Pedagogies of Repair: A Collective Conversation

Friday 21 July, 2023

TORCH Seminar Room, Radcliffe Humanities, Oxford

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:


Patricia Parker and Katherine Wallerstein: Introductory remarks

Thomas Cousins: On the work of repair

Katharine Wallerstein and Maurits van Bever Donker: Reflections on the Mémorial des martyrs de la Déportation, Paris


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 our TORCH @ 10 celebrations.

Further details about the event can be found here:
https://torch.ox.ac.uk/event/pedagogi...

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Thomas Cousins, St Hugh’s College, Oxford. 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.

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.