Seminars

Land, debt and trust in the making of biometric capitalism

Thursday, 24 August, 2023 - 12:30
Ataya, HUMA Interdisciplinary Seminar Series, University of Cape Town

"The girl is not consulted" : Abduction marriages and gendered traditions of violence

Monday, 21 August, 2023 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Sean
Redding

This is an on-line seminarPlease, register for the session in advance of the meeting at : 

The Land and its people : The South African ‘Land Question’ and the Post-Apartheid Political Order

Monday, 7 August, 2023 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Andries
du Toit

This is a hybrid seminar.  We will meet in the WISER seminar room and host participants on-line.  On-line participants should, please, regis

INVITE | Heated Conversations by Debjani Ganguly | 2 August | 10am (Johannesburg time)

Wednesday, 2 August, 2023 - 10:00

You are warmly invited to the next session of WiSER’s online seminar seri

Platform economies: Beyond the North-South divide

Thursday, 8 June, 2023 - 10:00
Presented by: 
Janet
Roitman

Platform economies are depicted as the foundation for a new era of economic production. This transpires through the incorporation of digital technologies and algorithmic operations into the heart of economic and financial practices.

Nets of Social Motion: Black Christianity in South African History

Monday, 5 June, 2023 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Natasha
Erlank

This is partly a paper about Christianity and its influence on black family life in the first half of the twentieth century, but more centrally about the conceptualization of social change in South African history.

Center-led Fiscal Reform and the Rise of Regional Power Blocs in a Limpopo Municipality, 1980-2020

Monday, 22 May, 2023 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Joel
Pearson

This article considers the changing role of a local municipality in the political economy of the Waterberg region of Limpopo.

“Open Doors” and “Stranger Natives”: white supremacy, racialisation and governing im/mobilities in African Trusts

Monday, 15 May, 2023 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Polly
Pallister-Wilkins

This paper explores how processes of white supremacy and racialisation coalesce in governing differential im/mobilities in mid-Twentieth Century African Trusts administered by the British under the League of Nations Mandate System and later UN Trusteeship Council.

Regulatory efforts to reign in digital credit: Case study of evolving regulation in Kenya

Monday, 8 May, 2023 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Keren Weitzberg &
Radha Upadhyaya

This paper charts the rise of digital credit in Kenya. It highlights the data on evidence on the problems of digital credit, including the high cost of credit, overindebtedness, and unfair blacklisting.

“We Will Not Follow You Like Sheep”: Literacy, Officialdom, and Generational Politics in the Digital Age

Monday, 24 April, 2023 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Clovis
Bergere

This paper examines digital media contents created by young Guineans on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube which all foreground literacy as a site of generational contention and struggle.

An air of legality – legalization under conditions of rightlessness in Indonesia

Monday, 3 April, 2023 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Christian
Lund

Land rights are uneven in Indonesia as they favor government over citizens as rights subjects.

Heated Conversations announcement

Thursday, 30 March, 2023 - 18:00

Labour recruiters as Lumpen-brokers

Monday, 27 March, 2023 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Enrique
Martino

Please register for the Zoom meeting here.

Looking below racism. Renegotiating authority at school through challenging the policing of hairstyles, an inside view on a girls-led protest in Soweto.

Monday, 20 March, 2023 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Jeanne
Bouyat

The policing of Black girls' hairstyles at school has become increasingly publicly politicized and primarily analysed through the lenses of institutional racism, and a lesser extend its intersections with sexism and religious discrimination, in post-segregationist education systems (in the Un

The (un) making of electoral transparency through technology: The 2017 Kenyan presidential election controversy

Monday, 13 March, 2023 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Cecilia
Passanti
& Marie-Emmanuelle
Pommerolle

Researching Africa and the Offshore World

Monday, 6 March, 2023 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Ricardo
Soares de Oliveira

One of the key features of today's global economy is an ‘offshore world’ of financial structures, institutions and techniques designed to provide secrecy, asset protection and tax exemption.

The Memory Flâneur in Teju Cole’s Open City

Monday, 20 February, 2023 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Sakiru
Adebayo

In this paper, I engage with Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin’s idea of the flâneur in order to articulate my own concept of the memory flâneur.

