Partnerships
The humanities, as a discourse that places the university in direct relation to society, assumes a transnational orientation, not least because of the ways in which its emergence brushes up against concerns of nationalism, troubling the securities of what we assume to be common sense about the human condition. To this end, the humanities function as a self-critical constellation of knowledge formations that always also open onto a future that has not yet been anticipated.
In the interval between past and a future that is not yet, the humanities offer us different conceptions of the world we live in, and which we might potentially inhabit. With this broad understanding, the CHR’s particular contribution to elaborating a concept of the post-apartheid that is more than a reference to the experience of apartheid in South Africa brings it into conversation and dialogue with a range of academic and art projects around the world. A significant aspect of this discussion and dialogue has centred on our approach to the larger global debate on the future of the humanities, and what specifically in our view is a need to get beyond the limits of the perennial talk about the crisis of the humanities. Ours is an effort to ascribe to the humanities a potential with which it has not adequately reckoned and that is the very condition for unrelenting questioning.
It is also to learn from the larger preoccupations of humanities scholars and arts practitioners in the world. To this end, the CHR hosts a cohort of leading local and international doctoral and post-doctoral fellows, with a significant proportion drawn from South Africa and elsewhere on the African continent, and a growing list of international visiting scholars eager to engage the CHR on its perspectives on the humanities.
The CHR is committed to reconstituting the study of the humanities in Africa through research partnerships that enhance our understanding of the human condition in an age of rapid technological change. The focus of such collaborations rests upon new approaches to pedagogy in the humanities that link university-based research with the visual and performing arts. With the support of sixteen international and five national institutions, the CHR aims to enhance scholarly exchange around its three main research platforms: Aesthetics and Politics, Migrating Violence, and the Becoming Technical of the Human. A major aspect of this exchange is the opportunity it affords the CHR to explore and exchange ideas about curriculum development.
The CHR is a member of the international Consortium of Humanities Centres and Institutes (CHCI).
National Partnerships
The CHR has a longstanding partnership with the University of Fort Hare, the National Heritage and Cultural Studies Centre (NAHECS), and the former SARChI Chair in Social Change, held by Gary Minkley. The research focus of the Chair in Social Change was located around exploring the historical and contemporary dimensions and dynamics of social change in the Eastern Cape and more broadly in South Africa and Africa. In relation to the research areas of social change, this entails attempting to explore the ways that ‘the social’ itself no longer conjures a common set of assumptions about society, culture, representation, or the methods by which we write and produce a history, or an understanding. These questions continue to orient our ongoing partnership beyond the life of the Chair, particularly with core researchers from the programme, Thozama April and Sinazo Mtshemla, who remain crucial participants at the CHR’s annual Winter School and our shared enquiries into the human condition.
Net Vir Pret works with children and youth from underpriveleged communities in the Overberg (Barrydale/Swellendam Municipal Area). They aim to encourage self-esteem, self-development, confidence, and a sense of responsibility among these children by providing activities which help to break the cycle of poverty, domestic violence and alcoholism/drug misuse within the family and community. These activities and programmes include an annual Reconciliation Day Puppetry Parade (16 December). The annual puppetry event is a much anticipated feature of the longstanding partnership between Net Vir Pret in Barrydale, the CHR, and longstanding CHR Artists in Reseidence, Ukwanda Puppetry and Design Collective.
The Black Archive Project is a research initiative that excavates, curates, and theorises African intellectual, political, and cultural traditions – particularly those articulated in Indigenous languages and rhetorical forms – as epistemic resources for transforming higher education. Positioned at the intersection of political theory, decolonial critique, and African Studies, the project draws on orature, protest aesthetics, archival texts, and vernacular philosophies to reconstruct African knowledges that challenge the dominance of Euro-modern paradigms within university curricula, governance, and research.
