A stellar graduation

Joining Stella Peterson and Emeritus Professor Martin West, who received honorary doctorates in Jameson Hall on Friday, 10 June, were three Honours students and two MA graduates from the Archive and Public Culture research initiative. Scooping four distinctions between them, the graduates' research, informed by historical and anthropological backgrounds, collectively demonstrates the aliveness of inheritance, archival material, and the past in contemporary circumstances.

Elsamie Olwage, whose Honours thesis focused on memory-making and 'legacy identities' amongst Ju/'hoansi people living on a San resettlement farm in the Omaheke region of Namibia, has returned to UCT's Social Anthropology department to pursue her Masters.

Similarly, Janie Swanepoel continues with her Masters at the University of Stellenbosch, having completed her Honours with a thesis that examined day-to-day practices, perceptions and life narratives in a small spice shop in inner-city Durban to understand how heritage and history were mobilised to assert identity in a complex post-apartheid space. Mona Hakimi, who intends to begin her Masters in 2012, wrote her Honours thesis on the notion of 'community' and the complexities of how it manifested in in relation to people involved in the Protea Village land claims.

Megan Greenwood's Masters in Social Anthropology traced an exhibition process at St George's Cathedral, considering the relationship between exhibition practice, bearing witness and modalities of citizenship in a post-New South Africa context.

Saarah Jappie's Masters explored the life of Cape Town-based Islamic manuscripts, or kietaabs, looking at their role(s) in a broader socio-historical context as opposed to limiting their significance to their content.  While Greenwood continues to work for the APC Research Initiative, Jappie will soon leave Cape Town's shores for New Jersey, where she will begin her PhD at Princeton University.