Paula Meth
Biographic Data
| ID | 1448246 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Paula Meth |
| GIVEN NAMES | Paula |
| FAMILY NAME | Meth |
| SIGNATURE | METH P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Sheffield |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2273-5134 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 299 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Youth, Work and Housing: A Nexus of Precarity
Globally, young people’s efforts to secure access to work and housing are characterised by considerable precarity and often impede youth transitions. Contributing to debates in housing studies, labour and youth geographies, this paper conceptualises ‘a nexus of precarity’, analysing young people’s experiences of unattainable and poorly paid work alongside their often unaffordable and poor-quality housing in Ethiopia and South Africa. Policy, part…
Not entirely displacement: Conceptualizing relocation in Ethiopia and South Africa as “disruptive re-placement”
Residents’ lived experiences of movement into state directed housing frequently evidence contradictory outcomes. Often, movement is articulated in terms of displacement, noting its profoundly negative outcomes. However, displacement does not always fully capture contradictions, particularly where housing programmes form part of wider developmental strategies, themselves ambiguous in practice. Adopting a relational analysis, the paper argues for c…
(Im)mobility at the margins: Low-income households’ experiences of peripheral resettlement in India and South Africa
Expanded state-subsidised housing programmes in middle-income countries raise questions about the displacement and socio-spatial marginalisation of poor households. Examining these questions through people’s experiences of resettlement indicates the importance of mobility to their lives. Drawing on a mixed-method comparative study of Ahmedabad, Chennai and Johannesburg, we ask: How does the relocation of low-income households to urban peripheries…
Navigating the challenges of fieldwork and childcare: Revisiting ‘muddy glee’
This commentary emerges from our collective interest in, and reflections on, the multiple ways in which parents working within Development Geography in UK academia negotiate the complexities of combining periods of overseas fieldwork with family life. Here, we bring our varied experiences of navigating these challenges (emotional, bureaucratic, and practical) into conversation with Bracken and Mawdsley's ‘Muddy glee,’ highlighting the ways in whi…
Gendered Infrastructural Citizenship: Shared Sanitation Facilities in Quarry Road West Informal Settlement, Durban, South Africa
Conceptualizing African Urban Peripheries
Recent years have seen a rising interest in peri-urban spaces, urban frontiers and new suburbanisms, including in African contexts. However, given the scale of urban growth and the extreme diversity of formations emerging on the geographical edges of African city-regions, a deeper understanding is needed of the drivers of peripheral urbanisms and the lived experiences of urban change in these spaces. Based on a comparative research project in Sou…
Marginalised formalisation’: An analysis of the in/formal binary through shifting policy and everyday experiences of ‘poor’ housing in South Africa
This paper contributes to global debates over the in/formal binary through an analysis of the South African state’s provision of formal housing to residents previously living informally or insecurely. Focusing on cases within the cities of eThekwini and Msunduzi, it uses a mix of empirical data from housing beneficiaries and government officials alongside an analysis of documents to examine the processes and experiences of housing formalisation. …
Childcare and academia: An intervention
In this Viewpoint, we engage with the everyday politics of academia – specifically, how caring for young children continues to affect academic work and career trajectories in ways that could be better mitigated. This viewpoint piece collates the personal accounts of six development scholars who discuss their experiences of negotiating both academia and childcare, covering fieldwork, funding, career trajectories, sharing parental responsibilities …
Gendered il/legalities of housing formalisation in India and South Africa
Urban interventions, such as state-led housing provision in India and South Africa, establish new legal landscapes for urban residents (formerly slum/informal dwellers), who become home owners, legal occupiers of spaces, ratespayers and visible citizens although not in ways that are necessarily contingent. These material-legal processes are also acutely gendered underscoring wider calls for a feminist approach to legal geographies. Informed by a …
Men’s experiences of state sponsored housing in South Africa: Emerging issues and key questions
In South African cities, millions of men and women living informally are being rehoused through the state-directed provision of formal houses to poor beneficiaries. This intervention is reshaping their lives, and innovatively targets beneficiaries with dependents, where over half are women. Aiming to redress the historical context of gendered inequality in housing ownership and house the very poor, these policy and implementation changes necessar…
