Migrants, Thinkers, Storytellers - Book launch

Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) seminars

Migrants, Thinkers, Storytellers develops an argument about how individual migrants, coming from four continents and diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, are in many ways affected by a violent categorisation that is often nihilistic, insistently racial, and continuously significant in the organisation of South African society. The book also examines how relative privilege and storytelling function as instruments for migrants to negotiate meanings and shape their lives. It employs narrative lifestory research as its guiding methodology and applies various disciplinary analytical perspectives, with an overall focus on social categorisation and its consequences. The featured stories stress how unsettled, mutable and in flux social categories and identities are – just as a messy pencil sketch challenges clear definitions.

MODERATOR:

Leslie Bank, Deputy Executive Director of the Economic Development and Performance Unit at the HSRC. Adjunct Professor at Walter Sisulu University and University of Fort Hare. Author of Migrant Labour after Apartheid: The inside story (edited with Dorrit Posel and Francis Wilson, 2020), Covid and Custom in Rural South Africa: Culture, healthcare and the state (with Nelly Sharpley, 2021), Home Spaces, Street Styles: Contesting power and identity in a South African city (2011) and other books.

PANELISTS:

Oswald Kucherera, Cape Town-based storyteller, human rights activist and educator. Author of The Exodus Down South (2016) and Washing Dishes and Other Stories (2018).

Angelo Martins Junior, Research Associate at the University of Bristol's School of Sociology, Politics & International Studies (SPAIS) and coordinator of the Research Challenge ‘Control, Conflict, Resistance’ at the Migration Mobilities Bristol Research Institute (MMB). Author of Lives in Motion: Notebooks of an Immigrant in London (2015) and Moving Difference: Brazilians in London (2020).

Faith Mkwesha, Researcher and Visiting Scholar at the Swedish School of Social Science Subunit, University of Helsinki. Chief Executive Director and Founder of Sahwira Africa, an anti-racist organisation. Author of Rasismi, valta ja vastarinta: Rodullistaminen, valkoisuus ja koloniaalisuus Suomessa (Racism, power and resistance: Racialization, whiteness and coloniality in Finland, edited with Suvi Keskinen and Minna Kristiina Seikkula, 2021) and Zimbabwe Women Writers from 1950 to the Present: re-creating gender images (PhD Thesis, 2016).

Alice Ncube, Senior Lecturer at the Natural and Agricultural Sciences; and Senior Lecturer and Programme Director at the Disaster Management Training and Education Centre, University of the Free State. Author of The socio-economic coping and adaptation mechanisms employed by African migrant women in South Africa (PhD Thesis, 2017).

In conversation with the editors of Migrants, Thinkers, Storytellers - Jonatan Kurzwelly (University of Göttingen and University of the Free State) and Luis Escobedo (University of the Free State) and other book contributors.

For more information: http://www.hsrc.ac.za/en/events/seminars/virtual-launch-migrants-thinkers-storytellers