[Sugarman] Minutes of Wits Meeting : 21 November 2013

[Keith Breckenridge]

The meeting was held at WISER between 12 and 1pm; about a dozen people
attended.

We discussed the arrangements for the overall project and the specific
plans that emerged from the Michigan meeting (most of which are explained
in my earlier email<http://lists.wits.ac.za/pipermail/sugarman/2013-November/000060.html>.)
We reviewed the topics covered by the proposal, and there was general
agreement that the themes were wide ranging and usefully interwoven.   (The
proposal is available here:
http://lists.wits.ac.za/pipermail/sugarman/2013-October/000055.html)

Chris Lee, Dilip Menon and Eric Worby agreed to be co-opted on to the
organising committee for the first workshop on producing theory from the
South.   Their involvements will differ -- some purely bibliographical,
others more administrative on the Wits side.  Laura Phillips was also
co-opted to assist in linking this collaboration with other institutions
and people.

In the open discussion, Dilip Menon expressed an interest in exploring the
intellectual ground that isn't well investigated by the different fields of
Area Studies, looking for gaps between African Studies and South Asian
Studies.  He has a particular interest in pushing our scholarly enquiry
beyond the short temporal frame provided by the colonial and the
post-colonial.   Mehita Iqani expressed a strong interest in the
"interrogating neo-liberalism" theme, and pointed out that there is an
interesting body of work in Media Studies on this issue (I forget the
journal you had in mInd, Mehita, please remind me).  Eric Worby is keen to
involve Wits Post-Grads in the Humanities in the events of the workshop,
and we agreed that he should be involved in the programming committee.  And
there was widespread agreement  -- from Catherine Burns,  Nafisa Essop
Sheik,  Dilip Menon -- that the proposal allows us to think very broadly
about participants, in South Africa, the US and elsewhere.

I will send another email pointing people to the online archives of this
list (which already has many useful resources) and encouraging people on
both sides of the collaboration to invite people who may have an interest
in the problems we will be pursuing.

If I've missed something important, please let me know.

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
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