CORPOREALITIES OF VIOLENCE IN SOUTHERN AFRICA

4th - 6Th SEPTEMBER 2013, EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, UK.

Background: Recognising a recent growth in academic interest in the complex social and political significance of human corporeality, the British Academy International Partnership between the University of Edinburgh, UK and the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, aims to explore how a focus on the transformations of human forms and substances can offer new ways to investigate how violence, migration and health are linked in the lives of people across the Southern African region. After the success of our first workshop in Johannesburg in April 2012, we invite applicants to participate in the second of three workshops taking place as part of the Transforming Bodies: Health, Migration and Violence in Southern Africa research partnership. Between 2012 and 2014, the partnership seeks to bring together emerging and established scholars working in a range of disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences across the Southern African region, in order to generate new comparative and theoretical approaches towards understanding the changing significance of human corporeality across the region, and to expand writing, editing and publishing capacity among participants.

CORPOREALITIES OF VIOLENCE IN SOUTHERN AFRICA: This second workshop will focus on how human bodies are not only the means and target of violence in a diversity of forms, and therefore transformed by it in a myriad of ways, but also how human corporealities are often at the centre of what follows violence: including refugee displacements, and subsequent movements and returns; medicalization, documentation, and sometimes incarceration; as well as acts of burial, mourning, and commemoration; and forensic examinations and exhumations for (often elusive) processes of transitional justice, reconciliation and healing. Taking the transformations, interferences and flows of bodies and bodily substances animating violence and its consequences as its central problematic, it will seek to explore the convergences and discontinuities of different forms of individual and orchestrated violence, encompassing political and social violence alongside torture, intimate partner violence, rape and broader forms of structural or institutionalised violence.

Draft Programme

Day 1: Wednesday 4th September 2013: Writing workshop day

9 9.30 Introduction& Welcome (Joost Fontein)

9.30 10.30 Editors panel Getting published (Sara Dorman, Paul Nugent, Joost Fontein)

10.30 11.00 Coffee

11.00 -1.00 Breakout session begins

1.00 2pm Lunch

2 3.30pm Breakout session continues.

3.30 4pm Tea

4 5.30pm Keynote address: Nicky Rousseau Another story of an African farm: the search for remains at

Post Chalmers, Cradock.

5.30 onwards CAS BRAAI

Day 2: Thursday 5th September 2013: Research workshop

9 10.30am Keynote address: Paul Lane Brutal murders, colonial skull-duggery and post-colonial neglect:

the case of the Mau Mau bones in the museum cupboard

10 .30 11 Coffee

11 12.30 Panel 1: Post violence: traces, burials and human remains (co-organised with ERC research programme

Corpses of Mass violence and Genocide)

Laura Major - The (un)lovely Bones: Exhuming and reburying human remains in Rwanda

Ina Jahn and Matthew Wilhem-Solomon - Bones in the Wrong Soil: Reburial, Belonging and Disinterred Cosmologies in Post-Conflict Northern Uganda.

Matthew Wilhem-Solomon We hear them dancing on the roof: Death, Violence and the Urban Form

12.30 1.30pm Lunch

1.30 3.30 Panel 2: Post violence: spirits, ghosts and traumas

Leila Bright Avenging Spirits of the Dead, accountability and Political Violence in Zimbabwe

LIZ Ravalde Pentecostal Bodies and Post-War Recovery: Rethinking Local vs. Global Debates in Uganda through Pentecostalism

Frederica Guglielmo Medicalising Violence: Technologies of diagnosis in post-genocide Rwanda

3.30 4 Tea

4 -5.30 Panel 3: Criminalities, security and public ordering

Bianca van Laun - Captured Bodies: Investigating the visual representation of the Paarl march and Poqo

Tessa Diphoorn - Its all about the body: Cultivating Force Capital to Claim Sovereign Power in Durban, South Africa

T.Nyamunda From a popular to an absolutist, panoptic State: The makings and meanings of the 1997/8 protests and the governments violent response in Harare, Zimbabwe

7 Workshop dinner

Day 3: Friday 6th September 2013: Research workshop

9 10.30am Keynote address: Steffen Jensen Corporealities of violence: rape and the stabilization of bodies in