New housing/new crime? Changes in safety, governance and everyday incivilities for residents relocated from informal to formal housing at Hammond’s Farm, eThekwini
New state-subsidised ‘RDP’ housing in South Africa aims to provide former informally-housed residents with a better quality of life, stronger community and decreased levels of crime. Despite the state’s ambitions, this process is highly contradictory, increases in safety occurring alongside rising incivilities and tensions. This paper contributes to an emerging set of debates on the socio-political outcomes of state-led housing interventions in t…
Informal Housing, Gender, Crime and Violence: The Role of Design in Urban South Africa
Violence and crime in countries such as South Africa are shaped by deep socio-economic inequalities; however, the spatial designs of urban areas and housing also play a role, but often in differing ways. There is little qualitatively derived research published on the design realities of poor informal housing where the hyper-permeability of housing structures directly shapes residents' experiences of crime, often in gendered ways. This paper speak…
Millennium development goals and urban informal settlements: Unintended consequences
The Millennium Development Goal focusing on improving the lives of slum dwellers is arguably a significant and worthy global objective. Yet its intentions may have unintended consequences, as they may parallel and unwittingly justify state-sponsored evictions of slum dwellers and their settlements. This Viewpoint examines the intersections between the intentions of the MDG and the aesthetic values of some states as well as intersections with busi…
Committees, witchdoctors and the ‘mother-body’: Everyday politics in the township of Cato Manor, South Africa
I Don't Like My Children to Grow up in this Bad Area: Parental Anxieties about Living in Informal Settlements
A growing body of research on informal settlements considers the experiences of children, but seldom outlines the daily parenting experiences of adult men and women. At the same time, policy on housing inSouthAfrica points to the ways in which the 'eradication' of informal housing will help provide children with better futures. This article explores the social relation of parenting within an informal settlement inDurban,SouthAfrica, bearing in mi…
Crime Management and Urban Governance: Everyday Interconnections in South Africa
Interconnections between crime prevention and local governance practices are increasingly evident through the involvement of local partnerships and local government in crime prevention. The microlocal workings and the political implications of these interconnections have, however, received far less attention. This paper uses a case study from South Africa to understand the microlocal experiences of the interconnections between what is described h…
Unsettling Insurgency: Reflections on Women's Insurgent Practices in South Africa
This paper builds on work which celebrates insurgent planning practices, and which recognises the possibilities for repression inherent within these. Calling for more attention to the practice of so-called repressive insurgencies, it uses two case studies from Durban, South Africa to unsettle some assumptions arguably embedded in notions of “anti-democratic” or repressive insurgency. The cases tell the stories of marginalised women who participat…
Marginalised men’s emotions: Politics and place
Researching men: The Politics and Possibilities of a Qualitative Mixed-Methods Approach
Explicit consideration of the nature and workings of different qualitative methods for researching men are relatively uncommon within geography. Building on work which explores ethnographies, ethical concerns and questions about fieldwork, this paper focuses on a qualitative mixed-methods approach and explores the possibilities and politics of this approach in researching men. Drawing on key debates within men's studies regarding the contingency …
Using diaries to understand women’s responses to crime and violence
This paper describes the use of solicited diaries in research on crime and violence in a South African community, drawing on material collected from 15 diary writers. The paper explains the broader aims of the research, describes the circumstances of the diary writers, and relates some of the stories told by these women in their diaries. The importance of triangulation is discussed and, in this particular case, illustrated through a combination o…
Using diaries to understand women's responses to crime and violence
Violent research: The ethics and emotions of doing research with women in South Africa
The twin concepts of ethics and emotions are used in this paper to examine experiences of doing research on the topic of violence. Ethical questions are of significance when carrying out research which is potentially distressing to the research participant. Through field experiences in South Africa the author argues, however, that despite the growing concern among geographers over the ethical dimensions of their work, the implementation of ethica…
Rethinking the ‘domus’ in domestic violence: Homelessness, space and domestic violence in South Africa