The CHR and Iziko Museums of South Africa signed a historic MOU in 2025, and by doing so committed to promoting artistic and educational cooperation between institutions, affording access to each institution’s educational and research facilities and developing collaborative and exchange practices across the continent and South Africa. Iziko operates 11 national museums in Cape Town. The museums house natural history, social history and art collections in historic buildings, which in themselves are national treasures. Iziko, an isiXhosa word meaning ‘hearth’, embodies the spirit of a transformed institution and their version of ‘African Museums of Excellence’. The hearth is traditionally and symbolically the social centre of the home; a place associated with warmth, kinship and the spirit of the ancestors. As such, Iziko was envisioned as a space for all South Africans to gather, nourish body and soul, and share stories and the knowledge passed from one generation to the next. Iziko Museums seeks to emulate the ‘hearth’ by creating receptive spaces for cultural interaction and dialogue – and we are proud to ignite connections between our shared history, our heritage and each other.
Zeitz MOCAA is a not-for-profit museum that exhibits, collects, preserves, and researches contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora. They host international exhibitions, develop educational and enrichment programmes including the Zeitz MOCAA/UWC Museum Fellowship Programme, encourage intercultural understanding, and strive for access for all. Their galleries feature rotating temporary exhibitions alongside a permanent collection that continues to grow and reflect the continent’s creative pulse.
The Zeitz MOCAA & University of the Western Cape (UWC) Museum Fellowship Programme aims to foster the growth of curatorial practice as well as advance scholarship on contemporary art discourse from the continent. This pan-African programme endeavours to increase knowledge production around curatorial practice, arts administration and heritage management. It offers fellows exposure to museum practice facilitated by Zeitz MOCAA senior staff and is underpinned by academic rigour in contemporary art scholarship at the University of the Western Cape’s (UWC) Department of Historical Studies and outstanding faculty of humanities.
The William Humphreys Art Gallery is located in the Oppenheimer Gardens in Kimberley and is considered one of the finest national art museums in South Africa.
Endearingly known as WHAG and conveniently situated in central South Africa, it remains one of the cultural gems for locals, and a must-see for patrons of the arts passing through the diamond city. The CHR and WHAG are building a longterm partnership that seeks to extend the question of an aesthetic education within multiple particularities in South Africa.
Working in Zimbabwe and South Africa, Lalela provides arts education in safe spaces for at-risk youth during the vulnerable after-school hours and holiday periods. Lalela uses the power of the arts top help students navigate a clear path that is often cluttered with the hazards of extreme poverty, including gang violence, HIV/AIDS, and physical and substance abuse. Modelled on the 15 year collaboration with Net Vir Pret, the CHR provides support and training for Lalela, particularly in aesthetic practice and performance.
International Partnerships
The Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures is the humanities center at the University of Virgina. They desrcibe themselves as an inclusive space that celebrates the humanities as the source of deep and sustaining knowledge that teaches us what it means to be human across the myriad scales of relationality, from the local to the global.
Their mission is to advance humanistic research and inquiry across the disciplines through innovative programming, institutional collaborations, and faculty-led initiatives. They sponsor a competitive fellowship program that embeds faculty in the life of the institution, ongoing humanities laboratories that explore emergent topics in the humanities, and initiatives that bring internal and external institutions into conversation with UVA. These include the CHR’s annual Winter School which regularly hosts faculty, scholars and fellows from UVA.
The Trinity Long Room Hub is Trinity College Dublin’s research institute for the Arts and Humanities. Their research community represents over twenty disciplines including the creative arts, philosophy, religion, languages, literatures, cultural studies, linguistics, history, law, education, peace studies, and classics, as well as the University Library. Collectively, these disciplines respond to the complex evolution of identity and culture; the determining effects of language, communication, and representation; and the meanings of historical and contemporary lived experience. Current institute priorities for research include democracy and resistance, cultural and literary heritage, the futures of Ireland, and human-centred approaches to technology.
