This zoom webinar will launch the new book Race, Class and Christianity in South Africa: Middle-Class Moralities by Ibrahim Abraham. Exploring the relationship between race and class among middle-class Christians in South Africa, this book will be of interest to researchers of South African culture and society, as well as religion, anthropology, and sociology. The presentation will draw from the book’s concluding chapter “Covid-19 in Cape Town” reflecting on the ongoing crisis in South Africa in light of the book’s focus on the spiritual and material insecurities of the South African middle class, and the diversity of theological and political approaches among multiracial middle-class churches.
About the author: Ibrahim Abraham is the Hans Mol Research Fellow in Religion and the Social Sciences in the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University. A graduate of Monash University and the University of Bristol, he was previously a research fellow at the University of Helsinki. Ibrahim is the author of Evangelical Youth Culture: Alternative Music and Extreme Sports Subcultures (Bloomsbury, 2017), editor of Christian Punk: Identity and Performance (Bloomsbury, 2020), and co-editor of the Journal for the Academic Study of Religion, the publication of the Australian Association for the Study of Religion.
Senegambian Rhythmic Traditions, Embodied Knowledge, and Adaptation
Lamine Sonko and King Marong
Date & time: Thursday 20 May 2021, 3.30â5pm
Location: Kingsland Room, Level 6, ANU School of Music
In this research seminar, Lamine Sonko and King Marong will reflect on their longterm engagement with embodied knowledge of ancient rhythmic traditions in West Africa, as well as current research exploring the adaptation of traditional music, dance, and theatre in contemporary Australia. The seminar will include a discussion and live music demonstration.
Lamine Sonko is a composer, director and multi-instrumentalist, originally from Senegal and living in Australia since 2004. In his artistic practice he draws on traditional wisdom to create inter-disciplinary & multi-sensory arts experiences inspired by his cultural background as a Gewel (hereditary cultural role). His role as a Gewel is to be a keeper and communicator of history, customs, rituals and sacred knowledge through music, dance and oral storytelling. Through his work he has defined new ways to present and re-imagine the traditional African, contemporary and classical synthesis of music and theatre. As a composer he has arranged and recorded award-winning music including two compositions for Grammy Award-winning album âWinds of Samsaraâ (2015). He has composed and directed large scale works including the Boite Millennium Chorus âOne Africaâ (Arts Centre Melbourne) and has presented and performed throughout Australia and internationally.
Born in The Gambia, King Marong has been performing professionally since the age of 12. King developed his skills in the coastal fishing village where he grew up surrounded by the griots (hereditary musicians) and international musicians who were his mentors for Senegambian drumming and cultural priorities. In his late teens he formed his band Kunta Kinteh and consequently toured The Gambia, Senegal, UK and Europe. King has since built an international reputation as a master of many African drumming styles on instruments such as the Djembe, Boucarabou, Doundoun and Sabar, performing and teaching percussion to students from around the world.
Join Gambian master percussionist, King Marong, Senegalese multi-instrumentalist, Lamine Sonko, music technology convenor Professor Samantha Bennett, and musicology convenor Dr Bonnie McConnell in ANU’s world class recording studio for a special performance/recording exploring Gambian and Senegalese culture.
Abstract The rolling out of Chinaâs Belt and Road Initiative and overseas projects provides a window to examine the intercultural dynamics between Chinese expats and local communities. Ethiopia, an East African country, has become a strategic partner of China and hosts a growing population of Chinese developers, business people and workers. In this contact zone, assumptions and misassumptions, tentative adjustments, and reevaluation of Chinese and local communitiesâ relations are abundant to the extent that any culturalist explanation is insufficient to grapple with the Chinese’s evolving ethical experience. This study shows how the Chinese and Ethiopians relate to one another ethically in different contexts and why the boundary between them becomes explicit or less so.
Bio Dr Liang Chenâs research interests involve migration, urbanisation, and intercultural encounters in China and Africa. He has been studying the trans-continental business network of African expatriates in China, the Chinese working in Ethiopia, and Afar pastoralists’ urbanisation in Ethiopia and Djibouti since 2016. He is currently visiting the School of Culture, History, and Language of ANU.
Victoria’s recently announced Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) draws inspiration from the famous TRC initiated in South Africa in 1995. Both initiatives endeavour to reveal historical truths and heal broken and unjust relationships between indigenous and non-indigenous communities. Whereas South Africaâs TRC was limited to political violence taking place between 1960 and 1994, excluding the broader sweep of South African history, the willingness of Victoriaâs TRC to investigate events as far back as European colonization makes it a conceivably more radical and potentially more contentious initiative. Offering an overview of South Africaâs TRC, drawn from the presenterâs forthcoming book, this lunchtime talk will also draw out some of the likely similarities and differences between the South African and Victorian initiatives, and highlight some of the challenges inherent in any TRC, including the implicitly religious nature of narratives of confession and reconciliation, and the difficulty of finding a common moral language in diverse societies.
Ibrahim Abraham is the Hans Mol Research Fellow in Religion and the Social Sciences in the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University, and a former Convenor of the Freilich Project for the Study of Bigotry. His book Race, Class and Christianity in South Africa: Middle-Class Moralities will be published by Routledge in 2021.
