Keynote Speakers
Danai Mupotsa is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of African Literature at Wits. She describes herself as a feminist teacher and researcher. In 2018, she published her debut collection of poetry, feeling and ugly, with impepho press. Her work specializes in a range of subjects that include gender and sexualities, black intellectual traditions and histories, intimacy and affect, popular culture, and feminist pedagogies.
The title of her talk at Feminist Readings in Motion is On permission
'On permission' explores writing. It examines how witnessing the reading and writing of oneself empirically rather than engaging with ideas conceptually can disrupt the dichotomy object/subject in connection to the questions implied by the positionality of speaking of/from women's experience. By doing so, the talk will also address the questions of the use of voice, autoethnography, placing oneself in the narrative, and of being read or understood as working in confession, thus giving oneself a permission to play with authority, voice and experience.
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YOU CAN WATCH THE RECORDED VERSION OF THIS KEYNOTE HERE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BAHbFoRhI0
Akosua Adomako Ampofo is Professor of African and Gender Studies at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana (UG). Adomako Ampofo is President of the African Studies Association of Africa; an honorary Professor at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Birmingham; and a Fellow of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the immediate past Dean of International Programmes at the University of Ghana, was the foundation Director of the University’s Centre for Gender Studies and Advocacy (2005-2009) and from 2010-2015 she was Director of the Institute of African Studies.
Adomako Ampofo considers herself an activist scholar. Her areas of interest include African Knowledge systems; Higher education; Race and Identity Politics; Gender relations; Masculinities; and Popular Culture. In her current work on black masculinities, she explores the shifting nature of identities among young men in Africa and the diaspora. Another project, “An Archive of Activism: Gender and Public History in Postcolonial Ghana” seeks to constitute a publicly accessible archive and documentary on gender activism and “political women” in postcolonial Ghana (with Kate Skinner, University of Birmingham; funded by the British Academy). (@adomakoampofo; https://adomakoampofo.com/)
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Her presentation at Feminist Readings in Motion is titled “’I’m a Feminist. I’ve been a female for a long time now. It’d be stupid not to be on my own side’- Maya Angelou; Feminist Traditions on the Move”
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I invoke Maya Angelou, one of my teachers I’ve never met. The fact that she spent time in Ghana, on my very campus, allows her spirit to linger for me, even though we have erected no memorial for her. Angelou was always on the move. Never still. Never derailed. Never silenced. I pick her as the signpost for my talk because I would like us to consider foremother words and actions that align with her spirit of wisdom, compassion, humility audacious authority, and generosity of spirit. There is a time to speak, a time to shout, a time to be silent, and sometimes a time to take back our words. But she chose. Traditions are not normally “on the move’, in fact the expression could be an oxymoron; we often embalm traditions. And yet, when we look carefully, we see today’s feminisms on the move with their own ritual urgencies. Angelou will be the voice I invite to lead conversations of traditions on the move.
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YOU CAN WATCH THE RECORDED VERSION OF THIS KEYNOTE HERE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wB0X_zJlss
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Nthabiseng Motsemme is currently Academic Director at the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIHSS) and is also Research Fellow at the University of Johannesburg (Sociology Department) and Nelson Mandela University (Centre for Women and Gender Studies). Her research interests include African feminist and womanist theories; African cultural production and subjectivities; Townships and township women’s shifting identities; Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and women’s testimonies and memories; and Women’s experiences and transformation in higher education. She currently serves on the editorial boards of African Identities and Feminist Legal Studies.
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The title of her presentation at Feminist Readings in Motion is: African women’s sacred/spiritual violations and the healing of our historical wounds: An African-womanist reflection
A neglected area in African women’s memories of oppressive and violent political regimes has been violations of the sacred/spiritual. Drawing from three generations of women’s life histories, the talk will focus on neglected sacred/spiritual memory-sensory sites which women’s recollections surfaced as traumatic. The talk will also creatively explore how women utilise African spiritualities, cosmologies and their bodies as counter epistemological resources and practices to heal their wounded pasts through intergenerationally linking ancestral memories with their recent violent memories; redirecting restless spirits to safety; repatriating spirits from distant lands to their ancestral homes; cleansing historically wounded bodies; repairing mutilated sensory paths numbed by violences; and clearing bloodied landscapes via circular ecological reversals towards the making of communities which draw on female power and maternal legacies.
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YOU CAN WATCH THE RECORDED VERSION OF THIS KEYNOTE HERE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5MSDkiLjVs