Fire literacies: reading fire risks and histories in an Anthropocene harmscape

This article explores how place-based learning and the development of socio-material place-literacies unfold in an urban settlement that regularly experiences runaway fires. We present a selection of verbal texts and photographs produced by community-based co-researchers in an informal settlement on the outskirts of the South African city of Cape Town. The assemblage of these multimodal texts reveals a harmscape in which fire is one of a complex set of intersecting and interoperating risks resulting from environmental, socio-historical, political and socio-economic factors. It also shows how those living within this harmscape have learned to read the traces of both future and past fires that are inscribed upon it. We suggest that attempts to reduce the harms caused by fire in such a space must recognise that it is not a simple problem of either the material or social environment, and that both its causes and consequences are multidimensional and extended. The development of such fire literacies is a powerful illustration of the pedagogical affect of repeated, ordinary, quotidian experience of place, where place has become an Anthropocene harmscape.