The African Critical Inquiry Programme (ACIP) is pleased to announce that the 2023 ACIP Workshop will be Archiving Otherwise: Sound Thinking and Sonic Practice.

The project was proposed by organizers Aidan Erasmus (History), Valmont Layne (Centre for Humanities Research), Ben Verghese (History/CHR) and Michael Bhatch (Lecturer/Artist), all based at the University of the Western Cape, on behalf of the University of the Western Cape/Centre for Humanities Research Sound Working Group.

It will take place across sites in Cape Town, South Africa in March 2023. Archiving Otherwise

What does it mean to take seriously the practice of collecting, curating, and performing sound and music as a public archival practice? What does it mean to reflect on the forms and modes of sonic intellectual work outside the university as critical conversations on archival engagement within the university? What might it mean to think of sampling, sound practice and DJ scholarship as modes of public scholarship? Archiving Otherwise: Sound Thinking and Sonic Practice is a three-day workshop hosted in March 2023 that draws on the concepts of DJ scholarship (as articulated by Lynnée Denise) and public sonic practice as an invitation to think anew about the act of public archival practice and study in South Africa. Focusing on sound as a generative form that cuts across and disrupts existing archival debates that tend to focus on the documentary and the enclosed collection, the workshop foregrounds the use and abuse of sound as performed public archival artefact and discourse to better grasp how we might think about public archives and public history. Through the emphasis in the workshop on the practices of public archival scholarship and study as encapsulated in the listener, the collector, the curator, and the crate-digger, the workshop intends to interrogate the sites of intellectual practice and production in relation to sound and music, and asks what kinds of feedback this might engender for the academy and its intellectual modes of address. The workshop will thus address the relationship between the institution, its objects, and its publics. It will feature sampling workshops, live listening sessions, activist and practitioner-led discussions while interacting with the work and research of academic scholars, as well as conversations around embedded practice.