Natasha Vally
Next Generation Scholar
South African Social Assistance and the 2012 Privatised National Payment System: An examination of insecurities and technopolitics in social grant administration and payment. She has undergraduate and honours degrees in mathematics and genetics and holds a Masters degree in history. She works, across disciplines, on the technopolitical in post-apartheid South Africa. Her favourite movie is Blade Runner, she awaits the sequel with anticipation.
Good Morning Cape Town with Lester Kiewet: Remembering the Trojan Horse Massacre
Lester Kiewit speaks to Promesh Lalu, a UWC research professor, on the lessons we can learn from the Trojan Horse Massacre in 1985, as well as the misconceptions about those at grassroots level fighting the apartheid machine with intellect and limited resources.
Winter School 7-11 July 2025: On the question of Freedom
In anticipation of the arrival of Fanon, Lorde, McGregor and several other truth-seekers, the Iyatsiba Lab, alive to its meaning “to jump”, called attention to the CHR’s 15th iteration of the annual Winter School titled Freedom, Techne/Technics, Postcoloniality. Accompanied by trusted companions, the Reading List, the Place/People, Concept and Programme, Winter School held interdisciplinary space for what it means to think and make in relation(s) at the edge of time.
Zine-making workshop: Something like an archive – Exploring memory through zine-making
‘Something like an archive – Exploring memory through zine-making’ is a one day public workshop at Iyatsiba Lab facilitated by visual artist and educator, Scott Eric Williams.
Exhibition Opening: Tales of History Retold
For this exhibition, eight artists were invited to select artefacts from the document archive of the Association for Visual Arts (AVA), a not-for-profit gallery and collective in Cape Town, as source material for an artistic response.
Artists’s Forum with Kemang Wa Lehulere
The Artists Forum, convened at the Centre for Humanities Research, emerges out a longstanding conversation between artists and academics working in and through the CHR. The Forum’s objective has been to connect scholarly exploration with the CHR’s Artist in Residency programme, and to bring artists and humanistic study into a more intimate adjacency.
The Polyrhythmic Ensemble
The Polyrhythmic Ensemble was formed in 2023 with the aim of creating new works based around research into contrapuntal and polyrhythmic African music.
Culture and Technics Workshop: 10-12 November
The UK-SA Chair in Digital Humanities, held by Prof. Premesh Lalu, is welcoming international scholars to Cape Town in November to attend a three-day roundtable at Iyatsiba Lab in Woodstock.
Fellowship Announcement: Siyanda Kobokana
We are delighted to announce that SA/UK Digital Humanities PhD fellow, Siyanda Kobokana, has been selected for the inaugural Paris Doctoral Research Residency at IFAS–Fondation Fiminco–ArTeC.
An Archive and Forms of Sight: Gestures of Madness
My history of madness in the Belgian Congo will rely on tracking transactional, micro, and urgent documents as gestures. These promise to open “spheres of ethos,” with human riddles, forms of upheaval, and violence (Agamben 1992).