Entries and omissions: Using Solicited Diaries in Geographical Research
This paper explores the use of personal solicited diaries as a qualitative research tool within social geography. Diaries were used with women from South Africa who recorded their experiences of violence over a period of one month. The paper analyses diaries in terms of their longitudinal benefits, their socially constituted nature, their use in conjunction with interviews and finally their potential for empowerment. The paper concludes with a di…
Rethinking the dumping grounds: Questioning assumptions about movement into the relocation settlement of Bilanyoni
Historical accounts of relocation settlements in South Africa have emphasized processes of dispossession in the creation of these settlements. This paper considers other related histories of movement into relocation settlements as evidence of seldom considered contradictory and ambiguous experiences around movement and attachment to place — hence encouraging a rethink of the laden term ‘the dumping grounds’
Entries and omissions: Using Solicited Diaries in Geographical Research
This paper explores the use of personal solicited diaries as a qualitative research tool within social geography. Diaries were used with women from South Africa who recorded their experiences of violence over a period of one month. The paper analyses diaries in terms of their longitudinal benefits, their socially constituted nature, their use in conjunction with interviews and finally their potential for empowerment. The paper concludes with a di…
Rethinking the ‘domus’ in domestic violence: Homelessness, space and domestic violence in South Africa
Researching men: The Politics and Possibilities of a Qualitative Mixed-Methods Approach
Explicit consideration of the nature and workings of different qualitative methods for researching men are relatively uncommon within geography. Building on work which explores ethnographies, ethical concerns and questions about fieldwork, this paper focuses on a qualitative mixed-methods approach and explores the possibilities and politics of this approach in researching men. Drawing on key debates within men's studies regarding the contingency …
Marginalised men’s emotions: Politics and place
Not entirely displacement: Conceptualizing relocation in Ethiopia and South Africa as “disruptive re-placement”
Residents’ lived experiences of movement into state directed housing frequently evidence contradictory outcomes. Often, movement is articulated in terms of displacement, noting its profoundly negative outcomes. However, displacement does not always fully capture contradictions, particularly where housing programmes form part of wider developmental strategies, themselves ambiguous in practice. Adopting a relational analysis, the paper argues for c…
(Im)mobility at the margins: Low-income households’ experiences of peripheral resettlement in India and South Africa
Expanded state-subsidised housing programmes in middle-income countries raise questions about the displacement and socio-spatial marginalisation of poor households. Examining these questions through people’s experiences of resettlement indicates the importance of mobility to their lives. Drawing on a mixed-method comparative study of Ahmedabad, Chennai and Johannesburg, we ask: How does the relocation of low-income households to urban peripheries…
Conceptualizing African Urban Peripheries
Recent years have seen a rising interest in peri-urban spaces, urban frontiers and new suburbanisms, including in African contexts. However, given the scale of urban growth and the extreme diversity of formations emerging on the geographical edges of African city-regions, a deeper understanding is needed of the drivers of peripheral urbanisms and the lived experiences of urban change in these spaces. Based on a comparative research project in Sou…
New housing/new crime? Changes in safety, governance and everyday incivilities for residents relocated from informal to formal housing at Hammond’s Farm, eThekwini
New state-subsidised ‘RDP’ housing in South Africa aims to provide former informally-housed residents with a better quality of life, stronger community and decreased levels of crime. Despite the state’s ambitions, this process is highly contradictory, increases in safety occurring alongside rising incivilities and tensions. This paper contributes to an emerging set of debates on the socio-political outcomes of state-led housing interventions in t…
Marginalised formalisation’: An analysis of the in/formal binary through shifting policy and everyday experiences of ‘poor’ housing in South Africa
This paper contributes to global debates over the in/formal binary through an analysis of the South African state’s provision of formal housing to residents previously living informally or insecurely. Focusing on cases within the cities of eThekwini and Msunduzi, it uses a mix of empirical data from housing beneficiaries and government officials alongside an analysis of documents to examine the processes and experiences of housing formalisation. …
Gendered il/legalities of housing formalisation in India and South Africa
