Today we release the next episode of The WISER Podcast entitled Lost Books: Four Narratives On Absent Books. Focusing especially on books by women, Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Sarah Nuttall, Isabel Hofmeyr and Confidence Joseph offer an array of engaging short narratives on books lost, hidden, dreamt, thrown overboard or killed on social media. The episode is dedicated to all those students, staff and workers, and the manuscripts, books, films and artefacts, impacted or destroyed by the recent fires at the University of Cape Town. 

Find our WISER Transcripts here  -

https://wiser.wits.ac.za/thewisertranscripts

The members of the WISER Podcast team are Sarah Nuttall, Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, Isabel Hofmeyr, Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Mpho Matsipa, Achille Mbembe and Bronwyn Kotzen.

Today we release Part Two of The WISER Podcast’s next mini-series, The Futures of the Constitution. It draws on research by WISER Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, on continuities between South Africa’s apartheid past and its democratic present, under the framework of “the new apartheid”.

In this podcast, he continues to explore the South African Constitution’s conception of justice, this time through a comparative lens. He then examines links between the Constitution’s conception of justice and the persistent injustices of South Africa’s present and considers how we might frame a set of future-oriented debates in relation to both. 

Today we also release our second batch of WISER Transcripts, making four more of our podcasts available in textual form for ease of citation and reference. Curated and designed by Tinashe Mushakavanhu, the transcripts can be found at this link:  

The members of the WISER Podcast team are Sarah Nuttall, Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, Isabel Hofmeyr, Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Mpho Matsipa, Achille Mbembe and Bronwyn Kotzen.

Today we release Part One The WISER Podcast’s next mini-series, The Futures of the Constitution. It draws on research by WiSER Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, on continuities between South Africa’s apartheid past and its democratic present, under the framework of “the new apartheid”.

In this podcast, Sizwe and Tshepo Madlingozi, Director and Associate Professor at the Centre for Applied Legal Studies, critique the Preamble of South Africa's Constitution. They suggest that the Preamble espouses a limited conception of justice which partly explains persistent inequality in South Africa’s present. 

The members of the WISER Podcast team are Sarah Nuttall, Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, Isabel Hofmeyr, Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Mpho Matsipa, Achille Mbembe and Bronwyn Kotzen.

Today we release Part Two of our next mini-series of The WISER Podcast. This two-part series takes as its theme Travelling Technology. It draws on research led by Prof Richard Rottenburg at WISER spanning 15 African countries and focusing on large technical systems as well as stand-alone devices to reflect on the amalgamation of techno-science with social, political, juridical and cultural elements in concrete African contexts beyond the modernist binary of nature and culture.

In this podcast, after a brief introduction by Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh (WISER) we hear from Katrien Pype (KU Leuven) on “radio phonie” in Kinshasa, and then Sara Geenen with Simon Marijse (U Antwerp) tell the story of the “scaphandre” on the Congolese Shabunda river. The two detailed studies show moments of translation in the circulation of technologies and challenge the difference between innovation, tweaking and improvisation.

The members of the WISER Podcast team are Sarah Nuttall, Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, Isabel Hofmeyr, Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Mpho Matsipa, Achille Mbembe and Bronwyn Kotzen.

This two-part series addresses Travelling Technology. It draws on research spanning 15 African countries and focusing on various technical assemblages to reflect on the amalgamation of techno-science with social, political, juridical and cultural elements in concrete African contexts beyond the modernist binary of nature and culture.

In today's podcast, we hear from Richard Rottenburg (WISER) on the key intellectual dimensions of this ongoing project, followed by Faeeza Ballim (UJ) on Eskom and Medupi power stations in South Africa, and Iginio Gagliadone (Wits) on the politics of the Internet in Ethiopa.

Part 2 of our mini-series on Unsettlement explores the predicament of those who are stranded in states of indefinite displacement, deferred arrival and recurrent departure around the world today. It has emerged from a collaboration between The Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University, Africana Studies at Barnard College in New York and WISER.

In this episode, we hear four further interventions on how we might think about unsettlement. Listen to Rosalind Morris (Columbia), Johannes Machinya (WISER), Sarah Nuttall (WISER) and Achille Mbembe (WISER).

The members of the WISER Podcast team are Sarah Nuttall, Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, Mpho Matsipa, Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Achille Mbembe, Bronwyn Kotzen and Isabel Hofmeyr.

Today we launch our 2021 Season of The WISER Podcast. This year, from March to September, we will run concept-based podcasts, each in two parts over two weeks. Our first edition of The WISER Podcast features the theme of Unsettlement, and we approach our topic from 8 different angles.

The topic is born of a collaboration between The Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University, Africana Studies at Barnard College in New York and WISER.

Listen in to find out what the term Unsettlement draws into focus in an original way. Speakers in Part 1, released today are Rosalind Morris (Columbia University), who introduces the theme, Isabel Hofmeyr(Wits/WISER), Yvette Christianse (Barnard College) and Mpho Matsipa (Wits/WISER).

Today we also launch The WISER Transcripts, compiled and curated  by Tinashe Mushakavanhu (WISER). Here, we make available all editions of The WISER Podcast in textual form, for ease of access, reference and citation. Please see our first four releases at this link: https://wiser.wits.ac.za/thewisertranscripts.

The members of the WISER Podcast team are Sarah Nuttall, Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Bronwyn Kotzen, Isabel Hofmeyr, Achille Mbembe and Mpho Matsipa.

Charne Lavery discusses how theory from the south can be taken further south, towards the currents and creatures of the Southern Ocean.

Charne Lavery is a Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Pretoria and a Research Fellow in the Oceanic Humanities for the Global South project (www.oceanichumanities.com) based at WISER. Her work explores literary and cultural representations of the deep ocean, the Indian Ocean, and the Southern Ocean and Antarctic seas, researching oceanic underworlds of the global South in a time of climate change.

Keith Breckenridge discusses Biometric Capitalism and African economics in the 21st Century.

The WISER Podcast is also available on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Keith Breckenridge is a Professor of History, and Deputy Director of WISER.

For more WISER research, visit: https://wiser.wits.ac.za/publications

Using Covid-19 as a point of departure, Sarah Nuttall explores the “redistributed university”. She considers new and older challenges that have contributed to redefining institutions of higher learning. As the university constantly reconfigures itself in response to multiple pressures and struggles, including economic pressures, struggles for social justice and rapid technological change, she asks - concretely and speculatively - how we might approach the institution in its present and historical formation.  

Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies and the Director of WISER. Her research focuses on literary and visual cultures, city lives and forms and critical cultural theory. She has authored or edited many influential books, published more than 60 articles and book chapters and her  work is widely cited across disciplines. For eight years she has directed WISER, one of the largest and most established Humanities Institutes across the global South.

https://wiser.wits.ac.za