[Sugarman] Getting started

[Anne Pitcher]

Hi Keith and everyone,
I like the following:
* Public spaces, informality and infrastructures in the desegregating (but
also RE-segregating) city
* Interrogating Neoliberalism as idea and explanation
* The Global South as an idea and a source of theory

The first topic is quite big and might merit a 2 week "course" that combined
perhaps lectures and site visits?? For that one, it might be useful to bring
studies of cities in SA and the literature on cities in the global south
into conversation with the more abstract theoretical literature in urban
studies that often treats cities in the north as the "norm" and everything
else as somehow deviant. It seems to me too that shrinking cities like
Detroit with all of its challenges providing health care, education, public
transportation, affordable housing might have something to learn from cities
in the south and their residents.

Neoliberalism and the Global South as ideas and explanations could be
usefully combinedŠ.Neoliberalism seems to me a tired topic but I'd be very
interested in how we might reconceptualize itŠ..

ap
Anne Pitcher
Professor of African Studies and Political Science
Associate Chair, African Studies
University of Michigan
4700 Haven Hall
505 S. State Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1045

From:  Kelly Gillespie <Kelly.Gillespie at wits.ac.za>
Date:  Wednesday, May 22, 2013 11:42 AM
To:  Keith Breckenridge <keith at breckenridge.org.za>,
"sugarman at lists.wits.ac.za" <sugarman at lists.wits.ac.za>
Subject:  Re: [Sugarman] Getting started

Hi Keith
 
Thanks for the email. I¹d be interested in:
* Public spaces, informality and infrastructures in the desegregating city
* The Global South as an idea and a source of theory
* Interrogating Neoliberalism as idea and explanation
Best,
 
Kelly
 
 

From: Keith Breckenridge [mailto:keith at breckenridge.org.za]
Sent: 22 May 2013 11:11 AM
To: sugarman at lists.wits.ac.za
Subject: [Sugarman] Getting started
 

Dear friends,

We should now begin to assemble the people, ideas and projects that will
carry this collaboration project for the next five years.   Our proposal is
clear about the themes we have in mind, and we had to adjust theme to meet
Mellon's objections, so we should try, very hard, to stick to them.   It
might be necessary, and interesting, to set up subsets within each of these
themes, narrow or expand them, but let's see how far we can get before we do
that.  

To begin with we have in mind workshops in Johannesburg in our late Summer
(timed to coincide with the Michigan Spring Break), and workshops in Ann
Arbor in the Fall, probably in September.  (The exact dates will have to be
worked out by the workshop committees).
Our first object should be to assemble committees around the themes we have
selected, and to do that the easiest way to begin will be for people to
indicate in which of the themes (at the bottom of this message) they'd be
interested to participate.

Please reply to the list (yes, that will generate a bit of mail) explaining
your interests.   For many people at both institutions this will be a useful
way to meet potential collaborators.  WISER and the ASC will use those
replies to assemble the committees.


WISER will support the project vigorously throughout, intellectually and
politically, but the committees will be responsible for at least the
following things (and I'm sure that there will be more):
1) Assembling a group of thirty interesting people, including about a dozen
who will fly from one side of the world to the other.   Most of those
people, but not all, should come from (or have very close links with)  Wits
or Michigan. 

2)  Chose readings, and works in progress from participants, to ensure that
the workshops produce new kinds of arguments and advance what we know and
think about each of the problems.

 

3)  Plan for publication of some of the work, ideally as a special edition
in one of the journals well matched to the problems.

 

4)  Think carefully through a program of events -- workshops, lectures,
exhibitions, visits -- that will (again) produce new and stronger insights
in to each problem area.

The proposed themes include:
*     Legacies of the imperial archive in post-colonial history, museums and
performance
*     Textual analysis, visual culture and the state in the making of
African publics
*     Interrogating Neoliberalism as idea and explanation
*     The politics of literacy, legibility and expert knowledges in Africa
*     Narrative, visual forms and biopolitics in the medical humanities
*     Cultural studies of science and technology in Africa
*     Intellectual property and curatorship in the digital humanities
*     Public spaces, informality and infrastructures in the desegregating
city
*     Vernacular literatures in the making of transnational movements and
subjects
*     The Global South as an idea and a source of theory
In addition, we have six themes mentioned in the proposal which we might
reasonably adapt or (ideally) join to the list above.
* The perils and possibilities of the digital humanities in Africa
* Social History after Edward Thompson
* The politics of heritage
*  Province and diaspora in African intellectual history
* The cultural politics of science and technology
* The cultural politics of performance and media
Many thanks, Keith

-- 

Keith Breckenridge  W I S E R - The Wits Institute for Social and Economic
Research, University of the Witwatersrand | Pbag 3, PO Wits,  Johannesburg,
South Africa, 2050 | Tel: +27117174272  | Fax: 0867654213 | Web:
wiser.wits.ac.za <http://wiser.wits.ac.za>

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