratic Marxism series and principal investigator for Emancipatory Futures Studies in the Anthropocene.

COPAC Activist School

COPAC hosted an activist school, 5-9 July 2026, under the theme, Transformative Activism from below to accelerate the deep just transition: Building the food sovereignty commons in communities, villages, towns, cities and the country. 

The school brought together grassroots activists, farm workers and small food producers from across the country. Grounded in transformative pedagogy, it explored themes such as capitalism and the poly-crisis, transformative politics for the deep just transition and systemic alternatives like food sovereignty and SAFSC’s triple transition.

 

Launch of the COPAC Food Sovereignty Hub

Launch of Food Sovereignty Hub and Activist Training Centre at Wits

“Today was one of those days when life sparkles and you know that after ten years of consistent transformative activism at Wits, change is happening!

We launched the Cooperative and Policy Alternative Centre Food Sovereignty Hub and Activist Training Centre with activists from Gauteng communities, the Climate Justice Charter Movement and the South African Food Sovereignty Campaign. This is the second hub at Wits and will be the backbone for all our agroecology gardens and forests. It will also be a space for emancipatory pedagogy, zero-input cost agroecology farming research and larger institutional transformation of Wits to accelerate the deep just transition.

These photos offer a glimpse into our agroecology garden, tool bank, seed bank, training space, water harvesting tanks, and more.

We also married this launch to a 4-day activist school and launched the Gauteng Food Sovereignty Forum and process.

I won’t see how the seed sharing, knowledge, and food sovereignty praxis travels into the years ahead and amongst generations. But knowing that foundations have been laid for this brings me immense joy.

Thanks to all the students, activists, academics, WCCO colleagues, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, and the EMS Foundation for your support over the years. Without you, we would not have come this far!”

Professor Vishwas Satgar

Solidarity Economy News Issue 27 – 2020

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Solidarity Economy News Issue 26 – 2020

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Solidarity Economy News Issue 25 – 2019

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Solidarity Economy News Issue 24 – 2019

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Solidarity Economy News Issue 23 – 2019

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Solidarity Economy News Issue 22 – 2019

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