2014 Conferences
Youth politics colloquium
The NRF Chair, Local Histories and Present Realities and the History Workshop hosted a colloquium on Youth Politics at Wits University in April 2014. The colloquium consisted of a small, in-depth three day gathering of presentations and group discussions on themes that have arisen from both popular and academic writing on youth politics in Africa. While the colloquium was dominated by South African Youth Politics, it also included a cross continent discussion around some of the many shifts in youth politics around Africa.Youth uprisings across the continent, most notably the Arab Spring, have challenged the general consensus that youth have abandoned politics. The uprisings draw attention to the ways in which youth navigate and negotiate repression, marginalisation and boredom, highlighting street politics and youth sub-cultures as the locus of political expression, largely outside of formal structures.
The Youth Politics colloquium provided a platform to explore and understand the spaces and modalities of youth politics and the role of youth as agents for social and political change from a comparative perspective. This was an opportunity for scholars and academics from the continent to explore both similarities and distinctions of youth in relation to politics, democracy and governance.
Some of the questions the workshop addressed in understanding the meaning of youth politics in South Africa and the continent at large included: What is the legacy of past discourses and practices on contemporary youth politics? What are the incentives for youth to engage in both formal political structures and outside such structures? What are the goals and objectives youth are hoping to achieve? And to what extent are practices and discourses distinct from those of other generations?
“1994-2014 20 Years of South African Democracy”
St Antony’s College and the African Studies Centre (ASC) at the University of Oxford hoste a conference between 24-26 April 2014 on 20 Years of South African Democracy.
http://www.africanstudies.ox.ac.uk/1994-2014-20-years-south-african-democracy#sthash.ElIGBGjq.dpuf
Power and Democracy: the many voices of Oral History. XVIII IOHA Conference.
The force of democracy as well as the resistance it has met have prompted oral history projects around the world. Interviews with advocates of change have supplemented and supplanted archives of discredited regimes. Oral histories have documented social and political upheavals, reform movements and reactions. Oral history have revealed the effects of power relationships that exist between citizens and their governments, workers and employers, students and teachers, and the layers within institutions, communities and families. As a democratic tool, oral history records and preserves the memories, perceptions, and voices of individuals and groups at all levels and in all endeavors, but that raises questions about what to do with these interviews and how to share them with the people and communities they reflect. “Power and democracy” will be the theme of the IOHA’s meeting in Barcelona, with the sub-themes:
- Archives, Oral Sources and Remembrance
- Power in Human Relations
- Democracy as a Political Tool
- Oral Sources and Cultural Heritage
- New Ways to Share Our Dialogue with the Public
Debates in History Education
The conference was a remarkable collaborative effort between the History Workshop, South African History Archive, the Ditsong National Museum of Military History and the Wits School of Education. ‘History Makes You Think’ was the theme of the 28th annual conference of the SASHT held at the Wits School of Education in Johannesburg on 10 and 11 October 2014. The conference was attended by close to 120 delegates from every province in South Africa and by some international guests. In addition we had the valuable contribution on the committee of practising History educators.
The theme of the conference attracted 38 thought-provoking offerings from primary, secondary and tertiary educators. Most were papers, loosely grouped into sessions entitled: History in the Classroom – practical; History out of the Classroom; Historical Thinking; Teaching Emotive History; History and Morality; Curriculum Issues; and Perspectives from Beyond the Classroom. There were four workshop sessions, including one by History Workshop members on using doing oral history. The keynote speaker, Anke Hoffstadt of the Heinrich-Heine University in Dusseldorf made an absorbing visual presentation on issues of commemoration and remembering - as we considered memorialization of the First World War.
Emerging Communities
On 30 October 2014 the Public Affairs Research Institute (PARI) with the NRF Chair “Local Histories and Present Realities” at Wits University hosted a one-day symposium on the theme of “Emerging communities”. The aim of the workshop was to bring together the research undertaken by a group of PARI researchers and postgraduate students under this umbrella theme. Both the symposium and proposed publication seek to make an intellectual contribution to understanding contemporary processes of social transformation that have characterised South Africa since 1994, with the view of creating links with scholars working on similar issues in different landscapes, both on the continent and internationally.
Twelve speakers and approximately 30 participants attended the event. The symposium began with an overview from Professors Chipkin and Bonner who provided the background and context to the emerging communities project. The majority of the panel speakers were PARI and NRF Chair researchers and postgraduate students with the exceptions of three presenters, namely Prof Jeremy Seekings (UCT, Sociology), Sylvia Croese (Stellenbosch, Sociology), and Marie Huchzermeyer (Wits, Architecture and Planning), who were invited to participate in the event because of the comparative relevance and potential of their work with that of the “emerging communities” project. Mosa Phadi (PARI), Jacob Dlamini, Claire Benit-Gbaffou (Cubes) and Aurelia Segatti were the four discussants.