Dr Ibrahim Abraham explores this controversial masterpiece of post-apartheid South Africa at the turn of the twenty-first century. Disgrace is the novel that not only earned Coetzee (another) Booker Prize but guaranteed him the Nobel Prize awarded in 2003.
The Individual Deprivation Measure, or IDM, is an individual-level, gender sensitive measure of multidimensional deprivationâit measures deprivation at the individual rather than household level, and is designed to discern differences in the experiences of poverty between men and women. The IDM program was a partnership between the ANU, the International Womenâs Development Agency and the Australian Department for Foreign Affairs and Trade. The ANU led a studies in Indonesia in 2018 and in South Africa in 2019. The IDM programme ran between 2016 and 2020, and related research is being taken forward as the Individual Measurement of Multidimensional Poverty at ANU.
In South Africa, 14 dimensions of deprivation were measured (shown in the figure below). Some of these are already partially covered in some existing surveys (e.g. food security and access to drinking water), but the IDM includes a range of economic and social aspects which are not usually covered (e.g. the relationships, clothing and footwear and voice dimensions). Further, several IDM dimensions include aspects beyond that which is typically assessed. For example, the work dimension covers not only issues around paid work, but also includes themes on unpaid domestic and care work and on the double labour burden that can arise when both paid and unpaid work are done.
The South African country study had two parts:
a national-level main sample, that interviewed 8,652 individuals, 16 years and older;
a purposive sample that interviewed 826 individuals with disabilities and their household members (2,311 individuals in total), in Gauteng and Limpopo provinces.
There are a wide range of resource available for those who are interested in the results of the survey and the methods used for the analysis.
A revised analysis of the data was undertaken, using slightly different methods, and a series of briefing notes and documentation was produced. There are six briefing notes, describing the results for the main sample, as well as the analyses by gender, by age group, by disability status and by rural/urban locality. The sixth summarises the South African country study and the revised data analysis methods. Accompanying documentation includes reports describing the revised methods in detail, as well as providing all of the revised results. A comprehensive report published in May 2020 summarises the initial analysis of both the main sample and the purposive sample, which is available here.
A launch of the report was held in early August 2020, with Australiaâs High Commissioner to South Africa, Ms Gita Kamath, and the Resident Coordinator of the United Nations in South Africa, Nardos Bekele-Thomas, which you can watch below.
Lions of Khartoum(29 minutes / Sudan / English subtitles) explores the role of Khartoumâs iconic wrestlers in the Sudanese revolution of 2019, through the voice of Mudawi, a childhood wrestler-turned-wrestling commentator. Until the 2019 Sudanese revolution, Khartoumâs local wrestling organisation was run by Islamist party acolytes (kÄ«zÄn), who were more focused on making money from ticket sales than training the athletes or promoting the sport. During the horrific June 2019 massacre in Khartoum, one of the wrestlers was murdered by the Janjaweed, the former regimeâs paramilitary forces. His face now adorns the wrestling stadium formerly controlled by the kÄ«zÄn. Against the extraordinary backdrop of revolutionary change, however, the film shows us that the ordinary mundanity of life continues for Khartoumâs wrestlers. The film builds on the filmmakersâ 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, living and training with Khartoumâs wrestling community prior to and during the Sudanese revolution.
Mudawi Hassan is a commentator at Khartoumâs East Nile wrestling stadium, and has worked for numerous international researchers and filmmakers, in Khartoum and Darfur. In 2018, he graduated from Omdurman Islamic University with honours in communication and television. He participated in almost every major protest event in Khartoum during the revolution.
CO-FILMMAKER STATEMENT
This was a collaborative project between me, an Australian PhD student of anthropology, and Mudawi, a Sudanese wrestling enthusiast and community leader from Khartoum. The film, which focuses on Mudawiâs reflections after the revolution, will form part of my broader PhD thesis which explores the embodied material culture of Sudanese wrestling. For that, I spent over 12 months training and socialising with the East Nile wrestling community, while also living with Mudawiâs family. Unexpectedly, the fieldwork took place in the lead-up to, and during the start of the Sudanese revolution, which led to the army overthrowing President Omar Al Bashir in April 2019, after months of street protests. The footage for this film was shot only in December 2019, during a return visit to Mudawiâs family, precisely one year after the revolution began. The film tries to convey only a tiny taste of the lives of its interlocutors and their involvement in the revolution. It is a partial, tentative story, and one which I think raises more questions than it answers. Paul Hayes, Canberra, March 2020
After graduating from ANU in 2015, Angella formed the team that set up the Women in Leadership Network (WILN)-Kenya chapter. She is the current chairperson of the network and has led three Women in Leadership grants that have empowered women and girls in rural communities in Kenya.
As a precautionary measure and based upon the advice from our expert panel, we will cancel all public and social events from Monday 16 March until the end of semester one, Saturday 20 June. This is a precautionary measure that we know will be disappointing for many, but our aim is to reduce opportunities for the virus to spread by limiting activity on campus without disrupting our essential teaching and research activities.Â
Cancellation and postponement will extend to all discretionary events including ticketed and non-ticketed public events, public lectures and concerts.
Essential activities related to teaching and research, including tutorials, lectures, staff meetings and community services like childcare and cafes will continue as normal at this stage.Â
Monday, 30 August 2021, 5pm-6pm AEST
