Undergraduate Fellow
Lita is a climate justice organiser pursuing a double major in Environmental Studies and Peace, Conflict & Justice, with a minor in Environmental Geography. She was raised in Nairobi, Kenya. Having been a JHI Scholar-in-Residence and an UofT Excellence award recipient, she has developed a passion for researching the environmental history, grassroots organising and geographies of care in Eastern and Southern Africa. A violinist for over 15 years, Lita is also interested in exploring how music can be a tool for community building and social justice.
Fellowship Project: Who Do You Trust in the Ruins of Extraction? Post-Apartheid Dystopia and the Struggle for Urban Belonging
This project explores how South African music captures the dystopian realities and resistance rooted in post-mining landscapes. Drawing on geography and musicology, I aim to make the connection between cultural production and urban marginalisation to examine how artists such as Hugh Masekela, Miriam Makeba, and Letta Mbulu turn fragmented landscapes into sonic archives of spatial injustice. Using policy and archival sources, my research traces how post-apartheid development narratives collide with lived realities in settlements like Soweto, Tudor Shaft and other townships where music is used to reclaim fractured urban space.