Centre for Humanities Research

Please join us on Thursday 13 August at the UWC Innovation Hub, for the next Humanities in Session: Archive Lab, 'Immersive Technologies and the Archive',
with Meghna Singh and Kyle Marais.

Date: Thursday 13 August
Times: 13:00pm-15:00pm
Venue: UWC Innovation Hub, 405 Voortrekker Rd, Oostersee, Cape Town

Synopsis:
The advancement of immersive technologies is fast shaping archival practice. What does this new yet old complexity of design, history, technology and mixed realities mean for the future of storytelling, research and education? How do social, historical and political urgencies influence the technology of immersion and its ethical and ecological stakes?

Join us at the UWC Innovation Hub to learn about immersive technologies and the archive from Creative Technologist, Kyle Marais from the UWC Immersive Zone (UIZ) and Meghna Singh, Visual Artist and NAV Fellow. The discussion will be moderated by Marcos Martins (NAV Fellow) and Laurent de Laroche Souvestre (Lead AR/VR Developer at the UIZ). Before the discussion, the audience will be provided with a group tour of the Immersive Zone.

This discussion is presented as part of NAV’s ongoing Archive Lab series, which gathers scholars, students, artists and archivists to think together about the activation of research collections. Archive Lab is part of the Humanities in Session series presented by the Centre for Humanities Research at UWC.

Please note that Archive Lab presents works in progress. No independent recordings are permitted. NAV records its Archive Lab sessions for record purposes only

https://www.chrflagship.uwc.ac.za/humanities-in-session-archive-lab-immersive-technologies-and-the-archive/

Please join us on Thursday 30 July for the next Humanities in Session: Artists' Forum, with Tshegofatso Moeng.

Date: Thursday 30 July
Times: 13:00pm-15:00pm
Venue: Iyatsiba Lab,
66 Greatmore Street, Woodstock
(enter via Regent St)

Synopsis:
This session will be led by Tshegofatso Moeng who is a versatile South African singer, arranger, composer, and music director. He holds a Master of Music in Opera Performance from the University of Maryland (2017), which he completed on a Fulbright Scholarship awarded in 2014. Moeng has performed principal roles in operas by Mozart, Verdi, Puccini, Britten, Offenbach, and Marc Blitzstein. He has also appeared as a soloist in major concert works, including Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, William Kentridge’s The Head and the Load, and Philip Miller’s Kaunas Kantata. A frequent collaborator with composer Philip Miller, Moeng has co-composed and co-arranged several major projects, notably Reuben T. Caluza: The B Side (2021) and Inkomo Iwile (2026). He has served as composer and music director for prominent international festivals and productions, including Little Gig (2024), African Imaginary (2025), Nkoli: A Fierce & Fabulous Life, and Kingdom of Ubuntu (both 2026). He currently resides in Cape Town, South Africa.

For more infomation: https://www.chrflagship.uwc.ac.za/humanities-in-sesssion-artists-forum-with-tshegofatso-moeng/

Please join us for the next Archive Lab, organised under the auspices of the New Archival Visions (NAV) Programme at UWC. On 16 July, NAV will host Brian Tilley and Makonenyana Molete, founding members of the VNS/Afravision video collective to share how they set up VNS/Afravision in the 1980s to document the struggles sweeping across South Africa.

Date: Thursday 16 July 2026
Time: 13:00pm – 15:00pm
Venue:
Iyatsiba Lab,
66 Greatmore Street, Woodstock
RSVP: [email protected]

https://www.chrflagship.uwc.ac.za/archive-lab-archiving-resistance-the-vns-afravision-collective-with-brian-tilley-and-makonenyana-molete/

Synopsis:
With close links to the liberation organisations, unions and mass democratic movement the collective had unprecedented access and produced the most in-depth video archive of that period. At that time, images of what was happening in the townships and industrial areas were not broadcast in South Africa. Afravision would document what was happening and cut ‘video pamphlets’ or short films which were then distributed through the unions and youth structures in South Africa and to the liberation structures outside the country. The master tapes of these video pamphlets and films are busy being digitized and they form an important window on our past. The story of VNS/AFRAVISION Collective and its archive is presented as part of NAV’s ongoing Archive Lab series which gathers scholars, students, artists and archivists to think together with pre-selected materials about archival practice, research methods and the activation of research collections.

The call for papers for this year's International Workshop in Visual History and Theory is now open. Organised under the theme, Regarder Ensemble/Looking Together, workshop participants are invited to consider modes of looking together and activation in relation to images and other media.

Deadline: 17 July

For more info : https://www.chrflagship.uwc.ac.za/call-for-papers-international-workshop-in-visual-history-and-theory-october-2026/

Please join us on Tuesday 7 July for 'Moving between Facts and Fabulations: Some Notes', a public lecture in conjunction with the CHR annual Winter School Programme.

Date: Tuesday 7July
Time: 5:30pm – 7:00pm
Venue: Iyatsiba Lab,
66 Greatmore Street, Woodstock
RSVP: [email protected]

For more information: https://www.chrflagship.uwc.ac.za/public-lecture-moving-between-facts-and-fabulations-some-notes-with-marcos-martins-state-university-of-rio-de-janeiro-uerj/

Please join us on Thursday 9 July for a film screening of Hecuba and lecture with Morna Regan and Lynne Parker. Morna and Lynne have joined the CHR as part of the Charlotte Maxeke-Mary Robinson Research Chair and will be giving a lecture as part of this year's Winter School. Please see below for more details.

Date: Thursday 9 July
Film Screening: 3:00pm – 5:00pm
Lecture: 5:30pm – 7:00pm
Venue: Iyatsiba Lab,
66 Greatmore Street, Woodstock
RSVP: [email protected]

Diana Vives' "The Sky Beneath" reflects the research commitments of the CHR in helping shape a Humanities that thinks across hemispheres. Placed on the wall of The Iyatsiba Lab along Greatmore Street, the old racial municipal boundary of Cape Town, the work speaks to the political, aesthetic, and academic commitments of the Centre and opens deeper dialogue into all these matters.

"I wanted to donate The Sky Beneath to the CHR, especially after getting to know Premesh Lalu and the way the Centre rethinks the humanities through sustained critical engagement with art, philosophy, and history. Formally, it is a strange piece, moving between 4th-century BCE cosmology, the deep-time topography of continental drift, and a maritime device once used to fix longitude at sea. In doing so, it unsettles western cartographies and suggests other ways of imagining our world. I hope the work lives there less as a statement and more as a conversation." Diana Vives

Diana Vives' "The Sky Beneath" reflects the research commitments of the CHR in helping shape a Humanities that thinks across hemispheres. Placed on the wall of The Iyatsiba Lab along Greatmore Street, the old racial municipal boundary of Cape Town, the work speaks to the political, aesthetic, and academic commitments of the Centre and opens deeper dialogue into all these matters.

I wanted to donate The Sky Beneath to the CHR, especially after getting to know Premesh Lalu and the way the Centre rethinks the humanities through sustained critical engagement with art, philosophy, and history. Formally, it is a strange piece, moving between 4th-century BCE cosmology, the deep-time topography of continental drift, and a maritime device once used to fix longitude at sea. In doing so, it unsettles western cartographies and suggests other ways of imagining our world. I hope the work lives there less as a statement and more as a conversation.