Pedagogies of Repair: A Collective Conversation
Pedagogies of Repair: A Collective Conversation
What does it mean to work with a concept like ‘repair’? What kinds of intervention, and what kinds of teaching and learning does it enable in this particular moment, and in the particular places in which we work?
What comes with, and what comes after repair; what is the work of repair, in the wake of – and in the enduring presence of – the harm done by the legacies of partition that scar our time?
Can repair usefully be thought of as a pursuit, or a form of practice, rather than as an arrival? If so, how do pedagogies of repair relate to the changing, potentially transformative practices, pedagogies, and places of reading, translation, adaptation, and performance?
This conversation will begin to open these questions, and others, in relation to the leading-edge work being done by scholars and artists in very different and yet resonant locations – this time in Oxford:
Agenda for the day
Introductory remarks: Patricia Parker
Thomas Cousins: On the work of repair
Katharine Wallerstein and Maurits van Bever Donker:
Reflections on the Mémorial des martyrs de la Déportation, Paris
Rosinka Chaudhuri and Peter McDonald : Revisiting a monument / a space of repair
Patricia Daley: Black ecological repair
Lunch Break
Wes Williams and Euton Daley: Repair in Oxford
Andrés Claro: Tikun: Historical repair as translation
Tinashe Mushakanvhu: Repair in/and the archive
Euton Daley and Amantha Edmead (poetry and song): Still breathing
Tea and Conclusions
This event is being supported by TORCH (The Oxford Centre for Research in the Humanities), the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes’ Critical Humanities Spaces Network, and St Hugh's College, Oxford.
It forms part of the TORCH at 10 celebrations 2013 -2023.
The expert panel and discussion participants for this collective conversation includes:-
Rosinka Chaudhuri, Director and Professor of Cultural Studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC); she works as an author, editor, and translator, and her work includes Gentlemen Poets in Colonial Bengal: Emergent Nationalism and the Orientalist Project, and The Literary Thing: History, Poetry and the Making of a Modern Cultural Sphere; Derozio, Poet of India; An Acre of Green Grass and Other English Writings of Buddhadeva Bose, and an award-winning translation of Rabindranath Tagore’s Letters from a Young Poet (1887-94). https://www.cssscal.org/faculty_rosinka_chaudhuri.php
Andrés Claro, Consejero, Centro Interdisciplinario de Estudios en Filosofía, Artes y Humanidades, Universidad de Chile; an essayist and university professor, Andrés’s work includes essays the e-book. Sinopsis (2023), and two major books on translation and interpretation : La Inquisición y la Cábala, un capítulo de la diferencia entre ontología y exilio (The Inquisition and the Kabbalah, a chapter on the difference between ontology and exile, 1996; 2nd. ed., 2009) and Las Vasijas Quebradas, cuatro variaciones sobre la ‘tarea del traductor’ (Broken Vessels, four variations on ‘the task of the translator ", 2012). He has also published collections of poems and literary translations from various languages.
Thomas Cousins, St Hugh’s. Thomas is an anthropologist of southern Africa with a particular interest in health, labour, and kinship, especially nutrition and pharmaceuticals and their attendant forms of value and life. His book, titled The Work of Repair: Amandla and Capacity in the Timber Plantations of South Africa, will be published by Fordham University Press in 2023. https://www.anthro.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-thomas-cousins
Euton Daley heads up the Unlock the Chains Collective, which makes and produces theatre that explores the Black experience through the fusion of dance, music, song and spoken word/performance poetry. As Artist, Director, Mentor and Producer, Euton has over 40 years’ experience working in the arts. Having developed and managed Pegasus Theatre specialising in youth and community work for over 20 years, his focus is currently on developing new forms of creative practice and pedagogy within the framework of the African- heritage experience. http://www.eutondaley.com
Patricia Daley, Professor of Human Geography of Africa at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Jesus College. She is a member of both the TORCH Race and Resistance Programme, and of the Political Worlds: Place, Power, Politics research cluster, which seeks to develop novel and critical understandings of the relationship(s) between regimes of discipline and violence, geographies of the South, and postcolonial, feminist, decolonial and anti-racist work. https://www.geog.ox.ac.uk/staff/pdaley.html
Amantha Edmead, Founder of Kuumba Nia Arts, Amantha is an actress and trained drama therapist and practitioner. She has worked with a range of theatre and TV companies, covering soap operas and crime dramas, to politically engaged performance, theatre in education, and therapeutic community projects. Kuumba Nia Arts focusses on stories from the African/ Caribbean experience. https://kuumbaniaarts.com/who-we-are
Peter McDonald, St. Hugh’s. For most of his professional life Peter has been thinking about the idea of culture as it has been shaped and reshaped over the past two hundred years, and about the processes and perils of literary guardianship, especially in the complex, mobile, and interconnected world that emerged in the course of the long twentieth century. This guiding preoccupation has informed his work on censorship, the rise of mass culture, media history and questions of the book, the public value of literature, critical theory, and interculturalism. (https://www.st-hughs.ox.ac.uk/people/professor-peter-mcdonald/).
Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Junior Research Fellow in African and Comparative Literature, St. Anne’s College. The central theme of his research is the role of literary culture in documentation, historical knowledge, and political power. His work manifests in interdisciplinary modalities. It blurs creative and critical methods, and writing genres, in order to imaginatively reconfigure the strictures that conventionally separate the poetic and the theoretical. https://www.st-annes.ox.ac.uk/cpt_people/mushakavanhu-dr-tinashe/
Patricia Parker, Director of the Institute for Arts and Humanities, UNC Chapel Hill and Ruel W. Tyson Distinguished Professor of Humanities. A professor of critical organizational communication studies, her research and teaching focus on social justice leadership and decolonizing organizational communication processes. She is also founder and executive director of the Ella Baker Women’s Center for Leadership and Community Activism, a community-based not-for-profit organization building community power for social change and supporting girls’ and women’s leadership development.
Maurits Van Bever Donker, Associate Professor, the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape; his research specialisations are in Black Consciousness Philosophy, Postcolonial Theory and Aesthetics, African Philosophy and Literatures, and Contemporary South African and African History. He is Research Manager in the CHR, where he convenes the Centre’s fellowship programme, which aims to develop the next generation of university educators in Africa.
Katharine Wallerstein, former Associate Director of the UC Davis Humanities Institute and Critical Humanities Spaces Network Chair. She has written on and taught on aesthetics, politics, and subjectivity; histories of sexuality, the body, and feminist theory; French philosophy; art, film, and visual culture; modernism and modernity. She was co-founder and Executive Director of the Global Commons Foundation, where she developed a range of public platforms for artists, scholars, thinkers, and activists to research, discuss, and act on world crises from a largely Global South perspective.
Wes Williams, Director of TORCH, Professor of French Literature at the University of Oxford, and Fellow in Modern Languages at St Edmund Hall. Wes works at the intersection of early modern and contemporary cultures. https://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/people/wes-williams
