The WISER Podcast
Welcome to The WISER Podcast! Published weekly, the podcast features conversations, talks and audio-essays from WISER.
You can also subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. A complete list of all past episodes is at https://witswiser.podbean.com. For podcast transcripts, click here. For more WISER research, click here.
Podcasts
Today we release the next episode of The WISER Podcast entitled Regions2050: mobility, extraction, circulation.
This is Part One of a two-part series.
The podcast is a conversation between Achille Mbembe (WISER) and Mpho Matsipa (Architecture and Planning/WISER) exploring the dynamics of mobility, circulation and extraction and reflecting on the new pathways of regionalisation in an African continent characterised — and sometimes saddled with — multiple and porous borders.
The members of the WISER Podcast team are Sarah Nuttall, Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, Isabel Hofmeyr, Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Mpho Matsipa, Achille Mbembe and Bronwyn Kotzen.
Today we release the next episode of The WISER Podcast entitled Lost Books: Narratives Of Absent Texts. Focusing especially on books by women, Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Sarah Nuttall, Isabel Hofmeyr and Confidence Joseph offer an array of engaging short narratives on books lost, hidden, dreamt, thrown overboard or killed on social media. The episode is dedicated to all those students, staff and workers, and the manuscripts, books, films and artefacts, impacted or destroyed by the recent fires at the University of Cape Town.
Find our WISER Transcripts here -
https://wiser.wits.ac.za/thewisertranscripts
The members of the WISER Podcast team are Sarah Nuttall, Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, Isabel Hofmeyr, Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Mpho Matsipa, Achille Mbembe and Bronwyn Kotzen.
Today we release Part Two of The WISER Podcast’s next mini-series, The Futures of the Constitution. It draws on research by WISER Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, on continuities between South Africa’s apartheid past and its democratic present, under the framework of “the new apartheid”.
In this podcast, he continues to explore the South African Constitution’s conception of justice, this time through a comparative lens. He then examines links between the Constitution’s conception of justice and the persistent injustices of South Africa’s present and considers how we might frame a set of future-oriented debates in relation to both.
Today we also release our second batch of WISER Transcripts, making four more of our podcasts available in textual form for ease of citation and reference. Curated and designed by Tinashe Mushakavanhu, the transcripts can be found at this link: https://wiser.wits.ac.za/thewisertranscripts
The members of the WISER Podcast team are Sarah Nuttall, Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, Isabel Hofmeyr, Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Mpho Matsipa, Achille Mbembe and Bronwyn Kotzen.
Today we release Part One of The WISER Podcast’s next mini-series, The Futures of the Constitution. It draws on research by WiSER Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, on continuities between South Africa’s apartheid past and its democratic present, under the framework of “the new apartheid”.
In this podcast, Sizwe and Tshepo Madlingozi, Director and Associate Professor at the Centre for Applied Legal Studies, critique the Preamble of South Africa's Constitution. They suggest that the Preamble espouses a limited conception of justice and explore this in relation to persistent inequality in South Africa’s present.
The members of the WISER Podcast team are Sarah Nuttall, Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, Isabel Hofmeyr, Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Mpho Matsipa, Achille Mbembe and Bronwyn Kotzen.
Today we release Part Two of our next mini-series of The WISER Podcast. This two-part series takes as its theme Travelling Technology. It draws on research led by Prof Richard Rottenburg at WISER spanning 15 African countries and focusing on large technical systems as well as stand-alone devices to reflect on the amalgamation of techno-science with social, political, juridical and cultural elements in concrete African contexts beyond the modernist binary of nature and culture.
In this podcast, after a brief introduction by Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh (WISER) we hear from Katrien Pype (KU Leuven) on “radio phonie” in Kinshasa, and then Sara Geenen with Simon Marijse (U Antwerp) tell the story of the “scaphandre” on the Congolese Shabunda river. The two detailed studies show moments of translation in the circulation of technologies and challenge the difference between innovation, tweaking and improvisation.
The members of the WISER Podcast team are Sarah Nuttall, Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, Isabel Hofmeyr, Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Mpho Matsipa, Achille Mbembe and Bronwyn Kotzen.
Today we release Part One of our next mini-series of The WISER Podcast. This two-part series takes as its theme Travelling Technology. It draws on research spanning 15 African countries and focusing on various technical assemblages to reflect on the amalgamation of techno-science with social, political, juridical and cultural elements in concrete African contexts beyond the modernist binary of nature and culture.
In today's podcast, we hear from Richard Rottenburg (WISER) on the key intellectual dimensions of this ongoing project, followed by Faeeza Ballim (UJ) on Eskom and Medupi power stations in South Africa, and Iginio Gagliardone (Wits) on the politics of the Internet in Ethiopia.
The members of the WISER Podcast team are Sarah Nuttall, Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, Mpho Matsipa, Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Achille Mbembe, Bronwyn Kotzen and Isabel Hofmeyr.
Today we release Part 2 of our mini-series on Unsettlement. The concept explores the predicament of those who are stranded in states of indefinite displacement, deferred arrival and recurrent departure around the world today. It has emerged from a collaboration between The Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University, Africana Studies at Barnard College in New York and WISER.
In this episode, we hear four further interventions on how we might think about unsettlement. Listen to Rosalind Morris (Columbia), Johannes Machinya (WISER), Sarah Nuttall (WISER) and Achille Mbembe (WISER).
The members of the WISER Podcast team are Sarah Nuttall, Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, Mpho Matsipa, Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Achille Mbembe, Bronwyn Kotzen and Isabel Hofmeyr.
Today we launch our 2021 Season of The WISER Podcast. This year, from March to September, we will run concept-based podcasts, each in two parts over two weeks. Our first edition of The WISER Podcast features the theme of Unsettlement, and we approach our topic from 8 different angles.
The topic is born of a collaboration between The Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University, Africana Studies at Barnard College in New York and WISER.
Listen in to find out what the term Unsettlement draws into focus in an original way. Speakers in Part 1, released today are Rosalind Morris (Columbia University), who introduces the theme, Isabel Hofmeyr (Wits/WISER), Yvette Christianse (Barnard College) and Mpho Matsipa (Wits/WISER).
Today we also launch The WISER Transcripts, compiled and curated by Tinashe Mushakavanhu (WISER). Here, we make available all editions of The WISER Podcast in textual form, for ease of access, reference and citation. Please see our first four releases at this link: https://wiser.wits.ac.za/thewisertranscripts.
The members of the WISER Podcast team are Sarah Nuttall, Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Bronwyn Kotzen, Isabel Hofmeyr, Achille Mbembe and Mpho Matsipa.
Today we release Season Two of The WISER Podcast Series. The series launched in April of this year, partly in response to lockdown conditions and with the intention to profile the work that WISER researchers do, individually and in conversation with each other and with the global academic community.
We have produced 21 podcasts in total, profiling the work of 30 WISER researchers. Across the series, we have reached nearly 10 000 listeners from the African continent and around the world.
In 2021, we will develop new formats and a wider range of interventions. We will release written versions of the podcasts in the form of e-books and offline publications, as public archives of the audio-work done and for ease of reference and citation.
We are proud of the range of interdisciplinary and intergenerational work that we do at WISER and we warmly invite you to listen with us and offer us feedback, as we draw the work of the seminar room into the public domain.
The members of the Podcast Group at WISER are Sarah Nuttall, Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, Isabel Hofmeyr, Bronwyn Kotzen, Mpho Matsipa, Achille Mbembe and Tinashe Mushakavanhu.
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