In 2024 the Charlotte Maxeke-Mary Robinson Research Chair was established. It emerged out of a longstanding collaboration between the CHR and the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute (TLRH), and includes the cross-pollination of research through and advanced research residency programme. The Chair inaugurates a broader and reciprocal collaboration between Ireland and South Africa which engages our complex inheritance of colonialism, empire, partition and apartheid, and how to overcome this legacy. The CHR and TLRH’s work in aesthetics and politics has drawn attention across our social and institutional settings to the ways that cultural production can bring political thought, the arts, and research across disciplines into the public sphere. This shared understanding stems from a recognition of a history that marks both countries in relation to legacies of colonialism and partition, as well as to the possibilities inherent in the work of education and the arts to find unexplored modes of reconciliation to transcend these legacies.
Through funding support from the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs, the initial phase of the work of the Research Chair brought scholars and artists in Ireland to Southern Africa, hosted by the CHR, and scholars and artists from South Africa to Ireland as the reciprocal commitment of the Research Chair. The historic inauguration of the Charlotte Maxeke-Mary Robinson Research Chair offers both societies the extraordinary opportunity to think beyond histories of partition in order to build new imaginations of post-partition societies.
For more information: https://www.chrflagship.uwc.ac.za/research-chairs/charlotte-maxeke-mary-robinson-research-chair/
The Leuphana Institute for Advanced Studies (LIAS) at Leuphana University Lüneburg was founded in 2022 as a research institute dedicated to strengthening and internationalising the university’s research profile. Supported by an international fellowship program, it engages with the challenges of a globalized present through research-driven approaches. As an institution, it contributes to positioning Lower Saxony as a hub for international research and multiperspectival thinking. LIAS provides a home for the enrichment that emerges from ongoing exchange among scholars and from the continuous development of research perspectives – a shared space shaped by many. A particular emphasis is placed on collaboration with fellows at various career stages from the Global South, and has included a number of collaborative projects with the CHR. Examples of these collaborations include a DFG Doctoral Training Academy on Cultures of Critique, a research partnership between the UK-SA Bilateral Digital Humanities Chair in Culture & Technics, and CHR Extraordinary Professor, Erich Hörl, as well as a broader conversation on the question of the university as institution, taking place through a number of workshops.
The SARChI Chair in Visual History & Theory is a project partner with the Goethe-University Frankfurt Graduiertenkolleg (a fully-funded PhD programme with 12 fellowships per annum) in ‘Aesthetics of the Democratic Form of Life’ which has received generous funding from the German Research Foundation. The Chair is a member of the Kolleg and its Advisory Board, with the CHR offering one of several international collaborative sites for student and teaching exchanges. The grant begins in April 2026 and the programme kicks off with its first annual workshop in Bad Homburg in June 2026.
The Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) in Portugal has awarded a grant to the Angolan project called Photo50 under the theme of ‘Imprinting Memories: Photography and History in Angola through the lens of Paulino Damião.’ Together with Ines Ponte and other researchers at ICS, the SARChI Chair in Visual History & Theory joins a one-month research trip to Luanda in 2026 to study an important collection of 1950s urban photography. The outcomes of this collaboration will be newspaper and archival research; a public seminar on African photography; and a workshop. The project aims to produce an exhibition, two digital collections, a catalogue, and a postcard series of artworks from workshops.an exhibition, an edited volume and digital archive.
Together with Marian Nur Goni and Anna Seiderer, Department of Art History, University of Paris 8 (Vincennes St Denis), the SARChI Chair in Visual History & Theory is partner in a project called ‘Regarder Ensemble/Looking together’ which has received funding for two years (2026-7) from ArTec (France). ‘Regarder Ensemble’ advocates a methodology that acknowledges the polyvalence across time of photographic images. Developed by media anthropologist (and former Visual History keynote lecturer 2022) Zeynep Gürsel, ‘looking together’ as a method originated from her research on ‘portraits of unbelonging’ and their relationship to migration, citizenship and belonging. ‘Regarder Ensemble’ brings two archives into conversation with each other, both built on principles of solidarity. These are the UWC-Robben Island Museum-Mayibuye Archive at UWC, and the archives of Bouba Touré held at Université Paris 8, St Denis, which represent the photographic and video work of the self-trained photographer, projectionist and this Malian migrant and activist, who covered anti-racist actions in France over many years.
