ARA Podcast - Ethnographies and Art Practices as Research in Africa

Arts Research Africa Dialogues

In this ARA dialogue, we look at the changing relationship between ethnographies and art practice as research in Africa.
The dialogue was prompted by the recent workshop on African ethnographies which was organised by Dr Jung Ran Annachiara Forte and Prof Sakhumzi Mfecane from the Department of Anthropolog and Sociology at the University of the Western Cape as part of the ongoing African Critical Inquiry Programme.
The workshop was intended to prompt reflection around the concept and practices of ethnograpy which the workshop organisers describe as "slippery, changing, dense, polysemic, and composed of a plurality of voices". And in a formulation that resonates with the manner in which artistic research practice is often understood, they describe contemporary African ethnography as enabling "conceptual work that transcends simple divides between the empirical, the methodological, and the theoretical." Of particular relevance to these dialogues, one of the major aims of the workshop was "to re-rethink ethnography from the African continent."
http://www.asauk.net/2019-african-critical-inquiry-workshop-african-ethnographies/
In this ARA dialogue, three Wits colleagues who attended the workshop will be discussing the changing relationship between ethnographies and artistic practice as research with particular reference to their own work at Wits in the light of the African Ethnographies workshop.
Prof Brett Pyper, Principal Investigator on the Arts Research Africa project and Head of the Wits School of Arts is in discussion with Dr Nosipho Mngomezulu and Dr George Mahashe, both lecturers in Wits Anthropology.