Navigating the crisis: University of Zimbabwe students’ campus experiences during Zimbabwe’s multi-layered crisis

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article deploys the concept of kujingirisa to unpack the lived experiences of university students during a period of unprecedented socio-economic and political crisis in Zimbabwe. I particularly examine the existential challenges faced by the students and how they creatively navigated everyday constraints on campus. Central to this article are the multiple ways through which students negotiated and navigated the country’s multi-layered crisis. I argue that the concept of kujingirisa as a form of social navigation enables us to understand students’ agency, resourcefulness and multiple ways of getting by and making do which made everyday life on campus possible. Through and in-depth examination of university students’ everyday life on campus, the article shows how particular forms of being and subjectivities emerge at the intersection of the tactics and strategies devised by students to get by on campus. Findings revealed that for students’ tactics of survival to succeed, one had to be socially embedded on and off campus. As such, students with strong social capital were able to tactically manoeuvre the vagaries of the crisis. Interestingly, some of the strategies devised by the students bordered on the margins of legality and formality.