2021 Annual Report
Convening an humanities inquiry that crosses, blurs and sometimes dissolves the disciplinary frames of the traditional Arts and Humanities, and with the momentum in programming for its new Greatmore Humanities Hub, the CHR has expanded its focus towards the invention of concepts that articulates new scholarly and public expressions of the humanities across different scales for our increasingly complex times. This is a project that has long taken the institutional history and location of UWC as a ground from which to reinvigorate the Humanities, expressed in a commitment to renewing the promises of freedom that were wrapped in the forceful and yet tentative ideas, arts and cultural initiatives of the late Twentieth Century. This was an inquiry that was excavated through the CHR’s historic ‘Uncontained: Opening the Community Arts Archive’ exhibition and book project (2011-2013). As the UWC and Mayibuye Archives art collection, ART CONTRA APARTHEID avows, this was a promise to our society as well as to the world.
Net Vir Pret Progress Report – 2019
The highlight of 2019 so far has been an invitation from the International Association of Theatre for Children and Young People (ASSITEJ) to perform an adaptation of our 2018 River & Redfin Giant Puppet Show at the Cradle of Creativity Festival at the Baxter Theatre in Cape Town.
Re-vitalising the Humanities
In the fourteen years since its establishment in 2006, the CHR accomplished its goal of giving new impetus to the experiments on building a post-apartheid future that defined the University of the Western Cape in the 1980s. Rather than casting itself as neutral and devoid of perspective, the CHR insisted on beginning with an inquiry into the very conditions that brought the university into being under apartheid. In place of assuming the role of diagnostician, it offered a space of working through but also working out its relation to this untenable inheritance. The centre provided a space in the university in which to think its way out of the legacies of apartheid and to think about what it means to be a university in Africa. This report tracks the itineraries of thought and practice that has animated the CHR over the last 10 years of its existence.
Net Vir Pret Report: 2018 Parade
The December Day of Reconciliation Giant Puppet Parade is the highlight of the Net vir Pret year. It brings together work developed across all our programmes in a stunning performance which is widely attended by a large part of the community.
Net vir Pret: Progress Report 31 October 2018
Net Vir Pret is one of the partners with the CHR on the annual Barrydale Puppet Parade and Performance.
Net vir Pret Annual Report 2017/2018
Net vir Pret continued its work with children and youth in Barrydale and on surrounding farms and ran 20 different programmes during the year under review.
10 Year Review of the Centre for Humanities Research
In a rapidly shifting social context of a post-apartheid society, the study of the humanities offers creative possibilities for dealing with the challenges of globalisation, rapid technological change, and the legacies of colonialism and apartheid.
2017 Annual Report
Milestones were specifically recorded in areas of research publication, graduate fellowship support, consolidation of national and international collaborations, and enhancement of our public arts projects.
2015 Annual Report
In recognition of its achievements in Humanities research, publication and education since 2006, the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) was selected as the national Department of Science and Technology and the National Research Foundation (DST-NRF) Flagship on Critical Thought in African Humanities in 2015. At the official launch of the Flagship in September 2015, Minister of Science and Technology, Naledi Pandor, expressed her wish that the flagship would see the CHR graduating to the position of a national Centre of Excellence in the Humanities in the next five years
2014 Annual Report
The Centre for Humanities Research of the University of the Western Cape undertook bold new steps to constitute new sites of humanities exchange in 2014. With this report we introduce the proposed Flagship in Critical Thought in African Humanities (FLACTAH) and report on the research of CHR in 2014.
2013 Annual Report
The CHR has emerged as a major contributor to the ongoing national debates on the humanities and social sciences in South Africa. Several examples attest to this. The ongoing publication of opinion pieces and commentaries by Suren Pillay in local and international newspapers coupled with several keynotes at Universities in South Africa, Argentina, Switzerland, USA, and India, and an invitation for the director of the CHR to serve on the board of the International Consortium of Humanities Centres and Institutes continues to draw attention to the CHR’s formulation of a reconstituted study of the humanities.
2012 Annual Report
As part of the annual report of the Centre for Humanities Research for 2012, we would like to offer a perspective on our work that also sheds light of the milestones reached since its inception as a project of the Faculty of Arts in 2006. For the last six years the CHR has held seminars, public events, conferences and symposia on a wide range of subjects that intersect with and have grown out of the Centre’s core research platforms which engage variously with questions of race, subjectivity, war and violence, aesthetics and politics.
2010 Annual Report
The Centre for Humanities Research of the University of the Western Cape is pleased to report on the successful completion of master’s and doctoral students funded through the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation fellowship awards in the humanities during the 2010 academic year. Amongst the recipients of Mellon grants for doctoral studies, Charles Mulinda Kabwete successfully completed a doctoral dissertation on narratives of escape during the Rwandan genocide based on extensive oral and archival research in two southern communes in Rwanda, Jill Weintroub completed a doctoral dissertation on the rock art archives of Dorothea Bleek, and Mduduzi Xakaza has submitted a completed draft of his dissertation on the tradition of landscape photography in South Africa for consideration to the History Department at UWC and has since been offered the directorship of the Natal Art Gallery starting in 2011.
2009 Annual Report
The Centre for Humanities Research reached several milestones in its various research projects and theoretical engagements over the 2009 academic year. Driven by the commitment and research of fellows attached to the Programme on the Study of the Humanities in Africa, the CHR has enabled research on themes such as War and the Everyday, Aesthetics and Politics, Cities in Transition and Historicism and the Humanities. Most of the projects of the CHR delve into the question of the formation of postcolonial subjectivities and their relation to knowledge projects in the humanities.