The WISER Podcast

WISER

Conversations, audio-essays and public talks from the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER), at the University of the Witwatersrand.

  1. Oct 26

    Postcolonial Air and Atmospheres: Elemental Life and Environmental Crisis

    The book is fully Open Access and can be accessed at this link: https://uclpress.co.uk/book/postcolonial-air-and-atmospheres/   The volume re-opens and revitalises debates on the materialities of air and atmospheres, including practices of breathing, in a multitude of postcolonial and Southern hemispheric contexts. It probes the limits, and extends the narrow spatial purview, of much of the emerging scholarship, considering historical questions of air and enslavement alongside South Asian histories of air-conditioning and the drifting toxic atmospheres of water bodies in the African South.   Affective atmospheres born of dust, damp, wind and sound; unfree and impure airs shaped by histories of inequality; and modes and manners of breathing, whether asthmatically, interoceptively, laboriously or as a means of creating an artwork, all reinvigorate our understanding of aerial elemental media. Throughout, the book explores ways to recalibrate forms of air, atmospheres and breathing for a more productively entangled, relational, regenerative and just world.  The case studies and more than fifty colour images make the book compelling for teaching and new research.    The volume emerged from a collaboration between WISER at Wits University and the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at University College London. It began as a co-hosted series called ‘Breathing In: Air and Atmospheres’, on the WISER online platform.

  2. 03/14/2024

    Hlonipha Mokoena interviews Achille Mbembe

    Hlonipha interviews Achille on winning the  Holberg prize, on their backgrounds, institutions and intellectual obsessions.

  3. 11/17/2022

    Bessie Head’s Absorbent Literature

    In this week’s episode, Anneke Rautenbach discusses how, when the writer Bessie Head escaped apartheid South Africa and settled in the rural village of Serowe, Botswana, she remained haunted by the violence of her past. In her work on experimental development farms, alongside locals and foreign volunteers, she discovered not only a source of healing, but a subterranean moral philosophy. Anneke Rautenbach spent time in residence at WiSER in 2022, participated in The WiSER Podcast group and travelled from there to Botswana to conduct archival research at the Bessie Head Papers in Serowe. She is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University, where she is completing a dissertation on the role of the public intellectual in southern Africa. The PhD focuses on flashpoint moments in recent history when language played a particularly dynamic role -- from anticolonial prophecy to nationalist sloganeering to the metaphors of the HIV/AIDS crisis. The WiSER Podcast Team this year is convened by Sarah Nuttall, sound editing by Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh and designs by Bronwyn Kotzen.

  4. 09/06/2022

    Cheikh BA: Riverine Landscapes in Senegal

    In this episode of The WiSER Podcast, Cheikh BA discusses the Senegal River as an intense node of knowledge making. He discusses how those who live alongside it observe, name and think about its flows, quantities, evolutions, water paths and distribution. He also shows how,  in parallel and sometimes in confrontation, the "modern management" of natural resources translates into developmental and technocratic visions. He invites listeners to reflect with him on ways of encountering this riverine landscape, actually or in our imaginations.   Cheikh BA is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in WiSER’s Regions2050 Research Programme and works on local notions of environmental justice, decolonisation of environmental knowledge and the ecological history of territorial governance in West Africa.   The WiSER Podcast Team this year is convened by Sarah Nuttall, sound editing by Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh and designs by Bronwyn Kotzen.

  5. 08/01/2022

    The new nuclear age

    In this week’s episode, Simon van Schalkwyk discusses our new nuclear age, the re-emergence of a long latent Cold War atavism, including the politics of containment and psycho-warfare. Online ‘nuke maps’ mean you can now simulate the effects of nuclear strikes anywhere in the world. He sets the location for Braamfontain, Johannesburg and sees what (would) happen…. Simon van Schalkwyk is a Visiting Research fellow at WiSER and a senior lecturer in the English Department at Wits University. His research interests focus primarily on poetry, both American and South African, and his debut poetry collection, Transcontinental Delay, appeared in 2021.   The WiSER Podcast Team this year is convened by Sarah Nuttall, sound editing by Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh and designs by Bronwyn Kotzen.

  6. 07/21/2022

    Bridging the Bay: Maputo-Katembe

    In this episode, Caio Simões de Araújo discusses the politics of infrastructure in Southern Africa, taking as an entry point the Maputo-Katembe bridge, inaugurated in 2018. Araújo argues that the bridge is part of a renewed public investment in infrastructure enabled by Chinese cooperation in Africa. Yet, rather than a straightforward road into the future, the bridge is embedded in a highly complex set of temporal landscapes  - ones that warrant close and careful analysis.

  7. 06/27/2022

    Vampires: Pandemics & Politics

    In this episode, Timothy Wright discusses the graphic novel Rebirth (2012), which imagines a node of vampire culture in the striated and gritty space of Johannesburg. He reads the book’s terminally ill vampires as offering a surprising, generative vantage point from which to think through some urgent social and political issues of the contemporary moment: whiteness, entanglement, transformation, blood imaginaries, and the global politics of immunity and insulation around the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.   Timothy Wright is an Assistant Professor of English Literature at Bilkent University, Ankara and a former post-doctoral fellow at WISER who is spending his sabbatical at the Institute. The WiSER Podcast Team this year is convened by Sarah Nuttall, sound editing by Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh and designs by Bronwyn Kotzen.

  8. 06/09/2022

    Two Treasons, Two States, One Family

    In Episode One of Season Five of The WiSER Podcast, the Reverend Frank Chikane and his son Regotsofetse Chikane, recollect and discuss the moment – separated by 30 years – they were each arrested for treason – by the apartheid and post-apartheid states, successively. As prominent anti-apartheid activist and #FeesMustFall activist respectively, they retell their experiences  - and the conversation reflects on the state of a democratic South Africa, the current dangers it faces and what choosing to fight for a more democratic state has meant and will come to mean, then and now.

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About

Conversations, audio-essays and public talks from the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER), at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Information

  • Creator
    WISER
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2026
  • Episodes
    51
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright WISER 2020. All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    The WISER Podcast

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