A one-day series of workshops, panels, and roundtables featuring local and regional students, faculty, staff, and community members. The event was hosted by the Miami University Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program.

Since the end of apartheid a new type of political movement has emerged in South African cities focused on rights to public water and electricity. As extensions of the struggle for legal rights to residence in cities, we should not be surprised by such sustained protests against the commodification and privatization of water and electricity. However, the history of these protest movements and their economic justice agenda are more accurately tied to an even earlier history of protests by rural and urban women. After all, in many ways the conditions that shaped black women's precarious access to land, cattle, housing, livelihoods, and cross-generational stability despite migration toward job centers still obtains. Drawing on the writings of Sindiwe Magona, Lauretta Ncgobo, and Njabulo Ndebele, this presentation examines the political and social strategies and the ethical precepts which black women as they survived migration and intervened in the shape and structure of the forces of involuntary migration and the construction of rural and urban spaces.