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CHCI Meeting Documentary

A short documentary on the Annual Meeting of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, held at the Castle of Good Hope, Cape Town

Stanley John Films has produced a short documentary on the Annual Meeting of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, held at the Castle of Good Hope, Cape Town from 10-13 August 2017.

The 2017 annual meeting of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI) explored the multiple ways in which improvisation has enabled and facilitated the study of the humanities, not least in times of great social upheaval. Under the theme of “The Humanities Improvised,” the annual meeting gathered together artists, art commentators, and humanists from member institutions to reconceptualize the relationship between art and the humanities against the backdrop of a rapidly changing world. The very concept of the public sphere is being recast in the twenty-first century as a consequence. The CHCI annual meeting will explore these shifts in an African and South African context where debates about nationalism, decolonization, neocolonialism, postcolonialism, globalization, and neoliberalism have found complex expression and contestation in burgeoning arts initiatives across the continent, producing possibilities for new models of aesthetic education and cultural critique.

The 2017 CHCI annual meeting revisited the work of improvisation in a context where changes in work, politics, and technology appear to have reorganized the repertoire of consciousness, memory, and desire that grounds the humanities. In the midst of the widening chasm between being and becoming, the humanities in its improvisational mode may reach beyond a process that only archives and preserves foundational narratives. The humanities, when placed in a longer duration of such artistic forms such as jazz, cinema, or the work of art, allows us to set forth in anticipation of the new. With the rise of third-generation technologies, the improvisational may precisely enable setting to work on reshaping the humanities in productive ways. At one level, improvisation may function as a “social instrumentality” under conditions where the relationship between the human and technology, the human and animal, attention and play, and bios and techne are being rearranged in the midst of uncertain futures. At another, improvisation functions as an opening, prompting reorientation, especially as thought and performance press up against the limits of what we conventionally understand as the humanities. Either way, improvisation may enable more questions for humanistic inquiry, and how the study of the humanities in turn might offer itself as a practice of thought adequate, appropriate, and necessary to the demands of a world in flux.

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Centre for Humanities Research

4 days ago

Centre for Humanities Research
Please join us for 'Together Apart The Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement', which will be given by Daryl Hendley Rooney as part of the Charlotte Maxeke-Mary Robinson Research Chair. This lecture draws upon the IAAM Archive held at UWC and reflects the ongoing research and development undertaken for the exhibition, Together Apart: The Irish-Anti Apartheid Movement, a partnership of the Little Museum and the University of the Western Cape. Together Apart will open at the Little Museum in spring 2026 for six months before moving to Cape Town. ... See MoreSee Less

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Centre for Humanities Research

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The 2025 International Workshop on Visual History & Theory will take place between October 14-15 and includes two keynotes which are open to the public. The second instalment, 'An Archive and Forms of Sight: Gestures of Madness " by Nancy Rose Hunt will take places on Wednesday 15 October. ... See MoreSee Less

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Centre for Humanities Research

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Centre for Humanities Research
The 2025 International Workshop on Visual History & Theory will take place between October 14-15, and includes two keynotes which are open to the public. The first, 'In Black Women’s Hands: A History of Gestures in Photography and Textile', will be given by Sandrine Colard and Giulia Paoletti, and takes place on Tuesday 14 October.Venue: CHR’s Iyatsiba Lab, 66 Greatmore Street, Woodstock (enter via Regent Road)Time: 9:30am-11:00am ... See MoreSee Less

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Centre for Humanities Research

2 weeks ago

Centre for Humanities Research
Please join us on Thursday 16 October for a screening of Dublin Short, a short documentary capturing the magic of the Little Museum of Dublin’s famous guided tour. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Dr Daryl Hendley Rooney, deputy curator at the Little Museum and visiting researcher on the Charlotte Maxeke-Mary Robinson Research Chair.Date: Thursday 16 October 2025Time: 15h00-16h30Venue: The CHR’s Iyatsiba Lab,66 Greatmore Street, Woodstock(enter via Regent St) ... See MoreSee Less

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Centre for Humanities Research

3 weeks ago

Centre for Humanities Research
We are pleased to announce that Premesh Lalu 's Undoing Apartheid has been translated into Turkic and published as part of the Afrika Vakfi Yayinlan series... ... See MoreSee Less

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