CONTRIBUTORS

Contributors

Emma Daitz is a PhD candidate in the department of Sociology at UCT where she also lectures periodically.

Retha Ferguson is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at UWC. Her dissertation, 'Neoliberal abstractions and microhistorical illuminations: dispatches from Cape Town', examines the relationship between the decline of empire and the rise of globalised capital as the new configuration of power. Towards critiquing this condition from the Global South, a historical materialist approach is deployed to unearth the material human stories hidden behind the monumental abstractions that characterise economic discourse. By illuminating the tangible microhistories of relationality along the externalities of the economy, the study aims to dismantle the rationale of depoliticised individual actors, minted into ideal citizens by the omniscient market. Ferguson is also a former Masters Fellow of the CHR. Her thesis 'Voortrekker Road Palimpsest: A Study in Social, Spatial and Temporal Flux in the City' was a study on the intersecting microhistories at play in Voortrekker Road, Cape Town, as a site of fractured negotiation within South Africa as a transitional society. Her work is keenly concerned with formulating a conversation between the granular and universal, and following the lessons from Walter Benjamin, she incorporates visuality into her work.

Premesh Lalu is Professor of History and a former founding director of the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the Western Cape (UWC). Lalu is co-editor with Patricia Hayes and G. Arunima of Love and Revolution in the Twentieth Century Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds (2021). His forthcoming book, Undoing Apartheid, will be published by Polity Press in Autumn 2022. He has recently been invited to take up a post as Professor of History at the Africa Institute, Sharjah. This paper is published under the auspices of the Communicating the Humanities platform at the CHR, UWC.

Gary Minkley is DST/NRF SARChI Chair in Social Change and Professor of History at the University of Fort Hare. His research examines the ways that the social is both formed and changed, with an emphasis on ordinary lives and everyday practices and focuses primarily on the Eastern Cape in South Africa. He is the recent co-editor (with Patricia Hayes) of Ambivalent: Photography and Visibility in African History (2020) and the co-author of Unsettled History: Making South African Public Pasts (2017).

Phindezwa 'Phindi' Mnyaka is a senior lecturer in the department of History at the University of the Western Cape. She has published widely on African photography and visual culture with a particular interest in southern African photographic collections. She teaches courses on gender and colonialism, the history of colonialism in Africa and experimental modes of writing history.

Sinazo Mtshemla works as an archivist at the National Heritage and Cultural Studies Centre at the University of Fort Hare where she is also studying towards a PhD. Her research focuses on sound and the archive.

Uthandile Njikelana is a Masters Candidate at the University of Fort Hare. She also works as a research assistant at the South African Chairs Initiative for Social Change (SARChI) at the University of Fort Hare.

Craig Paterson completed his PhD in 2019 on the history of umdyarho wamahashe in the Eastern Cape at Rhodes University. He has been a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Epistemic Justice and Engaged Research Group in Rhodes University's Community Engagement Division, and in the SARChI Chair in Social Change at the University of Fort Hare.

Helena Pohlandt-McCormick is associate professor of African history at Rhodes University. Her research focuses on postcolonial and postapartheid history and theory, archival studies, gender/sexuality studies, race/racism and the Eastern Cape. She is a contributor to a collection of essays entitled Archive Stories: Evidence, Experience, History (Duke University Press, 2005). Her book, 'I Saw a Nightmare …' Doing Violence to Memory: The Soweto Uprising, June 16, 1976 was published by Columbia University Press and the American Historical Association in 2005.

Michelle Smith is based at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape. She obtained her doctoral degree from the University of Fort Hare, located in the Eastern Cape. Her current research interests are in museum and visual studies.

Candice Steele was a postdoctoral researcher with the DST/NRF SARChI Chair in Social Change at the University of Fort Hare, from 2019-2020. Her research focused on the Pauline Ingle photographic collection, which was located in the Eastern Cape. She currently holds the position of Manager of the Graduate School in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Stellenbosch University.

Janeke Thumbran is a senior lecturer in the History Department at Rhodes University. She has a PhD in African History from the University of Minnesota. Her monograph, titled 'From Stellenbosch to Pretoria: (Re)-Locating the "Coloured Question" (1932-1990)' examines how the state's expansion of the content of the 'coloured' category relied upon the disciplines of social work and sociology, first at Stellenbosch University and subsequently at the University of Pretoria. Janeke's second project, PUTCO and Apartheid's Infrastructure, examines how this bus company participated in the creation of the transport infrastructure of Bantustans such as Kwandebele and Bophuthatswana, as well as in the upholding of colonial and apartheid categories of race.

Ross Truscott is a senior researcher at the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. His research, informed by psychoanalytic, postcolonial, and critical theory, is concerned with social and cultural institutions and subjectivity.

LeslieWitz is a senior professor in the Department of History at the University of the Western Cape. His major research centres on how different histories are created and represented in the public domain through memorials, museums, festivals and tourism. He is the author of: Write Your Own History and Apartheid's Festival: Contesting South Africa's National Pasts, and co-author, with Noëleen Murray of Hostels, Homes Museum: Memoralising Migrant Labour Pasts in Lwandle, South Africa. Leslie, together with colleagues Ciraj Rassool and Gary Minkley, co-authored Unsettled History: Making South African Public Pasts, a book that reflects on public history in South Africa since the 1990s.