Workshop: Shari Daya (L) and Pippin Anderson (R).
The African Critical Inquiry Programme (ACIP) is pleased to announce that the 2024 ACIP Workshop will be Multispecies Stories from a Southern City.The project was proposed by organisers Shari Daya and Pippin Anderson, both in the Department of Environmental and Geographical Science at University of Cape Town. It will take place in a series of gatherings across different sites in Cape Town, South Africa in 2023-2024.
Multispecies Stories from a Southern City
This series of three walking workshops and a final 1-day workshop explores multispecies relationships in the contemporary, diverse and layered African city of Cape Town. Bringing together scholars, activists and artists, the workshops take participants out into particular sites in the city where diverse lives abound, in order to explore the range of stories that emerge when we listen to more-than-human voices in urban spaces. In so doing the events will challenge the nature-culture divide which continues to dominate both public and scientific discourses, and will help to swell the rising tide of theoretical, cultural, and imaginative work seeking to re-frame our understanding of the lively world. The events are resolutely interdisciplinary, crossing both academic disciplinary boundaries and the accepted borders between science, art, and politics. They are also definitively embodied, emplaced, and mobile – insisting in their format that ideas are grounded in places and bodies, and that walking and thinking are closely related. Finally, the events are fundamentally relational, foregrounding the shared, reciprocal and inter-dependent lives of humans and nonhumans. Each walking workshop will be informed by pre-selected readings, and time will be allotted to moving through the space as well as discussion. The 1-day final seminar will focus on each participant’s work arising from the walking workshops, which may take the form of presentations, mini-exhibitions, performances, readings, or other expression. The final gathering will include public-facing dissemination and engagement. The organisers also anticipate publishing about the workshop’s methodology and public science implications.
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Founded in 2012, the African Critical Inquiry Programme (ACIP) is a partnership between the Centre for Humanities Research at University of the Western Cape in Cape Town and the Laney Graduate School of Emory University in Atlanta. Supported by donations to the Ivan Karp and Corinne Kratz Fund, the ACIP fosters thinking and working across public cultural institutions, across disciplines and fields, and across generations. It seeks to advance inquiry and debate about the roles and practice of public culture, public cultural institutions, and public scholarship in shaping identities and society in Africa through an annual ACIP workshop and through the Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards, which support African doctoral students in the humanities and humanistic social sciences enrolled at South African universities.
Information about applying to organize the 2025 ACIP workshop and for the 2024 Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards will be available in November 2023. The deadline for both workshop applications and student applications is 1 May 2024.
For further information, see http://www.gs.emory.edu/about/special/acip.html and https://www.facebook.com/ivan.karp.corinne.kratz.fund.