Publics, Counterpublics, Black Publics: The Growth of a Negritude Public in the Twentieth Century

Monday, 7 November, 2022 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Merve
Fejzula

This paper employs the history of negritude’s intellectual and institutional expansion across the twentieth century, to argue for a new conceptualization of public spheres.

On Being Touched by Boeremusiek: Listening as Haptic Event

Monday, 31 October, 2022 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Willemien
Froneman

Grounded in Aristotle, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida and Peter Sloterdijk’s reflections on the synesthesia of touch, the haptic sense as “corpus,” and the philosophical possibility of the gestation of a bodily apparatus via the ear, this article takes shape around a thought ex

Architecture and History in a Refugee Camp

Monday, 24 October, 2022 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Anooradha
Siddiqi

I present material from the introduction to my book manuscript, Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (to be published by Duke University Press), which analyzes the history, visual rhetoric, and spatial politics of the Dadaab refugee camps in Northeastern

INVITE | Debating Decolonization as a Theory of Knowledge

Thursday, 20 October, 2022 - 18:00

WiSER warmly invites you to the next session in our series on the futures of decolonizati

Acknowledging Natural Punishment

Monday, 17 October, 2022 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Raff
Donelson

A natural punishment occurs when an agent commits a wrong, and then, as a result of this wrong, faces a significant harm that is not caused by anyone seeking retribution against the agent for their wrong.

Colonial Carnivalesque: Transgressing Normativities and Gender Performance in Mozambique and Angola

Monday, 3 October, 2022 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Caio
Simoes de Araujo

Gender as a concept has been increasingly engaged in Southern African history.

INVITE | Technicisation and (De)colonisation | 29 Sept | 1pm

Thursday, 29 September, 2022 - 13:00

WISER warmly invites you to a discussion on

Mandela's Nurse

Monday, 26 September, 2022 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Casey
Golomski

This chapter from a creative nonfiction book in progress tells a story of Nelson Mandela’s Robben Island prison nurse in her own words. Mrs. N.Z. was the first sister of rank hired to administer care to prisoners there, including Mr.

The History of Black Lawyers in South Africa and Beyond II

Thursday, 22 September, 2022 - 18:00

WiSER warmly invites you to an online discussion on

INVITE | Lunchtime seminar by Ramesh Srinivasan | 22 Sept | 12noon

Thursday, 22 September, 2022 - 12:00

WiSER invites you to a lunchtime seminar (with lunch) on

Dissonant intimacies: South-South asymmetries, coloniality and failure

Monday, 19 September, 2022 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Srila
Roy

I will present some work in progress on the possibilities and limits of creating new epistemic infrastructures and orientations which are invested in South-South knowledge-production and collaborations.

Imported Black Books, Radical Undesirability, and Comparative Reading Under Apartheid

Monday, 5 September, 2022 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Stephane
Robolin

Whereas scholarship has generally cast the narrative of apartheid-era censorship in understandably national terms, this essay asks: What would an international account of apartheid censorship look like? And what are its implications?

Anti-colonial resistance in South Africa and Israel/Palestine: comparative dimensions

Monday, 29 August, 2022 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Ran
Greenstein

Based on a newly-published book, the paper highlights themes drawn from a historical overview of resistance politics in South Africa and Israel/Palestine.

The Bitter Aloe Project: Applying Advanced Machine Learning to the Truth and Reconciliation Archive

Monday, 22 August, 2022 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Steve
Davis

The current moment in the digital humanities marks an inflection point as third wave machine learning transforms the legibility of archives. The Bitter Aloe Project is an experimental intervention into new methods of reading archives via the automation of structured data extraction.

A History of Black Lawyers in South Africa

Wednesday, 3 August, 2022 - 09:00

WiSER, 6th Floor, Richard Ward Building, East Campus

Finding Nemo: Energy, Justice and Transition

Monday, 1 August, 2022 - 16:00
Presented by: 
Upamanyu Pablo
Mukherjee

Please register in advance of the meeting on Zoom at

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