AVReQ The Podcast

Prof Susanne Klausen traces the apartheid state’s obsession with suppressing interracial sex between white men and black women, revealing how Afrikaner nationalism relied on a punitive, puritanical masculinity to preserve its imagined racial order. Drawing from her archival research and critical race theory, Klausen explores how laws such as the Immorality Act and its amendments were used to crimi...

In this episode, Prof Neil Roos discusses how whiteness operated not only through state violence but also via the bureaucratic disciplining of the white working class. Drawing on archival material and personal memory, he illuminates how apartheid’s structures absorbed and managed misfit white bodies, from the expansion of the civil service to the little-known ‘work colonies’ where white men deemed...

Dr Azille Coetzee speaks with remarkable vulnerability and intellectual clarity about the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality within white Afrikaner identity. Drawing on personal memoir and theoretical inquiry, she examines how the apartheid regime not only demanded political loyalty but also shaped affective orientations, who white women were expected to love, obey, and fear. Through ref...

This episode delves into the racialised logic of physical education in twentieth-century South Africa and its entanglement with whiteness, nationalism and citizenship. Dr Anell Stacey Daries examines the history of the Physical Training Battalion (PTB), a state-led initiative aimed at rehabilitating impoverished white boys and men through militarised physical and moral training. Drawing on archiva...

In this powerful and unflinching lecture, Prof Joel Modiri challenges us to reckon with South Africa’s unfinished liberation and the symbolic transformation that has failed to deliver substantive justice. Drawing on the life and legacy of Steve Biko, Modiri frames his argument around three “deaths” of Biko, his physical death under apartheid, the juridical death through post-apartheid legal compro...

In this compelling talk, Dr Robyn Gill-Leslie examines how the apartheid regime created a bureaucratic fiction to disguise political killings, using the case of Imam Abdullah Haron as a focal point. She draws on Veena Das’s concept of state magic to show how death in detention was masked as accidental and how this created a lasting space of uncertainty for families. With reference to Berber Bevern...

Professor John Brewer explores the powerful and paradoxical question: Why do people kill and die for religion? The conversation confronts the ways in which monotheistic religions have been entangled with violence throughout history. Brewer offers a sociological lens on how sacred beliefs, identity politics, and historical trauma create conditions ripe for religious conflict. Dr Demaine Solomons re...

This conversation examines the ethical and psychological dimensions of bearing witness to atrocity, featuring Professor Jacqueline Rose and Professor Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela. Through insights grounded in psychoanalysis, history and ethics, the discussion interrogates the meanings of victimhood, the limits of remorse, and the moral obligation to recognise and respond to human suffering. From the Ho...

In this intellectually rigorous and emotionally resonant conversation, Professors Jacqueline Rose, Vasti Roodt, Jaco Barnard-Naudé, and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela examine what it means to “think without banisters” in the spirit of Hannah Arendt. Roodt reflects on Arendt’s call for unending, solitary thought as a practice of ethical responsibility, while Barnard-Naudé traces how Arendt’s idea of the b...

In this episode, we explore Prof Saleem Badat's compelling seminar, Reparative Justice and Social Justice Scholarship. Moderated by Dr Anell Daries, the discussion examines the structural and relational harms caused by apartheid and the urgent need for reparative justice in South Africa. Prof Badat draws from personal experiences, such as his detention and torture under apartheid, as well as histo...

In this episode, we engage with Professor Mays Imad's transformative lecture, Addressing Continuities of Trauma in Higher Education: Fostering Equity and Intergenerational Wellbeing. A neuroscientist and educator, Prof Imad seamlessly combines personal anecdotes, cutting-edge research, and student narratives to explore the profound impact of trauma on academic spaces. Drawing from her own experien...

In 1950 the apartheid regime passed the Immorality (Amendment) Act that criminalized heterosexual desire between “Europeans” and “non-Europeans.” During the 35 years the Act was on the statute book over 19,000 South Africans, mostly white men and Black women, were fully prosecuted and more than 11,000 convicted for crossing the colour line for sexual intimacy. The brutality with which the state en...

