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UCT RESEARCH REPORT 2012
Nattrass, N.J. 2012. Understanding the origins and
prevalence of AIDS conspiracy beliefs in the United States
and South Africa. Sociology of Health and Illness, published
online (April). DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9566.2012.01480.x.
Nunn, A., Dickman, S., Nattrass, N.J., Cornwall, A. and
Gruskin, S. 2012. The impacts of AIDS movements on the
policy responses to HIV/AIDS in Brazil and South Africa: a
comparative analysis. Global public health, 7(10): 1031-1044.
Hodes, R. 2012. Investigating AIDS Conspiracies: the
critical value of postmodernism. Science as Culture, 21(4).
Seekings, J.F. 2012. Pathways to redistribution: the
emerging politics of social assistance across the global
‘south’. Journal fur Entwicklungspolitik, 28(1): 14-34.
Muyeba, S. and Seekings, J. 2012. Slum Dwellers to
Freeholders: Homeownership and Neighbourly Relations
in Poor Post-Apartheid Urban Neighbourhoods of Cape
Town, South Africa. South African Review of Sociology,
43(3): 41-63.
Strand, P. 2012. Public opinion as leadership disincentive:
exploring a governance dilemma in the AIDS response in
Africa. Contemporary Politics, 18(2): 174-185.
Ward, C.L., Artz, L.M., Berg, J.M., Boonzaier, F.A., Crawford-
Browne, S.H., Dawes, A.R.L., Foster, D.H., Matzopoulos, R.,
Nicol, A., Seekings, J.F., Van As, A.B. and Van Der Spuy, E.
2012. Violence, violence prevention, and safety: a research
agenda for South Africa. SAMJ South African Medical
Journal, 102(4): 215-218.
Institute for Humanities in
Africa (HUMA)
Research Report 2012
Director: Professor Deborah Posel
Centre Profile
The humanities have long been vital to the creative and
critical energies of societies in the throes of profound
change. HUMA – the Institute for the Humanities in Africa
– is a new initiative at UCT, intended to create a space
of dynamic interdisciplinary community for scholars and
students in the humanities at large. Fostering top-end
academic research, HUMA seeks also to draw on that work
to nurture critical public debate, promoting UCT’s vision
of itself as a civic university contributing to the making of
democratic citizenship.
HUMA’s intellectual agenda is driven by two inclusive
research themes ‘on being human’, and ‘circuits of
consumption’, which inform and structure three primary
objectives:
• to conduct and promote research that is historically
grounded and theoretically engaged, with an eye to the
‘big’ theoretical and ethical questions that anchor South
African issues in wider fields of experience and analysis.
The combination of intellectual focus and breadth
provided by HUMA’s research themes is intended
to open up spaces for dialogue, collaboration and
argument across disparate theoretical, epistemological
and methodological traditions, and in ways that help
examine the project of interdisciplinary work.
• to nurture the expertise and enthusiasm of graduate
students interested in an academic career, through
a combination of intensive and supportive doctoral
supervision, and a broader programme of seminars,
symposia and workshops that help develop the
intellectual versatility and confidencewhich an academic
career requires. A doctoral fellowship programme is
central to the pursuit of this objective.
• to bring scholars and graduate students into
conversation with interested publics, around issues
of shared and topical concern. HUMA hopes to
promote what public intellectuals in the humanities
do best, which is to de-familiarise and unsettle
established ways of seeing, think creatively about
pressing social and political questions, and keep the
imagination of alternative futures alive.
This mission is embedded in a particular understanding of
our location in Africa. Africa is a landmass with a deep and
complex history of connection and disconnection amongst
its many inhabitants; being African means being party to
formative relationships of connection and disconnection
that shape the ways we think and act. Our scholarship and
debate, then, will be positioned in Africa, even if the focus
of our deliberations is not limited to the continent.
Centre Statistics
Professors, associate professors and lecturers, with
departmental appointments
2
Research and Contract Staff
2
Administrative Staff
2
Total
6
Research fields and staff
Deborah Posel is a professor of sociology, an appointment
that coincided with her taking up the position as HUMA’s
founding director in January 2010. She has written and