Fellowship at MIASA

I just got back to the UK after spending 3 months in Accra as a Junior Fellow of the Merian Institute for Advanced Studies in Africa (MIASA). It was both a whirlwind trip during which I tried to cram in as much work (and play) as I could, and a very peaceful and quiet period of reflection and writing.

I was able to work on the project started during my postdoc at UCT, which was--like many things-- interrupted by the pandemic in early 2020. I've called it 'Christianity and Feminism in World YWCA Discourse: Perspectives from Accra and Johannesburg', but now I want to expand the scope and include perspectives from elsewhere too. My thinking was enriched and supported by other fellows--now friends--and I look forward to hopefully working with them in the future.

I'm still working on a couple of articles coming out of the project, but for now I'm happy to share a reflective blog post I wrote for my research centre at Brunel: 'Travelling with care? Transnational mobility and research during Covid-19.' Soon I will be publishing a post on MIASA's hypotheses blog about my current research.

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Solidarity with the Concerned Law Students of UCT

As reported by Vernac News, a group of anonymous Concerned Law Students have issued a statement about institutional racism at UCT's Law Faculty : "We write this statement as concerned Law students, bearing cognizance of the fact that we are not represented officials of any said constituency, but instead a collective of concerned law students in an effort to highlight various structural issues affecting black students and staff alike. We write this against the backdrop of the now released IRTC report that concluded that UCT is indeed a racist institution. We wish to show how this manifests itself in the Law Faculty..." Read the full statement here

How to ask a professor to send you their work

One of the pieces of advice we tell each other a lot in para-academic spaces online is 'ask the author and they will send you a pdf of their journal article'. This idea has been popularised in tweets that I see recirculated maybe as often as every month. And of course there's the ongoing critique of the for-profit academic publishing industry. So, I thought it might helpful to share some advice to help people successfully make these kinds of requests. I have heard from some academics that when they receive email requests from strangers, they feel unsure how to respond. For example, this is an email a colleague in the UK (not me!) recently received: HI: I am kindly requesting from you a paper copy of your publication: ['Title...'] best regards [Name, personal postal address] The first misstep here is the informal opening - you should always use 'Dear Professor Surname' or 'Dear Dr Surname'. The professor who got this email thought it was particularly...

Decolonisation vs Progress

Decolonisation vs “Progress SA”: An ongoing battle at University of Cape Town Progress SA posters on campus The photo above shows posters recently put up all over campus at University of Cape Town (UCT). These posters were quite mystifying to me, because they seemed be taking aim at a target that I couldn’t quite see from my perspective as a newcomer to the University. I knew that they seemed to be promoting a perspective at odds with my own. And today, I found out part of what’s going on here, so I’m sharing. Starting in 2016, so after the #RhodesMustFall movement (which evidently had a huge impact at UCT not to mention higher education as a whole), the Curriculum Change Working Group (CCWG) was formed. It conducted an 18-month research project to identify ways to transform and decolonise the curriculum, teaching practices, and the institutional culture of UCT. In June 2018, CCWG published the results of its work as the “ Curriculum Change Framework ” which you can read in f...

Eleanor Tiplady Higgs

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