Sustainable Development with Michelle Pressend | Voices of Re-imagining Education
Channel: Ecoversities
Date: 2021-09-10

Michelle Pressend is currently a lecturer in Environmental Sociology at the University of Cape Town (UCT). She has worked as a researcher, policy analyst, and activist on environmental and socio-economic issues primarily within the non-governmental sector. She also served in national government during the World Summit on Sustainable Development. Her interests lie in re-thinking political economy of energy transitions in ways that will assist in responding in ‘new’ and relational ways to the multitude of crisis facing the world. She is completing her PhD in the Environmental Humanities South program. Her PhD project focuses on renewable energy transitions in South Africa. It engages in ontological questions to cultivate thinking and ways being beyond human mastery over nature and extractive logics within the renewable energy discourse and practices. Her research focus ways to create, re-member, reclaim and defend renewable energy transitions and energy needs with a focus on decoloniality and relationality.


Interest in the Philippi Horticultural Area (PHA) struggle
My work and interest in the PHA emerged in 2016 with inviting Nazeer Sonday, who has been centrally involved in PHA Food and Farming Campaign to participate in an Environmental Humanities South (EHS) course for the UCT’s Summer School. The title of our course was “Mining the Wild and the West Coast: ‘Development’ at what cost?” We invited the PHA Food and Farming Campaign because extractive intentions were happening close to home in Cape Town with the threats of silica mining in the area in addition to cement concrete ‘development’ imposed by the local and provincial government. Since then, we created reciprocal relationships to serve this struggle in relation to life.  The support and engagement with PHA struggle is also part of a Masters post-graduate course I convene where our learning and  unlearning is in service of what the soil and land is teaching and telling us about our way being in the world.

An article Michelle co-wrote with two of her Masters students and her friend Maya. The initial title was “If the Soil could Talk: The PHA Farmlands in Cape Town as a Site of Memory, Resistance and Renewal”. https://www.newframe.com/soil-and-land-in-the-philippi-horticultural-area/

The link to Michelle's profile on the UCT Sociology Department website http://www.sociology.uct.ac.za/michelle-pressend