Pitt Cyber addresses pressing issues in networks, data, and algorithms, while exploring the intersections of law, policy, and technology. Their team of legal, policy, and technical researchers partners with policymakers and industry to develop practical solutions and anticipate future trends. Pitt-Cyber has a longstanding partnership with the New Archival Visions (NAV) programme at the CHR, who have collaborated on a number of projects pertaining to the archive.
The CHR and the Centre Sogolon signed a historic MOU in 2025 in order to strengthen our shared, longstanding commitments to puppetry practice on the continent. The Centre Sogolon is a puppet company based in Bamako, Mali. Yaya Coulibaly (b.1959), seventh generation descendant of Bitòn Coulibaly, is the director of the Compagnie Sogolon (Sogolon Puppet Troupe), founded in 1980. The company does Bambara style performance, creating designs and productions in conjunction with multiple Coulibaly family members and others in performances that combine dance, drumming, song, words, and puppets, giant-sized to small. The works draw from traditional sources to make contemporary theatre. Yaya Coulibaly first learned puppetry under his father in a village context and then graduated from the Institut National des Arts in Bamako. In 1988, Coulibaly went on to receive a diploma from the Institut International de la Marionnette in Charleville-Mézières, France. Rather than following the traditional theatre, where text and narrative are not involved, Coulibaly has chosen to integrate dialogue and story in his company productions.
The Sogolon Puppet Troupe has expanded techniques and includes string puppets (a style not traditionally associated with Bamana puppetry) as well as traditional-style rod puppets and large body puppets. Their visual designs draw from tradition but artistically extends ideas through Coulibaly’s own aesthetic; Coulibaly is a master puppeteer who draws upon varied sources. The company includes females as manipulators, another break with tradition. Sogolon Puppet Troupe takes a uniquely contemporary approach to theatre. The company has performed in Europe, the United States (including at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC) and South Africa. Yaya Coulibaly’s figures have been exhibited in multiple venues.
The Kenya Institute of Puppet Theatre, Nairobi, is a non formal, non-profit making community based theatre institute based in Nairobi, Kenya. Its aim is to explore and develop puppetry/folk media as a means of community education, communication and social change, as well as a popular performing art-form and a participatory medium in Kenya and the region.
The Centre for Studies in Social Sciences (CSSC), Calcutta, was founded in February 1973. Financed primarily by matching grants from the ICSSR and the Government of West Bengal, the Centre has full academic autonomy, is designed to function democratically, and is proud of its impeccable record of public accountability. Academic and administrative matters at the Centre are under the control of a Board of Governors consisting of representatives of the Central and State governments, the ICSSR, the UGC, the universities of West Bengal and the Centre’s faculty. The Centre’s faculty members are academics of high merit from the fields of economics, history, political science, sociology, social anthropology, geography and cultural studies. Their unique interdisciplinary culture allows for collaboration between people from different fields for research that might not find support in traditional department-based institutions.
The Trinity Global Brain Health Institute (GBHI) is dedicated to protecting the world’s aging populations from threats to brain health. They strive to improve brain health for populations across the world, reaching into local communities and across our global network. GBHI brings together a powerful mix of disciplines, professions, backgrounds, skills, perspectives, and approaches to develop new science-based solutions. These include collaborations with Ukwanda Puppetry and Design Collective, and the CHR which alongwith GBHI and 26 world partners, was awarded a MSCA grant exploring the impact of climate change on brain health.
For more information: https://www.chrflagship.uwc.ac.za/the-global-brain-health-institute-gbhi-annual-conference-12-14-may/
The ICGC houses the University of Minnesota’s graduate education and faculty research collaboration with the University of the Western Cape (UWC), South Africa. The initiative involves graduate student and faculty exchanges, co-taught courses between the campuses using web and ITV technologies, and has the goal of further developing other networks among institutions in the global south. The partnership is supported in part by funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the partner universities.
