Browsing by Author "Gillespie, Kelly"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    A decolonial anthropology: You can dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools
    (Sage, 2024) Venkatesan, Soumhya; Gillespie, Kelly; Ntarangwi, Mwenda
    The 2022 meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory (GDAT) Social Anthropology, University of Manchester. The motion is, of course, a riff on Audre Lorde’s well-known 1984 claim that ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.’ Lorde is asking about the tools of a racist and constitutionally exclusionary world, but we can ask similar questions about the tools of an academic discipline, anthropology, which arose during the height of empire, and the house that anthropology has built and its location in the university. Are anthropology’s tools able to dismantle a house built on oppression, exploitation and discrimination and then build a different better house? If not, then what kinds of other tools might we use, and what is it that we might want to build? The motion is proposed by David Mills and Mwenda Ntarangwi and opposed by Kelly Gillespie and Naisargi Dav´e with Soumhya Venkatesan convening and editing the debate for publication.
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    Contemporary black African curatorial practice: Three biographic studies in strategy
    (University of the Western Cape, 2024) Setai, Phokeng Tshepo; Gillespie, Kelly; Taylor, Jane
    This doctoral thesis is an interpretive study of the emergence of contemporary curatorial practice on the African continent. The inquiry charts the rise of the practice of curating in postcolonial Africa, casting a biographical lens on the curatorial strategies of three pre-eminent contemporary Black-African curators — Koyo Kouoh, Ntone Edjabe and Gabi Ngcobo. It pays particular attention to the conceptual and methodological approaches these individuals have utilised in their negotiation of the emergent genre of curatorial practice on the African continent; in the context of a neoliberalising landscape in the global contemporary art-world. This thesis is an exploration of the present-day expanded role of contemporary curatorial practice, and the nascent formations of cultural production emerging from the rise of the curator — models of which have helped to situate the role of the curatorial practitioner at the political centre of our contemporary moment in the African and global art-world. This thesis problematises the function of contemporary curatorial practitioners in Africa by leading an examination into how three contemporary Black African curators are reconfiguring the historical and contemporary epistemic articulations of the practice in the present. Central to this research’s inquiry is understanding the thinking implemented by Black African curators in their curatorial practices and discovering what influence their pedagogies have on existing modes of cultural production on the African continent.
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    The long-term effects of domestic Violence: a study of life histories in a homeless shelter in cape Town, South Africa
    (University of the Western Cape, 2020) Munge, Epie Bernadette; Gillespie, Kelly
    This study examines the effects of domestic violence on adults who witnessed abuse as children in their homes. It seeks to ascertain if the childhood emotional trauma of domestic violence influences the growth and social adaptation of children in their later years. Despite the growing awareness of domestic violence worldwide, there is nevertheless an alarming number of women reporting abuse, and there are those who are reportedly beaten or inflicted with bodily harm at the hands of their abusers. However, most of these domestic or household conflicts take place in situations where children are involved. These children witness such abuse and grow up carrying emotional and physical scars that impact their functioning as members of society. The study adopts a life history approach to investigate 15 adult participants (five women and ten men) within evolving themes relating to their experiences of domestic violence and other life ordeals during their childhood that made them end up at the Elim Night Shelter in Cape Town, South Africa. The study is anchored on the explication of such key concepts as domestic violence, abuse and the physical, social, emotional and behavioural effects of abuse. Furthermore, the study identifies the social consequences of growing up in an abusive environment. The findings of the study reveal that people who witnessed acts of domestic violence as children experience negative consequences as adults. Recommendations have been listed which could assist the further study expansion on the topic, together with intervention strategies.
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    Making and remaking life under threat: Disposability, extraction, and anti-black historical processes in old coronation, Mpumalanga
    (University of the Western Cape, 2022) Rabbaney, Zaakiyah; Gillespie, Kelly
    Developed in the 1980s on an abandoned Anglo American coal mine, Old Coronation informal settlement in Mpumalanga is a site of environmental, infrastructural, social, and economic ruin. This thesis looks into the lives of the residents of Old Coronation as they navigate their existence in a scarcely-habitable environment compounded by poverty, joblessness, struggle, and historical and ongoing extractivist processes. The thesis intends to understand the lives of Old Coronation residents as they negotiate survival in a political and economic system, and mineral industry, in which their lives and futures have been abandoned. The main argument is that because of racial capitalism, neoliberalism, and extractivist processes, Old Coronation residents are forced into a life of extreme effort: making and remaking life always against threats, the escape of which only heightens the exposure to further threat.
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    Orders of protection: Feminist lessons in anti-privatization and authoritarianism from South Africa
    (Society for Cultural Anthropology, 2022) Gillespie, Kelly
    The feminist adage �the personal is political� is not ahistorical. It is being operationalized in a time when the relationship between the private and the public is undergoing historic transformation. Making privatized violence public under current conditions often involves channeling the most authoritarian tendencies of the state into relationships made increasingly desperate by the conditions of contemporary capitalism. The ethnographic focus of the essay is the work of a feminist organization operating in the context of Lavender Hill in Cape Town, a neighborhood created by apartheid forced removals and made more precarious by post-apartheid abandonment. The essay focuses on an explosion in the use of protection orders to compel police to intervene in the intimate relationships of households and neighbors, and offers an extended explanation of how and why feminism provides an exemplary case of reactionary politics for our times. The essay ends with a plea to draw on a different trajectory of feminism as a way of reconstituting a transformative political agenda, one that must take the historical transformations of racial capitalism seriously.