Urban interventions, such as state-led housing provision in India and South Africa, establish new legal landscapes for urban residents (formerly slum/informal dwellers), who become home owners, legal occupiers of spaces, ratespayers and visible citizens although not in ways that are necessarily contingent. These material-legal processes are also acutely gendered underscoring wider calls for a feminist approach to legal geographies. Informed by a …
Violent research: The ethics and emotions of doing research with women in South Africa
The twin concepts of ethics and emotions are used in this paper to examine experiences of doing research on the topic of violence. Ethical questions are of significance when carrying out research which is potentially distressing to the research participant. Through field experiences in South Africa the author argues, however, that despite the growing concern among geographers over the ethical dimensions of their work, the implementation of ethica…
Millennium development goals and urban informal settlements: Unintended consequences
The Millennium Development Goal focusing on improving the lives of slum dwellers is arguably a significant and worthy global objective. Yet its intentions may have unintended consequences, as they may parallel and unwittingly justify state-sponsored evictions of slum dwellers and their settlements. This Viewpoint examines the intersections between the intentions of the MDG and the aesthetic values of some states as well as intersections with busi…
Committees, witchdoctors and the ‘mother-body’: Everyday politics in the township of Cato Manor, South Africa
Using diaries to understand women’s responses to crime and violence
This paper describes the use of solicited diaries in research on crime and violence in a South African community, drawing on material collected from 15 diary writers. The paper explains the broader aims of the research, describes the circumstances of the diary writers, and relates some of the stories told by these women in their diaries. The importance of triangulation is discussed and, in this particular case, illustrated through a combination o…
Navigating the challenges of fieldwork and childcare: Revisiting ‘muddy glee’
This commentary emerges from our collective interest in, and reflections on, the multiple ways in which parents working within Development Geography in UK academia negotiate the complexities of combining periods of overseas fieldwork with family life. Here, we bring our varied experiences of navigating these challenges (emotional, bureaucratic, and practical) into conversation with Bracken and Mawdsley's ‘Muddy glee,’ highlighting the ways in whi…
Childcare and academia: An intervention
In this Viewpoint, we engage with the everyday politics of academia – specifically, how caring for young children continues to affect academic work and career trajectories in ways that could be better mitigated. This viewpoint piece collates the personal accounts of six development scholars who discuss their experiences of negotiating both academia and childcare, covering fieldwork, funding, career trajectories, sharing parental responsibilities …
I Don't Like My Children to Grow up in this Bad Area: Parental Anxieties about Living in Informal Settlements
A growing body of research on informal settlements considers the experiences of children, but seldom outlines the daily parenting experiences of adult men and women. At the same time, policy on housing inSouthAfrica points to the ways in which the 'eradication' of informal housing will help provide children with better futures. This article explores the social relation of parenting within an informal settlement inDurban,SouthAfrica, bearing in mi…
Crime Management and Urban Governance: Everyday Interconnections in South Africa
Interconnections between crime prevention and local governance practices are increasingly evident through the involvement of local partnerships and local government in crime prevention. The microlocal workings and the political implications of these interconnections have, however, received far less attention. This paper uses a case study from South Africa to understand the microlocal experiences of the interconnections between what is described h…
Men’s experiences of state sponsored housing in South Africa: Emerging issues and key questions
In South African cities, millions of men and women living informally are being rehoused through the state-directed provision of formal houses to poor beneficiaries. This intervention is reshaping their lives, and innovatively targets beneficiaries with dependents, where over half are women. Aiming to redress the historical context of gendered inequality in housing ownership and house the very poor, these policy and implementation changes necessar…
Representation and formalisation: A settlement of contradictions
Rethinking the dumping grounds: Questioning assumptions about movement into the relocation settlement of Bilanyoni
Historical accounts of relocation settlements in South Africa have emphasized processes of dispossession in the creation of these settlements. This paper considers other related histories of movement into relocation settlements as evidence of seldom considered contradictory and ambiguous experiences around movement and attachment to place — hence encouraging a rethink of the laden term ‘the dumping grounds’
