Staff and students are invited to attend Prof. Melissa Steyn’s lecture ‘Apartheid supporters and other extinct species’.
The event starts at 18:00 (with refreshments available from 17:30), Wednesday 21 January 2015, Building 58 (Murray Building), lecture theatre 1067 (LTA), Highfield Campus. A drinks reception will be held afterwards.
Twenty years into democracy few white South Africans who lived during the apartheid era acknowledge that they were implicated in the system.
They are more likely to claim that apartheid operated in such opaque ways that ordinary citizens could not have known the realities of what was happening in their society. For the past three years Prof. Steyn has conducted focus groups and interviews with white South Africans who are prepared to reflect on “what we knew,” partly to counter this reconstruction of past, but also to understand better what has been called “epistemologies of ignorance.” In this view, collective ignorance can be seen as a social accomplishment which contributes to our understanding of the operations of racial privilege. The paper discusses how participants in the study make sense of their knowing and not knowing in their past and present.
Melissa Steyn holds the DST-NRF South African National Research Chair in Critical Diversity Studies, and is the founding director of the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies.
For more information and to RSVP please email or Tel: 023 8059 2522 (x 22522).
Melissa joined the University as part of the Diamond Jubilee International Visiting Fellowship scheme. You can find more information about the scheme here.