Doctoral candidate in project 10 - Kingdom Fungai Karuwo

My name is Kingdom Fungai Karuwo. I am joining the HEALENAE Doctoral Network as a doctoral researcher under the co-supervision of Professor Ann Cassiman at KU Leuven and Professor Ruth Jane Prince at the University of Oslo. My intellectual formation has moved through Development Studies, African Studies, Anthropology and Sociology, and Development and Cooperation — disciplines sharpened, in turn, by professional practice within the United Nations and research institutions. Across these vantage points, one question has proven persistent:  How do people sustain social worlds, livelihoods, and senses of belonging amid transformations imposed upon them and beyond their power to arrest? 

My doctoral research, The Environments They Remember: Slow Violence, Temporal Displacement, and the Intergenerational Inheritance of Harm in Mining Communities, turns this question toward mining-affected communities in Zimbabwe. I ask what it means to remain rooted in a place even as the environment that once rendered it familiar is slowly unmade. Harm, here, rarely announces itself as a spectacle. It accretes — in diminished rivers, exhausted soils, altered livelihoods, and the long accumulation of exposure across bodies and generations.

At the centre of this inquiry lies memory, itself an archive of environmental change. Older generations may recall rivers that once ran clear, soils that yielded; the young inherit these only as narrated remnant, knowing the altered landscape simply as the world as it is. Out of this asymmetry I develop the concept of temporal displacement: the condition of remaining geographically at home while growing estranged, across time, from the ecological world that once made home recognisable.

Displacement of this kind, however, need not be only geographical as is commonly understood. Chronic illness offers a cognate case: one may remain, in the most literal sense, at home in one's own body, and yet grow steadily unfamiliar with it, as accumulated harm; biological, yet also psychological — reshapes what that body once was into something no longer fully recognisable to the self who inhabits it. Slow violence does not confine itself to landscapes; it inscribes itself onto bodies too, and its harms are not only material but intangible; felt in the widening gap between who one remembers being and who one has, almost imperceptibly, become. Temporal displacement, then, names a condition broader than any single field site: an estrangement that can unfold in environment and in bodies alike, without either ever ceasing, in the narrowest sense, to be home.

Through ethnographic fieldwork in Zimbabwe's mining-affected communities, I will trace this widening distance between remembrance and inheritance — attending as closely to what has been lost as to how communities narrate, inhabit, and resist that loss. It is, in the end, one more attempt to ask how people fashion lives amid transformations they neither chose nor could arrest — and how they hold on, regardless, to a sense of home and definitions of it across time.

More personally, I love chess! A game or two will always make the conversations remarkable!