Violent research: The ethics and emotions of doing research with women in South Africa
The twin concepts of ethics and emotions are used in this paper to examine experiences of doing research on the topic of violence. Ethical questions are of significance when carrying out research which is potentially distressing to the research participant. Through field experiences in South Africa the author argues, however, that despite the growing concern among geographers over the ethical dimensions of their work, the implementation of ethica…
Rethinking the ‘domus’ in domestic violence: Homelessness, space and domestic violence in South Africa
Entries and omissions: Using Solicited Diaries in Geographical Research
This paper explores the use of personal solicited diaries as a qualitative research tool within social geography. Diaries were used with women from South Africa who recorded their experiences of violence over a period of one month. The paper analyses diaries in terms of their longitudinal benefits, their socially constituted nature, their use in conjunction with interviews and finally their potential for empowerment. The paper concludes with a di…
Using diaries to understand women’s responses to crime and violence
This paper describes the use of solicited diaries in research on crime and violence in a South African community, drawing on material collected from 15 diary writers. The paper explains the broader aims of the research, describes the circumstances of the diary writers, and relates some of the stories told by these women in their diaries. The importance of triangulation is discussed and, in this particular case, illustrated through a combination o…
Using diaries to understand women's responses to crime and violence
Marginalised men’s emotions: Politics and place
Researching men: The Politics and Possibilities of a Qualitative Mixed-Methods Approach
Explicit consideration of the nature and workings of different qualitative methods for researching men are relatively uncommon within geography. Building on work which explores ethnographies, ethical concerns and questions about fieldwork, this paper focuses on a qualitative mixed-methods approach and explores the possibilities and politics of this approach in researching men. Drawing on key debates within men's studies regarding the contingency …
Unsettling Insurgency: Reflections on Women's Insurgent Practices in South Africa
This paper builds on work which celebrates insurgent planning practices, and which recognises the possibilities for repression inherent within these. Calling for more attention to the practice of so-called repressive insurgencies, it uses two case studies from Durban, South Africa to unsettle some assumptions arguably embedded in notions of “anti-democratic” or repressive insurgency. The cases tell the stories of marginalised women who participat…
Crime Management and Urban Governance: Everyday Interconnections in South Africa
Interconnections between crime prevention and local governance practices are increasingly evident through the involvement of local partnerships and local government in crime prevention. The microlocal workings and the political implications of these interconnections have, however, received far less attention. This paper uses a case study from South Africa to understand the microlocal experiences of the interconnections between what is described h…
Millennium development goals and urban informal settlements: Unintended consequences
The Millennium Development Goal focusing on improving the lives of slum dwellers is arguably a significant and worthy global objective. Yet its intentions may have unintended consequences, as they may parallel and unwittingly justify state-sponsored evictions of slum dwellers and their settlements. This Viewpoint examines the intersections between the intentions of the MDG and the aesthetic values of some states as well as intersections with busi…
Committees, witchdoctors and the ‘mother-body’: Everyday politics in the township of Cato Manor, South Africa
I Don't Like My Children to Grow up in this Bad Area: Parental Anxieties about Living in Informal Settlements
A growing body of research on informal settlements considers the experiences of children, but seldom outlines the daily parenting experiences of adult men and women. At the same time, policy on housing inSouthAfrica points to the ways in which the 'eradication' of informal housing will help provide children with better futures. This article explores the social relation of parenting within an informal settlement inDurban,SouthAfrica, bearing in mi…
Informal Housing, Gender, Crime and Violence: The Role of Design in Urban South Africa
Violence and crime in countries such as South Africa are shaped by deep socio-economic inequalities; however, the spatial designs of urban areas and housing also play a role, but often in differing ways. There is little qualitatively derived research published on the design realities of poor informal housing where the hyper-permeability of housing structures directly shapes residents' experiences of crime, often in gendered ways. This paper speak…
Men’s experiences of state sponsored housing in South Africa: Emerging issues and key questions
