The WISER Podcast

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

Sisonke Msimang discusses the life, politics and legacy of Winnie Mandela.

Sisonke Msimang is the author of  Always Another Country: A Memoir of Exile and Home (2017) and The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela (2018) and is a Writing Fellow at WISER.

In Episode 4 of Season 2 of The WISER Podcast, Shireen Hassim and Sisonke Msimang discuss the life, politics and legacy of Winnie Mandela.

Shireen Hassim is Canada 150 Research Chair in Gender and African Politics and Visiting Professor at WiSER. She has published three articles on Winnie Madikizela-Mandela: “A Life of Refusal: Winnie Madikizela Mandela and violence in South Africa (Storia della Donne); “Not Just Nelson’s Wife: Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Violence and Radicalism in South Africa”, and “The Impossible Contract: The Political and Private Marriage of Nelson and Winnie Mandela” (both in the Journal of Southern African Studies)

Sakiru Adebayo examines the multiple melancholies associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Sakiru Adebayo is a sessional lecturer in the Department of African Literature and Postdoctoral Fellow at WiSER, the University of the Witwatersrand. 

Terry Kurgan discusses two photographs, each found in her father’s possession, and both taken on the edge of graves, one in Ein al-Beida, Palestine and the other in a forest just outside the town of Panevėžys in Lithuania. She considers the two photographs as entry points to a new book she has just begun that will traverse perhaps the darkest period of mid-twentieth century European and Middle Eastern History.

Terry Kurgan is a visual artist and writer based in Johannesburg. Her recent publication, Everyone is Present, written while she was a Writing Fellow and Artist in Residence at WiSER, won South Africa’s premier literary prize, the 2019 Sunday Times Alan Paton Award. It was also shortlisted for the 2019 Photo Arles Book Prize, and selected as a Finalist for the 2019 New York based National Jewish Book Awards. Terry is currently a Research Associate at WISER, working on a new book project, and co-director of the independent publishing project, Fourthwall Books. www.terrykurgan.com

Johannes Machinya discusses the everyday experience of living with potential or imminent arrest and deportation for undocumented migrants in South Africa.

Johannes Machinya is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow co-hosted by WISER and the African Studies Center (ASC) at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on migration, labour and politics, migration control and the temporalities associated with waiting and the anticipation of deportation.

Melanie Boehi discusses botanical gardens and public parks in the time of the Covid-19 pandemic with Luciano Concheiro San Vicente and Phakamani m’Afrika Xaba.

Melanie Boehi is a Visiting Researcher at WISER and a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Postdoctoral Fellow. She is currently finalising a book about the history of the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden in Cape Town and doing research about journalist Ruth Weiss.

Phakamani m’Afrika Xaba is a senior horticulturalist and researcher based at the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden in Cape Town. He is the co-author of the book Traditionally Useful Plants of Africa: Their Cultivation and Use (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Luciano Concheiro San Vicente holds a Ph.D. in history from The National Autonomous University of Mexico and an M.Phil in Sociology from Cambridge University. He is currently doing research about the history of Chapultepec, Mexico's most important urban park. 

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In the latest episode of The WISER Podcast, Ruth Sacks discusses post-independence sites in Kinshasa, focusing especially on L’Échangeur [the Exchange] in Limete as a means of understanding processes of disrepair and reconstruction in the city today.

Ruth Sacks is a South African visual artist and academic based in Johannesburg who completed her PhD at WiSER and currently holds a Postdoc at the SARChI Chair for Social Change at the University of Fort Hare. Sacks’ first academic book, Congo Style: From Art Nouveau to African Independence (Michigan University Press and Wits University Press), is forthcoming in 2021.

Confidence Joseph, Ryan Poinasamy, Meghan Judge and Mapule Mohulatsi go below the water line as they describe new avenues for research in the environmental humanities and critical ocean studies.

Confidence Joseph is an African Literature doctoral candidate at the University of the Witwatersrand.