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25 August 2023 | Story Supplied | Photo Supplied
Prof Pamila Gupta
Prof Pamila Gupta delivered the 2023 Biennial Gendered Worlds Lecture titled, ‘Landscaping South Africa’s Gendered Hinterlands’ presented in digital format in collaboration with the UFS Art Gallery exhibition.
In commemoration of Women’s Day, 9 August, the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies at the University of the Free State (UFS) presents the Biennial Gendered Worlds Lecture every second year to reflect on gendered dynamics across a range of fields and topics. The 2023 Biennial Gendered Worlds Lecture by Prof Pamila Gupta titled, ‘Landscaping South Africa’s Gendered Hinterlands’ is presented in digital format in collaboration with the UFS Art Gallery exhibition, Eureka, by artists Prof Janine Allen and Dr André Rose which showed at the Stegmann Gallery from 10 July-11 August 2023.

Prof Gupta was appointed Research Professor at the UFS, taking up her position on the 1st January 2023 at the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies. In her lecture she traces the concept of the hinterland, as a crucial tool for understanding the global and planetary present, as a time defined by the lasting legacies of colonialism, increasing labour precarity under late capitalist regimes, and looming climate disasters. 

South African case studies

Traditionally seen to serve a (colonial) port or market town, the hinterland defined here becomes a lens to attend to the times and spaces shaped and experienced across the received categories of the urban, rural, wilderness or nature. Her lecture is based on her contribution to the forthcoming book titled, ‘Planetary Hinterlands꞉ Extraction, abandonment, and Care,’ (Eds. Pamila Gupta, Sarah Nuttall, Esther Peeren, and Hanneke Stuit, Palgrave, 2023). In this work, Prof Gupta considers South African case studies, namely Jeremy Foster’s evocative description of South Africa’s landscape as one ‘washed with sun’ (2008), to reflect on the shifting spatial thematics of two contemporary male South African non‑fiction writers and academics, Rob Nixon (Dreambirds, 1999) and Jacob Dlamini (Native Nostalgia, 2009). She considers what happens when we view certain locations described in their respective gendered works (a small desert town, Oudtshoorn vs a township, Katlehong) through the prism of hinterlands. 

Prof Gupta argues that the concept of hinterland offers a framework for a new understanding of those places inflected by the rural and urban, helping us to see the small town and township as operating within the same time/space configuration of apartheid South Africa. It highlights also  the importance of human/non‑human relations, with Nixon and Dlamini operating as each other’s hinterland. She suggests the potential of the concept of the hinterland for showcasing  the practice of writing as caught between a reflective self and other; one where Nixon and Dlamini (and she) use landscaped memories of gendered hinterland childhoods to say something about political becoming, and the past in South Africa today.

Prof Gupta, formerly Full Professor based at WiSER at the University of the Witwatersrand (2008-2022), holds a PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University. Her research and writing interests include Portuguese colonial and Jesuit missionary history, in India; diasporas, islands, tourism, heritage, and design in the Indian Ocean; photography, tailoring and visual cultures in East Africa; and architecture, infrastructure, and effect in South Africa. 

Eureka

The lecture is considered alongside Eureka, a transdisciplinary art exhibition by Dr Andrè Rose and Prof Janine Allen, presented by the UFS Art Gallery. Eureka explores the complex multidimensional narrative of artisanal mining in Kimberley in the Northern Cape, and when viewed through the scope of the concept of hinterland it opens provocative pathways for interrogating the intersections and interactions of psycho‑social‑economic and environmental challenges in this artisanal mining community. The artworks narrate the complex multidimensional narratives of the artisanal miners in a post‑colonial neoliberal world. This forms the basis of a rich dialogue, between Prof Gupta and the artists following the lecture, to explore the synergies between the exhibition and the concept of gendered hinterlands. 

Watch the Biennial Gendered Worlds Lecture below.

News Archive

International Year of Crystallography attracts science experts from across the globe
2014-10-13



Video: Discover what Chrystallopgraphy can do for you
Video: Celebrating Crystallography: An Animated Adventure

Summit programme

The third world summit in the International Year of Crystallography (in Africa) will be hosted by the UFS Department of Chemistry here on the Bloemfontein Campus. Prof André Roodt, Head of the Department of Chemistry, was elected as the President of the European Crystallographic Association in 2012. Earlier this year he unveiled the Max von Laue 'Plaque' in Posnan, Poland.

The Pan-African Meeting of the International Year of Crystallography consists of a congress and summit. The details are as follows:

Congress
12–15 October 2014
CR Swart Senate Hall, UFS Bloemfontein Campus

Summit
15–17 October 2014
CR Swart Senate Hall, UFS Bloemfontein Campus
Summit opening: Wednesday 15 October 2014 at 14:00 in the CR Swart Senate Hall

This event will be opened and attended by:
•    the UFS Rector and Vice-Rector – Profs Jonathan Jansen and Corli Witthuhn;
•    the acting Director-General of the Department of Science and Technology – Dr Thomas Auf der Heyde;
•    the acting CEO of the National Research Foundation – Dr Gansen Pillay;
•    the UNESCO Vice-Director for Science Extension – Dr Jean-Paul Ngome-Abiaga (Paris, France);
•    the representative of the Executive Committee for the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) – Prof Santiago Garcia-Granda (Oviedo: Spain);
•    the marketing director of the IUCr – Prof Michele Zema (Pavia, Italy);
•    the President of the European Crystallographic Association (ECA) – Prof André Roodt, who will officially open the summit on Wednesday 15 October 2014 from 14:00–15:30.

Presenters from across Africa and Europe will deliver papers at this event which will be attended by more than 100 delegates from twenty-plus countries, including Spain, France, Italy, Croatia, Germany, Russia and India.

Numerous crystallographic research areas will be covered. This includes:
•    powder diffraction,
•    small molecule crystallography,
•    biological crystallography,
•    industrial crystallography,
•    surface crystallography,
as well as techniques such as
•    electron microscopy and
•    synchrotron work.

“At this event we hope to establish an African Crystallographic Association,” said Prof Roodt.

The United Nations declared 2014 as the International Year of Crystallography. It was recently officially opened at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, France, by the Secretary General of the UN, Ban Ki-moon.

The International Year of Crystallography celebrates the centennial of the work of Max von Laue and the father and son, William Henry and William Laurence Bragg. More generally, it celebrates what crystallography can do for humanity – which proves to be a significant amount.

 

 


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