WiSER WELCOMES YOU TO OUR 2016 PROGRAMME

~ WiSER WELCOMES YOU TO OUR 2016 PROGRAMME ~

The Institute has undergone a period of reflection. We are determined to respond creatively to the historic challenges put to us all by the student movement in 2015. We embrace the critique that has been made of South African institutions and we want to actively contribute to changing and re-inventing our University as we move forward into the year.

We plan to take up that challenge in a number of ways. While attending to our core mandate which is the production of outstanding research, we will also design and curate multiple intellectual events aimed at different publics.

Debates and events will be crafted in a way that enables us to respond to the call to ultimately change how we learn, teach and do research, and to consider alternative archives we can draw from in our attempt to make sense of our history, our present and our world.

We invite students and staff in all Faculties to draw on WiSER, its seminar room, its staff and visiting scholars and its large local and international networks, to bring into being a new kind of University, the University we want.

The Institute will be attuned to the ongoing events that mark our current moment, with the aim of assessing the extent to which these events are revelatory of deeper fractures and tensions in our society and in the world at large. 

Our ongoing experimentation with forms and format will be intensified – a necessary condition to keep our interdisciplinary space open, welcoming, respectful of multiple points of view and accessible to those who wish to engage with us.

In 2016 we plan to offer public conversations on topics as varied as:

• What Must Fall: On Destruction and Creation
• Public Writing: Limits and Possibilities
• Social Media and Digital Publics
• Journalist-Activists: Women, Media and Writing
• Girlhood 1976-2016
• Invisible Boundaries and Silent Transformations

We will shape, too, in discussion with our colleagues across the Faculty, conversations on securitization and financialisation, on histories of University education in South Africa, on the fall of the rand, the closure of Humanities faculties in Japan, on failing infrastructures, on the politics of health/care,  philanthropy and the University, on the future of critique, and on histories of race and forms of contemporary racism. We will respond to calls for a renewed University and social project in collaboration with colleagues in the Faculty.

Finally, we will offer public discussions of some of the most compelling books just published. All events begin in February.

We look forward to a collegial year ahead, and we urge you to be in touch with us about what you would like to see at WiSER this year.

Sarah Nuttall, Director