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READ MORE Technics & Urban workshop takes off

“They conduct their lives with a wry resilience. They have a front row seat to the apocalyptic – birds falling out the sky – but they go on, with a cruel optimism towards the everyday within the age of extreme climate change. To translate that into formal strategies is the work of documentary.” READ MORE Publication Announcement: New Contrast, Issue 212, In Memory of Diana Ferrus and Zoë Wicomb

We are pleased to announce the publication of New Contrast’s 212th Issue, In Memory of Diana Ferrus and Zoë Wicomb, which includes contributions from Premesh Lalu who holds the UK-SA Bilateral Chair in Culture and Technics at the CHR, and Bongani Kona (Department of Historical Studies, UWC). READ MORE Humanities in Sesssion, Artists’ Forum: Underwater Cables & Global Digital Infrastructure

This session, titled ‘Underwater Cables & Global Digital Infrastructure’, will be led by Ian Purnell, and Southbound Studio members, Kamil Adam Hassim, and Benji Anstey, who will be in conversation with the CHR’s Premesh Lalu.
August 28, 2026
Archive Lab, HOME IE by Naoya Yoshikawa

Humanities in Session: Archive Lab, HOME: IE by Naoya Yoshikawa

The New Archival Visions (NAV) Programme will be hosting Naoya Yoshikawa in September at the Iyatsiba Lab, in collaboration with The Cape Town Photography Festival. Alongside this Humanities in Session: Archive Lab seminar, Yoshikawa’s exhibition, HOME: IE, will be showing at the Iyatsiba Lab’s Annex Gallery (3-26 September 2026).
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August 21, 2026

A Tribute to Tiisetso Dladla (1985-2026): PhD fellow New Archival Visions Programme at the CHR, UWC

It seems unthinkable to be sharing a tribute for Tiisetso Dladla who passed away in Johannesburg on 11 August 2026. We are shocked and heartbroken at UWC where Tiisetso was a doctoral fellow of the New Archival Visions (NAV) at the Centre for Humanities Research, with her PhD registered in the Department of Historical Studies.
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August 18, 2026

Charlotte Maxeke-Mary Robinson Research Chair public lecture: Burn/t Out, The Legacy of Forced Displacement During North(ern) Ireland’s ‘Troubles’

The CHR, in collaboration with the District Six Homecoming Centre, welcomes Brendan Ciarán Browne, visiting scholar of the Charlotte Maxeke–Mary Robinson Research Chair, who will present a public lecture on Tuesday 25 August 2026, at the District Six Homecoming Centre.
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August 6, 2026

Exhibition Launch: Rhythmic Solidarity: the photographs of Derek Speirs

The Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape is proud to present an exhibition of Derek Speirs' photographs of the Irish anti-apartheid movement to mark the conferral of honorary doctorates on Charlotte Maxeke and Mary Robinson. The exhibition will be opened by former President of Ireland, Mary Robinson.
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July 20, 2026

Humanities in Sesssion: ‘Returning Transitions: Memories of Persistent Crises in South African and Russian Writing’, with Ksenia Robbe

In this seminar, Ksenia Robbe present the key questions and theoretical propositions concerning the possibility of reading comparatively and connectively memories of the post-apartheid and post-Soviet ‘transitions’ in contemporary South African and Russian writing.
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July 9, 2026

Archive Lab: ‘Archiving Resistance: The VNS/AFRAVISION Collective’, with Brian Tilley and Makonenyana Molete

The New Archival Visions (NAV) Programme will host Brian Tilley and Makonenyana Molete, founder members of the VNS/Afravision video collective to share how they set up VNS/Afravision in the 1980s to document the struggles sweeping across South Africa.
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July 6, 2026

Winter School 2026: Liminalities: Thinking, Thresholds

Liminality has been theorised as a condition of transition. Whether in its original anthropological form as a movement from one state to another through a rite of passage or in its postcolonial rendering via Homi Bhabha's notion of hybridity, liminality has come to mark a condition of being “not quite” and “not yet.”
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