The WISER Podcast

Mar 14 2024 50 ep. 21 mins 28
The WISER Podcast artwork

Conversations, audio-essays and public talks from the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER), at the University of the Witwatersrand.

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Hlonipha Mokoena interviews Achille Mbembe

Mar 14 2024 64 mins  
Hlonipha interviews Achille on winning the Holberg prize, on their backgrounds, institutions and intellectual obsessions.

Bessie Head’s Absorbent Literature

Nov 17 2022 16 mins  
In this week’s episode, Anneke Rautenbach discusses how, when the writer Bessie Head escaped apartheid South Africa and settled in the rural village of Serowe, Botswana, she remained haunted by the violence of her past. In her work on experimental development farms, alongside locals and foreign volunteers, she discovered not only a source of healing, but a subterranean moral phil

Cheikh BA: Riverine Landscapes in Senegal

Sep 06 2022 9 mins  
In this episode of The WiSER Podcast, Cheikh BA discusses the Senegal River as an intense node of knowledge making. He discusses how those who live alongside it observe, name and think about its flows, quantities, evolutions, water paths and distribution. He also shows how, in parallel and sometimes in confrontation, the "modern management" of natural resources translates into deve

The new nuclear age

Aug 01 2022 17 mins  
In this week’s episode, Simon van Schalkwyk discusses our new nuclear age, the re-emergence of a long latent Cold War atavism, including the politics of containment and psycho-warfare. Online ‘nuke maps’ mean you can now simulate the effects of nuclear strikes anywhere in the world. He sets the location for Braamfontain, Johannesburg and sees what (would) happen…. Simon van

Bridging the Bay: Maputo-Katembe

Jul 21 2022 14 mins  
In this episode, Caio Simões de Araújo discusses the politics of infrastructure in Southern Africa, taking as an entry point the Maputo-Katembe bridge, inaugurated in 2018. Araújo argues that the bridge is part of a renewed public investment in infrastructure enabled by Chinese cooperation in Africa. Yet, rather than a straightforward road into the future, the bridge is embedded

Vampires: Pandemics & Politics

Jun 27 2022 16 mins  
In this episode, Timothy Wright discusses the graphic novel Rebirth (2012), which imagines a node of vampire culture in the striated and gritty space of Johannesburg. He reads the book’s terminally ill vampires as offering a surprising, generative vantage point from which to think through some urgent social and political issues of the contemporary moment: whiteness, entanglement,

Two Treasons, Two States, One Family

Jun 09 2022 37 mins  
In Episode One of Season Five of The WiSER Podcast, the Reverend Frank Chikane and his son Regotsofetse Chikane, recollect and discuss the moment – separated by 30 years – they were each arrested for treason – by the apartheid and post-apartheid states, successively. As prominent anti-apartheid activist and #FeesMustFall activist respectively, they retell their experiences -

The Art of Meleko Mokgosi Part 2

Nov 04 2021 61 mins  
In this week’s episode, we present Part Two of our mini-series on the work of Botswanan artist Meleko Mokgosi by Hlonipha Mokoena of WISER. Last week, Mokoena offered an analysis of Mokgosi’s paintings from multiple perspectives. In today’s episode, she speaks to the artist himself, a wide-ranging and fascinating discussion that takes up many of the issues introduced last wee

The Art of Meleko Mokgosi (Part 1)

Oct 28 2021 17 mins  
Today we release the first of a two-part podcast series that focuses on the work of Botswanan artist Meleko Mokgosi. In today’s episode, Hlonipha Mokoena, Associate Professor at WISER, discusses his work. “There seems to be no better time than the present for us to have a conversation about what it means to be a black artist who paints black subjects”, says Mokoena, as she

Inside WISER

Oct 14 2021 19 mins  
Today we hear from Najibha Deshmukh, WISER’s Senior Administrator and Adila Deshmukh, WISER’s Financial Manager. Najibha and Adila, who are sisters, give us their take on life at WISER, offering an inside view of everyday life, from both the front desk and the Institute’s financial office. In a richly nuanced and finely observed - and often very funny – set of observations,