On Borderless Resistance and Nomadic Appetites: Weaving Decolonial (Dis)ruptures with Forced Migrants in South Africa

This dissertation explores how scholars, social actors, and forced migrants co-create initiatives for social justice in contemporary South Africa. It is grounded in the concept of critically engaged scholarship—a process of meaningful, reciprocal, and respectful collaboration between academia and marginalised communities. Responding to decolonial calls to unsettle how knowledge about forced migrants is cultivated and disseminated, the study analyses the narratives of twenty-two scholars and fourteen professionals—activists, advocates, and artists—who engaged in co-creation with forced migrant communities before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Framed through a decolonial feminist lens, the research foregrounds practices of care, addressing structural power imbalances while drawing on indigenous wisdoms such as ubuntu and corazonar. These frameworks reimagine knowledge-cultivation as spaces of dialogue, joy, and resistance. The analysis centres on two grassroots projects that use food as a means of co-creation: Food for Change, an online collaboration with eight forced migrant women, and The Chakalaka Sessions, a series of brunch gatherings with LGBTQI+ forced migrants. These initiatives demonstrate how cooking and eating generate visceral, sensorial experiences that—without overlooking hardship—foster belonging and collective joy. The embodied interaction of displaced people with food inspires the concept of pedagogies of craving: a framework that recognises forced migrants’ agency to learn, resist, and reimagine their hunger for justice, connection, and wellbeing. To conclude, the dissertation becomes a plea to weave structural calls to decolonise forced migration studies with collective efforts to enable critical and caring praxis rooted in the concerns and worldviews of forced migrants, challenging the gap between theory and lived reality.