South Africa

10.30 - 11 Coffee

11 1pm Panel 4: Migration and gendered violence in South Africa

Kirsten Thomson Exploring the tangibility and realness of the continuous experience of trauma on community health care workers in South Africa

Mara Mattoscio - Victims or negotiators? Violence against womens bodies in South African fiction and filmic adaptations

Nataly Woollett Fragmentation and disconnection: linking HIV, gender based violence (GBV) and health in the South African context

1 - 2 Lunch

2 - 3 Summing up & close

Format:

DAY 1 writing/publishing workshop: The first day of the conference will be a writing and publishing workshop. We will have a session led by journal editors focusing on writing and getting published. There after the participants will break out into smaller group sessions, according to their panels for the next day, each led by one our keynote speakers. Each participant must have read the papers of the other participants in their group/panel before hand. It is therefore important that participants will have circulated their papers to their group members and to their keynote speaker in advance. Deadline for papers to be submitted for circulation: 1st August 2013

DAYS 2&3 Research workshop: Keynotes will have 90 min sessions, 45 min for the papers & 45 min discussions. Participants will have 20 minutes (maximum) to present their papers, the rest of their time will be for discussions.

Locations & Rooms:

Most of the events will take place in the McEwan Hall Reception Room (booked for 4th, 5th and 6th September between 08:30-17:30) See no. 35 on map on next page

See: http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/registry/timetabling/bookable-rooms/bookable-rooms?rid=1.300&fid=01&bid=113&cw_xml=Room_info.cfm

For the breakout sessions: 3 small meeting rooms (rms 3, 4 and 5, on those floors) have been booked in the CMB, 15a George Square (no. 38 on map on next page)

Accommodation: most delegates will be staying at the Kenneth Mackenzie, on Richmond Place (between no. 27 & 29 on map on next page)

See: http://www.edinburghfirst.co.uk/for-accommodation/kenneth-mackenzie

Braai: The braai on Wednesday (4th) evening will take place in the garden at 21 George Square, which can be accessed from the lane behind George Square. Bring your own booze, and anything else you particularly fancy.

Dinner on Thursday (5th) will be at 7.30pm, at the Nile Valley Cafe, (again bring your own booze).

see: https://plus.google.com/112387781755065606620/about?gl=uk&hl=en

Keynote abstracts

Paul J. Lane (Professor of Global Archaeology, Department of Archaeology & Ancient History, Uppsala University, Sweden. e-mail: paul.lane@arkeologi.uu.se)

Brutal murders, colonial skull-duggery and post-colonial neglect: the case of the Mau Mau bones in the museum cupboard

The National Museums of Kenya (NMK) holds a reference collection of human skeletal material that includes the remains of just over 480 individuals. The collection is currently housed in the Osteology Department at the Nairobi Museum, which is also the headquarters of NMK. Additional human remains from excavated archaeological sites are also held by the Archaeology Department elsewhere in the Nairobi Museum. As is common with excavated skeletons, these latter examples are of varying completeness. However, this is also true of the reference collection and in fact none of the reference specimens are actually complete (i.e. comprised of the full range of cranial and post-cranial elements). Skulls, several of which are missing their lower mandibles, form the most common component of the reference collection. Post-cranial elements are far less numerous. Despite such limitations, the collection is far more comprehensive than those that exist elsewhere in the region, such as in the national museums of Tanzania and Uganda, and as such is a valuable resource for scholars from a variety of disciplines including archaeology and biological anthropology. Accompanying documentation indicates that the majority of the human remains derive from just two closely related ethnic groups, the Kikuyu and Embu. From this documentary evidence most of specimens can be linked to particular settlements, and in several cases the causes of death, many of them the result of violence, and/or the sex, age, and even name of the individual is recorded. Most critical and disturbing of all is that the evidence indicates the majority of these specimens were obtained on behalf of the Corydon Museum (the precursor on NMK) by the then Director, Louis Leakey, from the government pathologist after post-mortem examinations conducted as part of investigations into possible murders that took place during the Mau Mau campaigns against British colonial rule. The manner in which this reference collection was built up, especially the questionable legitimacy of Leakeys actions and the lack of any evidence that informed consent w