The APC in 2016

The APC's research endeavours nurture emergent forms of knowledge production and new methodologies designed to unsettle regularised disciplinary practices. In 2016 we attempt to do this in a manner responsive to contemporary events in South Africa and abroad, including the recent student protests. We seek to do this in a manner hospitable to alternative approaches and above all, productive of new forms of knowledge. We fuse these research concerns with those that arise out of the work of the Archival Platform in the area of archive activism.  In 2016 our primary focus is on the neglected area of the long southern African past before European colonialism.

MA research student, Rosemary Lombard, has taken over the APC administration from Dr. June Bam-Hutchison who has moved into a four-month research fellowship with the APC.  We welcome Rosemary in this new role and are already appreciating the special touch that she brings to our daily operations.  We are delighted to see June settling into her research looking at institutional partnerships in relation to the Five Hundred Year Archive (FHYA) project.

Needing more extensive introduction are a number of new faces at the APC. Debra Pryor joins us as the archivist/content manager on the FHYA project. Debra spent six years as the audio archivist at the Centre for Popular Memory here at UCT. For the past two years she worked as an archival assistant in the Special Collections section of the UCT Libraries. She now heads up a team of students working on the FHYA comprising Christian Mpazayabo, Lauren White and Kerusha Govender. (If you get the chance, be sure to hear her perform with the  Boulevard Blues Band. It will stop you in your tracks!)

Duane Jethro, for some time an energetic external contributor at APC events, joins us this year as a post-doc, a position held jointly with the History department.  Duane completed an undergraduate degree and a research Masters, with distinction, in Religious Studies at UCT.  He went on to complete a PhD as part of an international Nederlandse Wetenschapsorganisatie-funded project, Heritage Dynamics: politics of authentication and aesthetics of persuasion in Brazil, Ghana, the Netherlands and South Africa, led by Professor Birgit Meyer and Professor Mattijs van de Port. He successfully defended his thesis, entitled "Aesthetics of Power: Heritage Formation and the Senses in Post-Apartheid South Africa", at the University of Utrecht in September 2015. Duane has published articles on Freedom Park, the vuvuzela, and tourism and tour guiding in Material Religion, African Diaspora and Tourist Studies.