Photo-elicitation and the voiceless: Narrating the “lived experiences” perspective of informal street food vendors in Khayelitsha, Cape Town

Abstract

This research delves into the symbolic spaces and everyday practices of street food vendors in Khayelitsha, Cape Town - specifically, how traders interact and negotiate their agency within food systems of the poor and marginalised. A key objective for this study is to gain insight into street food vendors’ understanding of the right to food and what it means for them as food system actors. Taking on a gendered lens, findings speak to informal traders existing in a complex space - caught somewhere between exclusionary urban politics, and waiting for the state to address the many governance and political bottlenecks that define the complex environment in which they operate. By focusing on symbolic experiences and actions of vendors in Khayelitsha, the study unveils the often invisible, ordinary, everyday realities of the vendors, through which ‘social capital’ is produced. The irrelevance of an actual constitutionally codified right to food for informality is also revealed through the qualitative essence of informal food traders’ experiences of navigating a livelihood in the fluid and unstable context of the informal economy.