[Sugarman] Minutes of Wits Meeting : 21 November 2013

[Mehita Iqani]

Thanks to Keith for the summary and to everyone for the meeting earlier.

My two-cents: I work on "consumer culture and the media" and would be keen to get involved in the "interrogating neoliberalism" theme from that perspective. The journal I mentioned is 'Consumption, Markets & Culture', which is an interdisciplinary, not a media studies, journal. I've already discussed with the editor a potential special issue on media and consumption in/and the global south, so there is some possibility for dovetailing Sugarman activities into that possibility later on. Definitely not next year though, I think 2015 would be more realistic. I also mentioned that there might be an opportunity to dovetail a workshop (again, in 2015?) on the Neoliberalism theme with work done by the Critical Research in Consumer Culture network, which held a South-South Consumption Studies Workshop this year at Wits (and there might be a follow up in Sao Paulo in 2014).

All the best

Mehita

From: Keith Breckenridge [mailto:keith at breckenridge.org.za]
Sent: 21 November 2013 02:36 PM
To: sugarman at lists.wits.ac.za
Subject: [Sugarman] Minutes of Wits Meeting : 21 November 2013

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<http://wiser.wits.ac.za>
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