APC partners with Historical Studies

13 Mar 2015
Image: Lauren White
13 Mar 2015

 

In 2015 the APC has launched a collaboration with a new departmental partner at UCT, Historical Studies, situated in the neighbouring Beattie building. 

This includes joint supervision of postgraduate projects, sharing of intellectual and institutional resources, and critical curricular reforms at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels in Historical Studies. 

A major development in 2015 is the teaching collaboration on the new Honours core course organised around the notion of ‘archives’ – seemingly the first of its kind in a South African history department. Convened by APC associate and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Historical Studies, Dr Bodhisattva Kar, the course is an eight-week intensive seminar positioned as a core course that is compulsory for all Honours students. It invites the students to think through some of the key conceptual and methodological issues concerning historiography and its modes of writing and enquiry. It is organised around the notion of ‘archives’ understood both as an institutionalised order of evidence and as a shorthand for an entire epistemological complex.

Dr Kar notes that, ‘The principal aim of the collaboration is to plough back some of the gains of the innovative, interdisciplinary and state-of-the-art research carried out in the APC unit into the regular pedagogical space of the historical discipline within the university.’

Three APC researchers – NRF Chair Professor Carolyn Hamilton, Honorary Research Fellow Professor John Wright and Senior Researcher Dr Mbongiseni Buthelezi – guest taught a three-session segment of the course titled ‘Ethnographic, Oral and Mnemonic Archives’. Focusing on the James Stuart Archive on which Wright has been working for 44 years, they brought into the classroom some of the questions that have been central to the APC’s work since its establishment, creating a link between the research initiative and the training of the next generation of scholars. 

Three new APC scholars – Masters Research Scholar Rehana Odendaal, and two Honours Research Scholars – Kerusha Govender and Lauren White – are taking the class.