2015 Conferences

Commissioning the Present: Marikana and its Aftermath Since 2012, the Marikana Commission of Inquiry has been the site of struggles over the narratives, meanings, and implications of the events at Marikana. SERI and the History Workshop at the University of the Witwatersrand have convened this meeting to allow participants in the Commission and scholars to come together to consider the development of these narratives and stories, and to place both the massacre and the Commission in context. The three days of this convening will provide spaces for discussion and disagreement, and for the development of new political and social narratives.  naadira@seri-sa.org

¡°Unsettling Stories and Unstable Subjects¡± - SAHS

This biennial conference creates space for professional historians and post-graduate students, and cognate specialists like archivists, documentary film-makers and heritage practitioners. As the professional body for Southern Africa, this conference is not exclusive in terms of its theme. We strive to reflect the broad diversity of the discipline ¨C we are therefore open to individual papers or panels on unrelated themes. Themes discussed were:

• Disciplining the disciplines: changes, constraints and opportunities in a globalising academic world
• Raiders of the Lost Archive: archival survival in twenty first century Southern Africa
• The geists in our machines? New ways of thinking about industrialization
• The Anthropocene and the end of anthropocentric history?
• Festivals of History: exhibitions, museums, tours, war commemorations and public history
• Whither (or wither) Political History?
• Let a thousand flowers bloom? Reflections on Southern African historiography
• Business history in Africa: corporations, consumers, culprits, casualties and cronies
• Versions of Africa: victors, victims, vitality in socio-economic history
• Lives through the lens: history, photography and film
• Thirsting for the truth: water histories and watering history

ECAS - Paris Following on Lisbon in 2013, the Sixth European Conference on African Studies (ECAS-6) took place in Paris 8-10 July 2015 at the Sorbonne and at the ?cole pratique des hautes ¨¦tudes (EPHE). The co-organisers are IMAF (Institut des mondes africains) and LAM (Les Afriques dans le monde). The principal theme of ECAS 6 is Collective Mobilisations in Africa: Contestation, Resistance, Revolt.

¡®Safeguarding Democracy: Contests of Values and Interests¡¯

Establishing the South African Context: Meeting Academics and Activists

This project explores the question of how values are negotiated in different social and political contexts and what significance these have for knowledge production, for policy development and above all for safeguarding democracy. The case studies fall into two ¡®work packages¡¯, social movements and struggles for gender equality. The focus is on South Africa and Switzerland. Our view is that all scientific and humanities knowledge production requires an enabling environment that only a sustainable democracy can provide. The sub-questions of the study focus on the changes in the meaning of values that have taken place historically in each society. Are there non-negotiable values, and what are they, and how did they come about? In what ways do Swiss and South African democracies live up to the democratic values they promote, and under what circumstances do they not honour the values that they promote? In this second workshop of the project we hope that our invited guests will throw light on these questions.

In our studies so far, the project team has developed a methodology based upon a cross-cutting gaze. The idea of a regard crois¨¦, recognises that the location and standpoint of the ¡®other¡¯ is critical in fieldwork across boundaries. Drawing from a systematic qualitative analysis of the projects, papers and presentations produced by the project during the first phase, Professor Elisio Macamo found that the experience of joint research provided a useful framework for new comparative and interdisciplinary methodological perspectives. The regard crois¨¦ provided a key to a new comparative and interdisciplinary methodology. The second phase of the project aims to develop, advance and refine this methodology.

 The discussion focussed on the dynamics between the state and different groups in society in the negotiation and interpretation of values. 

The Underground Workshop

The workshop was attended by 16 scholars from Kenya, Mozambique, Egypt, Ivory Coast, Swaziland, and South Africa. They presented papers and interrogated the idea and practices of underground with a view to contribute to new understandings of the underground and more generally of liberation struggles across the continent.

The workshop further gained immensely from the addresses by Prof Raymond Suttner and Dr Sifiso Ndlovu. The two scholars dealt with the research methodologies, archival materials and the theoretical aspects of underground.