ICGC and the CHR formalised a partnership in graduate education and faculty research through a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), put in place during a visit to UWC by former Senior Vice President, Robert Jones, and ICGC Director, Karen Brown. Through the partnership between ICGC and the CHR at UWC, our collaborative graduate education and faculty research initiative offers faculty and student exchanges; graduate student fellowships; and joint research projects, workshops, conferences and courses.
The “Aesthetic Education: A South-North Dialogue,” a collaboration between the Jackman Humanities Institute (JHI) at the University of Toronto and the CHR, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, ran between 2016 and 2021. The wager of the collaboration was that the mutual engagement of scholars from the two institutions would open new possibilities for research into aesthetic education, that is, into the ways that artistic endeavours can add to knowledge and that Humanities scholars can learn from artistic endeavours. The collaboration was divided into five sections which are in no sense discreet and which share an inquiry into concepts and questions which connect these in their concern with an ‘Aesthetic Education’. The five sections are ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Canada and South Africa’, ‘Museums and Public History’, ‘Puppetry’, ‘Literature and Decolonization’, ‘Movement, Image, Sound’.
Jointly run by Emory University and the CHR, the African Critical Inquiry Programme (ACIP) seeks to advance inquiry and debate about the roles of public cultural domains and institutions in shaping identities and society in South Africa after colonialism and apartheid. The program has two components: The first, an annual ACIP workshop and lecture in Cape Town, will provide interdisciplinary, cross-institutional contexts to address issues central to such debate and to develop comparative, critical frameworks that can yield fresh insights, innovative and informed practice, and lively interchange for those working in, and on, institutions of public culture in Africa. The second component, doctoral research awards, will foster work by the next generation of scholar-practitioners. In these ways, ACIP will strengthen public scholarship and institutions of public culture in South Africa and enhance our understanding of these vital sites of cultural production and social action. ACIP is supported by contributions from the Ivan Karp and Corinne Kratz Fund. The Fund was created to honour the late National Endowment for the Humanities Professor, Ivan Karp, whose work was monumental in the fields of anthropology, museum studies, African studies, social theory, and public scholarship.
The Fund will help continue his collaborative work with universities, museums and other cultural institutions in Cape Town, South Africa, through activities such as lectures, programs and student research support.
Housed within the College of Arts and Sciences, the Institute for the Arts and Humanities was founded in 1987. Then called the Program for the Arts and Humanities, its early mission was to nurture liberal arts learning and to support faculty excellence. Today, the Institute empowers faculty to achieve their full potential by creating community and cultivating leadership. At the heart of this mission is the affirmation of the crucial value of the arts and humanities to the life of the university and the world. The CHR collaborates with the IAH on a number of projects which include the CHCI Global Justice and Humanities Practices Institute in 2026. It also hosted the IAH’s Director, Patricia Parker in 2024, 2025, and 2026, who is an extraordinary Professor at the CHR.
Global dis:connect is based at Ludwig–Maximilians-Universität, Munich. It is an internationally oriented centre for advanced humanities research. It provides an intellectually open and collaborative environment for scholars examining historical and contemporary processes of globalisation. Their research starts from a relational perspective: integration, disconnection, and disintegration are co-constitutive, not opposites. Migration, markets, and information circulate unevenly, encountering barriers, exclusions, and delays that are integral to globalisation itself. This perspective enables fellows to investigate the cultural, social, and interpretative dimensions of globalisation across disciplines. global dis:connect is a crucial partner of the CHR’s annual Winter School programme and regularly hosts fellows from southern Africa in Munich.
