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Being Human
approaching questions that challenge and extend older
metropolitan ideas. Taking the initiative still further, it
considers what the notion of archive enables and what it
forecloses, and explores new methods for approaching
archival and similar materials.
The initiative investigates to the fullest the circumstances
of the making of the archival inheritance, its refashioning
over time, and processes of inclusion and exclusion. This
is accomplished by focusing on how archives shape public,
political and academic discourses and practices, and were,
themselves, shaped by public, political and academic
discourses and practices.
This draws attention to the relationship between academic
disciplines and their archives. Former UCT Vice-Chancellor
Professor Njabulo Ndebele’s observation that “[t]here
can be no transformation of the curriculum, or indeed
of knowledge itself, without an interrogation of archive”
informs the initiative’s exploration of these relationships in
a variety of disciplines.
Along with Professor Pippa Skotnes from UCT’s Michaelis
School of Art, the DST/NRF Chair in Archive and Public
Culture anchors a UCT-wide initiative, Archive and Curation
(ARC): The Visual University and Its Columbarium. ARC
engages with projects that investigate the university’s
extended columbarium (the many research collections,
both in formal university repositories and in informal bottom
drawers of professors’ desks or hidden in departmental
cupboards), encouraging self-reflection of the relationships
between disciplines and their archives within the university.
The initiative is committed to inter- and transdisciplinary
modes of work and social learning formats. Close attention
is given to postgraduate pedagogy and the production of
future academics, with postgraduate research structured
around regular research development workshops and
active support for sole-authored student publications.
The platform has achieved high recognition, nationally and
internationally, as a trusted voice with the will and power to
speak out in support of archival institutions and the public
interest, as well as for its trailblazing work as a novel form
of popular media-based activist intervention.
There can be no transformation of the
curriculum, or indeed of knowledge
itself, without an interrogation of archive.
District Six Museum