Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela

Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela is the South African National Research Foundation’s Research Chair in Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma and the Director of the Centre for the Study of the Afterlife of Violence and the Reparative Quest (AVReQ) at Stellenbosch University. Her research interest is in historical trauma and its intergenerational repercussions and exploring what the “repair” of these transgenerational effects might mean. She has won several academic awards, which include the Harry Oppenheimer Fellowship Award, the most prestigious academic award in Africa; the Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellowship; a Fellowship at the Kennedy School’s Carr Centre for Human Rights Policy, Harvard University; an honorary Doctor of Theology from the Friedrich-Schiller University, Jena, Germany; and an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Rhodes University. Awards for her critically acclaimed book A Human Being Died that Night are the Alan Paton Award in South Africa, and the Christopher Award in the United States for “a book that affirms the highest values of the human spirit.”

Prof. Patricia Parker

Prof. Patricia Parker (Ph.D. University of Texas at Austin) is Director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities, the Ruel W. Tyson Distinguished Professor of Humanities, and Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. From 2015-2021 she served as Chair of the Department of Communication and Director of the Graduate Certificate in Participatory Research (2017-2021).

Professor Parker’s research is community-based and focused on communication for social justice. Her work is driven by questions about discourses that influence whether and how people have the capacity to engage each other’s humanity to work toward positive social change. She is interested in understanding the communication processes that can block or fuel that capacity in a particular community or organization, especially where there is unequal power. The author of two books and dozens of articles and book chapters exploring the intersections of race, gender, leadership, and power, her most recent book is Ella Baker’s Catalytic Leadership: A Primer on Community Engagement and Communication for Social Justice, published in 2020 by the University of California Press.