Musings Podcast

I had the profound honour of being invited to converse with the very keen mind of Mfundo Mpepuka on his podcast Read Between the Covers about some of what is preoccupying me at the moment. In this conversation we reflect on African cinema, ancestral presence, elemental world-making and forms of knowledge that survive despite attempts to erase them. So much gratitude to my magnificent supervisor Pr...

At 38, menopause arrived in my life like a crazy cyclone I didn’t yet have a name for. I thought I was losing my mind — panic attacks, sleepless nights, wild anxiety —except none of it was ‘in my head.’ My body was speaking in a new dialect I had never been taught to understand. No one had prepared me for this particular curriculum of becoming. It was as though every fault-line in my life lit up a...

This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection begins with a grave and ends with refusal. I was invited to give this lecture by the lovely Prof Nick J Fox of the BSA New Materialisms Study Group , in collaboration with the BSA Death, Dying and Bereavement Study Group, and the Centre for Sociodigital Futures at Bristol University, with very special thanks to my fairy godmother Debbie Watson. Let’s explo...

Two weeks ago I was finishing the five day Outeniqua Trail in the dense forests of South Africa’s Garden Route. Outeniqua is one of those musical words that has persisted from the original humans that were part of this lush landscape. It means ‘those who bear honey.’ A week prior I was overlooking the Valley of Desolation in the Karoo which the KhoiSan called Camdeboo…‘green pool.’ Thanks for read...

The Long & Winding Road Back to Ourselves 2024 kicked my butt. Not gonna lie, it felt relentless. There were plenty of personal struggles and who can deny that the global scene — political & environmental — has felt particularly fraught. I arrived with some trepidation at the Buddhist Retreat Centre via ‘a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling,...

My friend Stella Viljoen and I co-teach a very cool Honours seminar on Visual Intimacy at Stellenbosch University . The gorgeous exhibition she curated with our dreamy colleague Ernst Van der Wal for The Slow Intimacy Conference in 2022 was an outgrowth of that work. Thanks for reading Musings! Subscribe for free. As part of the exhibition I chose to interview Ghanaian filmmaker Nuotama Bodomo . I...

I only learned her age after her death. And I only learned of her death last night. Hella was not a fan of ageism and certainly never let her growing blindness and unsteadiness in the wake of a stroke and a whole heap of years (almost 80 of them, shhh, don’t tell her I told you) get in the way of adventuring. I’ve been missing my dear friend a lot lately. https://charisselouw.substack.com/p/3aaaf4...

The first time I met Izzy she was a 15 year old student of mine at Imhoff Waldorf High School and reading one of the classics…for fun! In other words, not your average tenth grader, but exactly the bookish creative soul that I was at that age. We went on to have oh so many adventures together — trekking in the mountains, grabbing all the accolades on stage, navigating the rich waters of the Waldor...

Chelsea and I met at the Burning Down the House Symposium at the beginning of April. It was love at first Feminist New Materialist quote. To be fair, she wasn’t just poetically patching others insights together, but very much embodying the ethos of this avenue of inquiry most eloquently. A dream of an afternoon followed where I had the tremendous pleasure of introducing my supervisor/colleague/sou...

This beautiful soul and I walked together in the mountains behind my home a year ago. Rakhee has blessed my life ever since with her generosity. We get together to discuss the student uprisings in America after discovering that we were both studying at NYU at the same time…a different time, but also a time of war. Some of the protest action sweeping across America at this moment as shared by Rakhe...

I have an impromptu chat with embodied ray of sunshine Lili who is a skateboarding, crochet kween…and also a physicist in the making. Because apparently you can do it all! Our small talk looks a little like this, when in our natural habitat, Noordhoek beach: As usual our conversation roamed into the metaphysical. Thank you for allowing your bday brunch to be hijacked and for engaging in the unknow...

I have a lifelong friend. This is not something I take for granted. We were both born into devout Mormon families in Pretoria and were besties from the get-go. Both great lovers of the performing arts, we loved the stage and went on to teach, Natalie in Dance and me Drama. Then as teenagers we were split up when she moved to Ecuador. We were later reunited when I studied at Brigham Young Universit...

I had a meeting with my brilliant student Shakeelah Ismail this morning. She had given a(nother) presentation that blew me away at our Burning Down the House Symposium earlier this month and I wanted her to teach me her ways. In the end we spoke about so much more than that. This is a snippet of her impromptu wisdom for the benefit of us all. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss...

I tried to start a podcast (again) at the beginning of the year. It’s now 4 months later and my bestie from childhood is egging me on. So here’s Take 1 from the first week of what has turned out to be a proper shitshow of a year (Is it the Dragon? Eclipse? Late Capitalism? or simply Life…specifically the middle passage…?) The idea is to engage in friendly conversation with my lovelies about how th...