Early April 2019, the Malawi Hub visited the Northern region of Malawi to establish new connections and partnerships. The Hub held meetings with Mzuzu University and the University of Livingstonia (UNILIA). At UNILIA we met with the Vice Chancellor and the university registrar, who showed interest in joining the SFA Network. We also met with Moses Mkandawire, director of Church and Society, which is a governance desk for the Synod of Livingstonia of the CCAP Church. All the meetings centred on introducing the network and extending invitations to join. Our engagements in the “green city” of Mzuzu further involved our hub member Elson Kambalu of ArtHouse Africa, who took photos for an essay on Public Spaces.

A final activity was a visit to Chintheche on the beautiful sandy shores of Lake Malawi, where we did more documentation of public spaces. Most importantly, Dr. Pullanikkatil and Dr. Moyo made final edits on the Faldherbia Albida paper (Unravelling indigenous knowledge using the Msangu (Faidherbia albida) tree in Malawi: through the voice of farmers. The Scientific African) which was submitted for publication later that day.

In Malawi, climate change, the ongoing impacts of British colonialism on economic and political geographies, and cross-border tensions in East Africa have intersected to produce a series of crises for communities. Working with Dr. Moyo (LUANAR), Abundance, and Kei Otsuki (Utrecht University), GES researchers Deborah Dixon, Phil Nicholson, and Brian Barrett developed a project on ‘Visualising Geoviolence’ that aims to map how this complex intersection of physical and social factors emerges over time and space, how it is experienced as a form of violence upon individual bodies and community infrastructures, and how it is negotiated and responded to. The project focused on areas such as Lake Chilwa, where irrigation, fertilisers, sand mining and reed-bed removal have profoundly impacted the now shallow, saline lake.

In January 2018, the Malawi hub conducted a workshop with the theme “Exploring the role of Arts in Development Projects” at the Child Legacy Community premises in Lilongwe. The workshop was a rare opportunity for artists and development practitioners to work together on issues concerning sustainability and development by thinking outside the box and coming up with new and creative ideas to solve sustainability challenges. For more information about this event, read SFA Malawi’s RA Stewart Paul’s reflection on the day here. Building on this workshop and activities happening in other SFA Hubs, Elson Kambalu of ArtHouse Africa directed and produced a short documentary.

Co-authored by Dr. Deepa Pullanikkatil (SFA co-director), Dr. Boyson Moyo (Malawi hub director) and Dr. Brian Barret (Glasgow hub director), this paper – available here – outlines a project drawing together an artist working on creative GIS, a geomatics scholar, an NGO leader, a rural geographer and soil scientist, an environmental geochemist, and a political geographer. With a shared interest in the social and physical processes affecting people’s lives in Malawi, and the possibilities for interdisciplinary collaboration, the team engaged in practice-based mapping of their data sources and respective methodologies. StoryMaps – an emerging genre of GIS-based software that can integrate different kinds of geo-located data, such as salinity measures, photographs and videos, with online video steaming services (e.g. YouTube) and data sources (e.g. Google Earth) – allows for new narratives of people and place.