In this episode, Professor Kopano Ratele and Dr. Sophia Sanan engage in a profound dialogue on the intersections of African art, black subjectivity, and African psychology. They explore the challenges of racialized structures within aesthetic and identity theories, particularly against the backdrop of South Africa's colonial legacy. The conversation investigates the radical potential of Africa...

This episode will focus on a compelling book exploring South Africa’s unresolved issue of reparation. It critiques the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s failure to adequately compensate victims of colonization and apartheid, which continues to undermine its processes and legacy. By examining the TRC’s key processes and highlighting their hindrance due to the lack of reparation, t...

In this episode, Professor Homi Bhabha engages in a conversation with acclaimed artist William Kentridge. Their dialogue revolves around Kentridge's latest project, "The Great YES, The Great No," a chamber opera set amidst a surreal 1941 sea voyage. They examine the thematic underpinnings of surrealism, fragmentation, and social dialogue in Kentridge's work, shedding light on his...

Radical Familiar. A different kind of aesthetic encounter In this installment of the masterclass, Rabia Abba Omar was in conversation with Gabrielle Goliath as she shared on “Radical Familiar. A different kind of aesthetic encounter.” This discussion of the AVReQ Masterclass stirred a profound contemplation on the intricate threads of representation, encounter, and response. Gabrielle directed her...

Between 1950 and 1985, tens of thousands of South Africans were arrested for contravening the Immorality Act (1950) that prohibited extramarital heterosex between whites and Blacks and was extended in 1957 to also criminalize the  attempt  to have interracial sex. Aimed at maintaining whites’ mythical purity, the law was both a weapon to mould the sexual behaviour of transgressive heterosexual whi...

This episode offers a nuanced dissection of the rise and development of physical education, later reimagined as sport science, as a department and as an academic discipline at Stellenbosch University from its inception in 1937 to 2019. Located within a complex institutional history, this research foregrounds the extent to which the university’s ethos of conservativism and traditionalist values inf...

This lecture addresses the public value of the social sciences and its implications for ethical engagement by academics, particularly focusing on universities’ moral responsibilities in societies emerging out of conflict. JOHN BREWER John Brewer is a Professor of Post Conflict Studies in the Senator George J Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at Queen’s University Belfast. H...

In this instalment of the masterclass, Gratia Aimee Ilibagiza is in conversation with Professor Azrini Wahidin as she shares her experience of conducting research with prisoners, her feminist praxis, and the processes of reparative knowledge. This discussion is regarded as an extension of the AVReQ series on sensitive research, creating new ethics for social justice research, and draws on Azrini’s...

In this instalment of the masterclass, Professor Dennis Francis is in conversation with Professor Shirley Anne Tate discussing decoloniality, intersectionality as a framework, and anti-racist interventions in higher education. Prof Tate shares an extract from an upcoming edited volume on decolonization and anti-racism in settler colonial states of which South Africa is a part of. She positions the...

On May 24, 2022, a mass shooting occurred at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, United States, where 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, a former student at the school, fatally shot nineteen students and two teachers, while seventeen others survived despite being injured. The words "The sound of Children Screaming has been removed," were an editor’s note attached to a video, published by the Austin...

Rabia Abba Omar is a researcher and curator working towards a MA in Visual Studies from Stellenbosch University’s Visual Arts Department. She likes to think with/of the ocean, memory, archives, and is currently exploring the body as an archive of violence. She is a MA Fellow of Imagining Futures of Un/Archived Pasts project (Exeter University) and based at AVReQ . She holds a MA in Heritage Studie...

Zintombizethu (zethu) Matebeni is a sociologist, activist and writer whose research focuses on the development of African Queer Studies. She has worked at different universities in South Africa and the United States of America and has been part of decolonizing interventions, including #RhodesMustFall and the Black Academic Caucus at the University of Cape Town. zethu has edited and co-edited vario...

Andrea Gullotta is lecturer in Russian at the University of Palermo. He has also worked for the University of Glasgow, the Ca' Foscari University of Venice and the University of Padua, where he obtained his PhD. He is co-editor of the journal AvtobiografiЯ, which deals with life-writing and the representation of the self in Russian culture. His main research area is Gulag literature. He has author...