62 FACULTY OF HUMANITIES ANNUAL REPORT 2021 Health, the Gauteng Provincial Department of Health, the inter-ministerial task team on Covid-19 vaccines and the Department of Higher Education. National Vaccine Monitoring Project This project is led by the SARCHi Chair in Social Change and is based on rapid-response community action research. By working with community activists our approach has been to monitor the Covid-19 vaccine rollout by locating logjams and trying to remove them, either locally, or by working with government. To date, the project has developed in three phases. The first was based in Protea South an informal settlement south of Johannesburg, where our researcher, Bongani Xezwi, who is also a local community leader identified significant access issues to vaccination, primarily the cost of travel to vaccination sites. A short report based on this research called for ‘getting vaccines to the people’, a call that the acting Minister of Health subsequently took up. We worked with the Gauteng Community Organizing Working Group to expand community action research nationally in the second phase. The National Monitoring Working Group, was established in eight provinces as an outreach project of the SARChI Chair in Social. Change. A week of action was organised to promote vaccine education. In the third stage, a relationship with the DG Murray Trust assisted us in obtaining a R100,000 grant for mobilization in Gauteng. Skills and trust gained through previous activism meant that the Gauteng teams were highly successful with mobilization and vaccination, and they are now in the process of transferring organizational knowledge. Credibility from the grant and mobilization has made it possible to strike up a working relationship with the Department of Health and also with the Clicks pharmacy chain. The project is ongoing, with new lessons learnt and more people vaccinated. We have also provided information and advice to the government’s Risk, Communications and Community Engagement Structures and to UNICEF. At a theoretical level, the project has highlighted, first, the weakness of the state. In particular, civil society and the DG Murray Trust has played a critical role in the rollout. Secondly, in poor communities, grassroots mobilization is far more successful than the department’s top-down approach. Thirdly, the government’s relationship with civil society has proved flimsy and although it has worked well with major donors, there is still a gap with activity on the ground, though this a problem the project has found ways to mitigate. Civil Society Projects The SARCHI Chair in Social Change was invited to participate in South Africa’s Country Study on responses to Covid-19, specifically its chapter on Civil Society. Under the auspices of this project, four projects were established to analyse the responses of organised labour, community organising, foreign migrants and universities. Rethinking democracy in a time of crisis Analysing voting and abstention in the 2021 local government elections The CSC undertook its fourth election exit poll in 2021. Due to Covid-19 the methodology of the project adapted. We conducted exit polls at four voting stations on Election Day. In addition, with support from the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, we were able to conduct a telephone survey with 3,900 voters and non-voters in five metropolitan municipalities: the City of Cape Town, the City of Johannesburg, the City of Tshwane, EThekwini and Nelson Mandela Bay. The initial findings were shared at webinar on 30 November 2021 and focused on trends in voter fluidity and abstention. Rethinking Democracy from Below Building on the critical work on post-apartheid democracy that the CSC has historically engaged in, we advanced this research further through the ‘Democracy from Below’ project, which has been funded by the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences. This project aims to overcome the exclusion of bodies of knowledge that exist in postcolonial societies about the conceptualisation, A central part of this project is to analyse how democracy is conceptualised in South Africa’s indigenous languages. Our contention is that in order to understand democracy from below it is essential to understand how democracy is expressed and conceptualised in language as well as embedded in everyday practice. The project embarked on an innovative mixed methods approach to address these research objectives and the emergent findings will be shared in a hybrid colloquium in February 2022. Looking ahead to 2022 All of the projects discussed above will continue into 2022. Further analysis of the UJ/HSRC Covid-19 Democracy survey data will be undertaken, which will yield interesting new insights. The Democracy From Below project will also commence filming a short film set in Duncan Village that will summarise the key themes from the project.
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