Dialogue on Troubling Seasons of Hate* Sexual Violence: Remembering, representing, resisting

Women’s and Gender Studies with the Centre for Humanities’ Factory of the Arts and the Laboratory of Kinetic Objects (LoKO), Faculty of Arts

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Programme: 26th MARCH, THE ARTS SPACE, UWC

12.30 Light lunch served

1.15 Welcome: Tamara Shefer (overview of the Mellon-funded project on New IMAGINARIES)

1.20 Overview of the Troubling Seasons of Hate Dialogues: Haley McEwen

1.30 Introduction to Unbroken Silence Itumeleng Wa-Lehulere (director, Factory of the Arts, also welcome on behalf of Factory of the Arts and LOKO, CHR) and Pumeza Rashe-Matoti (artist-in-residence, CHR)

1.45 -2.45 Performance of Unbroken Silence by Pumeza Rashe-Mtoti 2.45 – 3.15 Discussion facilitated by Prof Kopano Ratele

3.15 – 4.00 Reflections and dialogues on sexual violence: remembering, representing & resisting: Prof Floretta Boonzaier (UCT) and Dr Redi Koobak (University of Linkoping): Chair: Nadira Omarjee

4.00 – 4.15 Evaluation and closing

* Dialogues on Troubling Seasons of Hate is a series of national dialogues at different universities initiated by the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies, (WICDs), Wits University

This event is hosted by the Mellon funded Project on New Imaginaries of Gender and Sexual Justice, Women’s and Gender Studies, University of the Western Cape and funded by WICDS.

BIONOTES

Floretta Boonzaier is Associate Professor in Psychology at the University of Cape Town. She works in feminist, critical, social and decolonial psychologies, with special interests in intersectional subjectivities, participatory methodologies and gender-based violence all areas in which she has published. She is past Mandela Fellow and Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. She serves on the Advisory Board of the Centre for Narrative Research at the University of East London, UK and on the Board of the African Gender Institute at the University of Cape Town.

Redi Koobak is a feminist cultural studies scholar who contributes to analysis of modes of power in contemporary political landscape, in particular Estonia and postsocialist Eastern Europe, through a sustained focus on the visual arts, culture, media and memory politics. Her research revolves around three trajectories: critical discourses of postsocialism and postcolonialism; visual politics of gender, war and nationalism; and various forms of transnational and local feminisms. She is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Thematic Studies – Gender Studies at Linköping University, Sweden where she also defended her dissertation, Whirling Stories: Postsocialist Feminist Imaginaries and the Visual Arts (Linköping University Press, 2013).

Haley McEwen is Research Coordinator at the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies (WiCDS). She has recently submitted her Doctoral dissertation (Sociology, Wits), which examines the ways in which the conservative U.S. based ‘pro-family’ movement is fueling homophobia and transphobia in African contexts. Her work takes an intersectional decolonial approach to the study of how modern/colonial knowledge systems are being reproduced by the pro-family movement in its work to maintain a Christonormative, white supremacist, and heteropatriarchal global order that is controlled by the US. Haley has also played a coordinating role in projects that employ art activist methods in order to challenge, and expand, existing social imaginaries of difference and otherness. She is currently coordinating the course Research Methods for Critical Diversity Studies, which forms part of the Honours and Masters programs in Critical Diversity Studies offered by WiCDS. Haley holds an MPhil in Diversity Studies (UCT) and a BA in Social Relations (Michigan State University, US).

Kopano Ratele is Professor in the Institute of Social and Health Sciences at the University of South Africa (UNISA) and researcher in the South African Medical Research Council-UNISA Violence, Injury & Peace Research Unit. He runs the Research Unit on Men & Masculinities as well as the Transdisciplinary African Psychology Programme. A regular guest on radio and television, the major focus of his work is on boys, men and masculinities in relation to socioeconomic class, violence, traditions, sexuality, culture, and race. Among other roles, Kopano is past president of the Psychological Society of South Africa and a member of a number of editorial boards, including Feminism & Psychology, NORMA: the International Journal for Masculinity Studies, and Psychology in Society. He is also convener of the NRF panel on Psychology and member of the national Ministerial University Transformation Oversight Committee. His books include There was this goat (with Antjie Krog and Nosisi Mpolweni, 2009) and Liberating masculinities (2016).