Date:    27 May 2016
Venue:  Cape Sun Hotel, Strand Street, Cape Town 
Time:    10:30-13:30

The theme for the Racism Dialogue series is “Racial inequalities and racism in South Africa: history, mechanisms & ideas for change”. The Cape Town leg will focus on “History and mechanisms of racism”.

We are pleased to announce an exciting group of speakers for our Cape Town event. The discussion will be chaired and moderated by media personality Mr John Perlman. Panelists included in this round will be:

• Prof Adam Haupt, Associate Professor of Media Studies at the Centre for Film and Media Studies, UCT
• Prof Paul Maylam, Emeritus Professor of History, Rhodes University
• Dr Sarah Henkeman, Senior Staff Associate of the Centre of Criminology in the Faculty of Law, UCT
• Dr Shose Kessi, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology, UCT
• Mr Angelo Fick, current affairs and news analyst at eNCA

You can follow the discussion on Twitter via @HSRCza and use the hashtag: #RacismDialogues

Please RSVP to Solly Lebelo on email slebelo@hsrc.ac.za

Prof. Paul Maylam
I have been retired for the past three-and-a half years, having previously been professor of history at Rhodes from 1991 to 2012. Before that I taught at what was the University of Natal, in Durban, from 1974 to 1991. My main work on racism is a book entitled South Africa’s Racial Past: the History and Historiography of Racism, Segregation and Apartheid, published in 2001. I have since produced a book on the ways in which Cecil Rhodes has been commemorated since his death – a book that has relevance to the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaign. I am currently working on a history of Rhodes University.

Dr Sarah Henkeman
is an independent conflict and social justice practitioner/scholar, and a senior staff associate of the Centre of Criminology in the Faculty of Law, University of Cape Town (UCT).  Before, during and after the end of apartheid she has worked in the Public interest, Human Rights, Education and Conflict Resolution sectors.  She then worked independently for over twenty years and recently under the name ‘Transdisciplinary Project for Social Justice’ which partners with universities and a range of civil society organisations in South Africa, Norway and Denmark on social justice related projects. In 2005 a chasm between conflict theory and her experience in her practice caused her to embark on a ‘deeper and longer’ analysis of invisible/visible violence since 1652.  This transdisciplinary approach to violence suggests that racism, as an invisible/visible structure of violence which is symbolic, structural, psychological and physical in nature; needs to be approached in its structure and not only its surface definitions.

Dr Shose Kessi
is senior lecturer in the Department of Psychology at UCT. She completed her PhD in 2010 at the London School of Economics and was the Harvard-Mandela fellow at the DuBois Institute for African and African American studies at Harvard University in 2014. Shose is one of the founding members and current chairperson of the UCT Black Academic Caucus. Her research centers around community-based empowerment and social change, particularly exploring how race, class, and gender, impact on people’s participation in transformation efforts. A key focus is the development of Photovoice methodology as a participatory action research tool that can raise consciousness and mobilize community groups into social action. Some of her current Photovoice projects focus on the experiences of black students and black academics at UCT and LSE. 

Angelo Fick
is a resident current affairs and news analyst at eNCA (e News Channel Africa), where he also regularly publishes opinion pieces on the political economy of South Africa.  He completed a graduate thesis on ‘race’, gender and representation in South African writing in the late 1990s.  For fifteen years he taught courses across disciplines varying from English literature to Sociology in South Africa.  In 2005-2006 he held a Unesco Fellowship to the Netherlands Research School for Women’s Studies at Utrecht University, pursuing research on the nexus of ‘race’, gender and class in representation, grounding his work in feminist theories, colonial discourse theory, and post-structuralism.  Between 2008 and the end of his university teaching career in 2013, he taught courses in logic, argumentation and the philosophy of science in faculties of science and engineering in South Africa.

The dialogues are scheduled as follows:

11 May 2016 – Pretoria

27 May 2016 – Cape Town

14 June 2016 – Durban