In South African cities, millions of men and women living informally are being rehoused through the state-directed provision of formal houses to poor beneficiaries. This intervention is reshaping their lives, and innovatively targets beneficiaries with dependents, where over half are women. Aiming to redress the historical context of gendered inequality in housing ownership and house the very poor, these policy and implementation changes necessar…
New housing/new crime? Changes in safety, governance and everyday incivilities for residents relocated from informal to formal housing at Hammond’s Farm, eThekwini
New state-subsidised ‘RDP’ housing in South Africa aims to provide former informally-housed residents with a better quality of life, stronger community and decreased levels of crime. Despite the state’s ambitions, this process is highly contradictory, increases in safety occurring alongside rising incivilities and tensions. This paper contributes to an emerging set of debates on the socio-political outcomes of state-led housing interventions in t…
Gendered il/legalities of housing formalisation in India and South Africa
Urban interventions, such as state-led housing provision in India and South Africa, establish new legal landscapes for urban residents (formerly slum/informal dwellers), who become home owners, legal occupiers of spaces, ratespayers and visible citizens although not in ways that are necessarily contingent. These material-legal processes are also acutely gendered underscoring wider calls for a feminist approach to legal geographies. Informed by a …
Marginalised formalisation’: An analysis of the in/formal binary through shifting policy and everyday experiences of ‘poor’ housing in South Africa
This paper contributes to global debates over the in/formal binary through an analysis of the South African state’s provision of formal housing to residents previously living informally or insecurely. Focusing on cases within the cities of eThekwini and Msunduzi, it uses a mix of empirical data from housing beneficiaries and government officials alongside an analysis of documents to examine the processes and experiences of housing formalisation. …
Childcare and academia: An intervention
In this Viewpoint, we engage with the everyday politics of academia – specifically, how caring for young children continues to affect academic work and career trajectories in ways that could be better mitigated. This viewpoint piece collates the personal accounts of six development scholars who discuss their experiences of negotiating both academia and childcare, covering fieldwork, funding, career trajectories, sharing parental responsibilities …
Gendered Infrastructural Citizenship: Shared Sanitation Facilities in Quarry Road West Informal Settlement, Durban, South Africa
Conceptualizing African Urban Peripheries
Recent years have seen a rising interest in peri-urban spaces, urban frontiers and new suburbanisms, including in African contexts. However, given the scale of urban growth and the extreme diversity of formations emerging on the geographical edges of African city-regions, a deeper understanding is needed of the drivers of peripheral urbanisms and the lived experiences of urban change in these spaces. Based on a comparative research project in Sou…
Not entirely displacement: Conceptualizing relocation in Ethiopia and South Africa as “disruptive re-placement”
Residents’ lived experiences of movement into state directed housing frequently evidence contradictory outcomes. Often, movement is articulated in terms of displacement, noting its profoundly negative outcomes. However, displacement does not always fully capture contradictions, particularly where housing programmes form part of wider developmental strategies, themselves ambiguous in practice. Adopting a relational analysis, the paper argues for c…
(Im)mobility at the margins: Low-income households’ experiences of peripheral resettlement in India and South Africa
Expanded state-subsidised housing programmes in middle-income countries raise questions about the displacement and socio-spatial marginalisation of poor households. Examining these questions through people’s experiences of resettlement indicates the importance of mobility to their lives. Drawing on a mixed-method comparative study of Ahmedabad, Chennai and Johannesburg, we ask: How does the relocation of low-income households to urban peripheries…
Navigating the challenges of fieldwork and childcare: Revisiting ‘muddy glee’
This commentary emerges from our collective interest in, and reflections on, the multiple ways in which parents working within Development Geography in UK academia negotiate the complexities of combining periods of overseas fieldwork with family life. Here, we bring our varied experiences of navigating these challenges (emotional, bureaucratic, and practical) into conversation with Bracken and Mawdsley's ‘Muddy glee,’ highlighting the ways in whi…
Sociology (22 works) · Political science (20 works) · Geography (13 works) · Urban and Rural Development Challenges (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Politics (10 works) · Economic growth (9 works) · Economics (9 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Gender Studies (7 works)