The Dahlem Humanities Center (DHC) was founded in 2007 as part of the Excellence Initiative as one of five Focus Areas at Freie Universität Berlin, making it the first institution of its kind in Germany. It brings together the breadth of research in the humanities at Freie Universität, which is unique in Germany, and is located in the two departments of Philosophy and Humanities and History and Cultural Studies. In November 2019, it was made permanent at Freie Universität Berlin. The DHC aims to detect and investigate new trends in the humanities and to support interdisciplinary research, both at the regional and international level. Another major concern is to strengthen the visibility of the humanities also in the non-university public. The CHR and the Dahlam Humanities Centre have cohosted a number of online workshops and partner on visiting fellowships through the Erasmus Plus programme.
Founded in 1696, the Akademie der Künste is one of the oldest cultural institutes in Europe. It is an international community of artists and has a current total of 414 members in its six Sections (Visual Arts, Architecture, Music, Literature, Performing Arts, Film and Media Arts). In 2024, the CHR collaborated with the Academie de Kunste on the award winning workshop and Sound Art Exhibition (27 April–19 May 2024): Oscillations – Cape Town to Berlin – Sonic Inquiries and Practices, and again in 2026 for the exhibition Every Artist Must Take Sides – Resonances of Eslanda and Paul Robeson.
The CHR and the W. E. B. Du Bois Centre at the University of Massachusetts signed a Memoranda of Understanding in 2026. The purpose of this partnership is to foster transcontinental solidarity around the ideals of racial justice, social equality, democracy, dignity and peace. It is also intended to facilitate knowledge sharing between our two organisations, to provide a platform for the interchange of ideas, to produce engaging programming for a diverse set of audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, and to encourage new interdisciplinary research and scholarship. The W. E. B. Du Bois Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst was established in 2009 to engage audiences in discussion and scholarship about global issues involving race, labor, and social justice. UMass Amherst is the proud home of the W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, which are housed on the 25th floor of the library in Special Collections University Archives. The entire collection is free to view digitally. The Du Bois Center’s mission is to make the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, as well as his contemporaries, available and accessible to everyone throughout the world for application to the problems and issues of the 21st Century, and to create new knowledge and support scholarship emanating from the life and teachings of W. E. B. Du Bois.
Collaborators
The CHR collaborates with Boschendaal Winefarm and Estate on a number of community based projects. These include the annual Heritage Day Arts Education Workshops and Puppetry Parade, ran and facilitated by Ukwanda Puppetry and Design Arts Collective.
The Little Museum tells the story of the Ireland’s capital, Dublin. It was launched in 2011 with a public appeal for historic objects. The response to that appeal illustrates the generosity of the Irish people. Today there are over 5,000 artefacts in their collection. Recently described as ‘Dublin’s best museum experience’ by the Irish Times, the Little Museum has twice been voted as the number one museum in Ireland on the TripAdvisor website. Children attend free civics classes here every morning, we host several temporary exhibitions each year, one of them includes a collaborative exhibition with the CHR which focuses on the Irish anti-apartheid movement.
The Wallerstein Institute for World Futures is a non-profit center for critical inquiry, creative experimentation, and collective reflection on the challenges of our time. Bringing together scholars, students, artists, writers, and activists from across disciplines and regions, the Institute serves as a space for imagining democratic and equitable world futures.
Grounded in the intellectual legacy of Immanuel Wallerstein, the Institute explores the dynamics of the capitalist world-system, the evolution of global social movements, and the possibilities for transformative action—especially in the Global South. Its work examines the intersections of capitalism, colonialism, and resistance, highlighting how communities around the world reimagine democracy, justice, and solidarity beyond Eurocentric models of progress. Committed to open, anti-disciplinary, and collaborative forms of knowledge, the Institute fosters dialogue between the social sciences, humanities, arts, and natural sciences. It values diverse epistemologies and emphasizes theorizing from below—centering the experiences and insights of those historically excluded from global discourse. At a moment when spaces for dissent and critical thought are under threat, the Wallerstein Institute seeks to uphold intellectual freedom and collective inquiry. It offers a home for those committed to thinking, creating, and acting together toward more just and sustainable world futures.