The Humanities Forum is a collaboration between the Academy of Science in South Africa (ASSAf), Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA) and UKZN Press. Ulrike Kistner, Professor in the Department of Classics and World Languages at UNISA and author of Commissioning and Contesting Post-Apartheid’s Human Rights, will present a public lecture titled The Humanities and Poverty . 

The Humanities and Poverty examines the ways in which, in recent years, the measure of legitimacy granted to the Humanities in South African higher education has been their relation to poverty. This is not co-incidental as the Humanities mark a site where, as Garcia Duttnann has put it, “It is as if the human being appears where pverty stops, and poverty begins where the human being disappears.” This lecture examines the terms of the received relation between the Humanities and poverty, as asks whether the currency of these terms is no itself one of the hallmarks of a poverty of philosophy – a failure to ask new questions and to crete a new philosophy of poverty.

This lecture will be followed by a panel discussion on The Value of the Humanities with Ulrike Kistner, Deborah Posel (UCT), Mike van Graan (director and arts activist), Njabulo Ndebele (author and academic), chaired by John Maytham.

The lecture will be preceded by the launch of a related title recently published by UKZN Press – Re-imagining the Social in South Africa: Critique, Theory and Post-Apartheid Society, edited by Heather Jacklin and Peter Vale.

The event is convened by John Higgins, Department of English Language and Literature (UCT).

Ulrike Kistner audio recording available for download.

Start: 9 Apr ’10 5:00 pm

End: 9 Apr ’10 7:25 pm

Cost: Free

Category: , 

Organizer: GIPCA

Email: fin-gipca@uct.ac.za

Venue: Hiddingh Hall 

Phone: +27 21 480 7156 

Address: UCT Hiddingh Campus, 31 Orange Street, Cape Town, 8001, South Africa