Making Democracy as a Community of Life: Transregional Dialogues Across Asia and Africa

SYMPOSIUM PROGRAMME

DAY 1: OPENING AND KEYNOTE

Achille Mbembe (Wits University/Innovation Foundation for Democracy)

Democracy as a Community of Life, Revisited

16:00-17:30

(Wine Reception, 17:30-19:00)

Engineering Exhibition Space (Engineering 1)3

DAY 2: PANELS AND MODERATED CONVERSATION

The Lounge, Old College House

Panel 1: Communities of Life on the Urban Periphery (09:00-11:00)

• Trevor van Wyk (University of Pretoria) – Becoming Mgerezi: Planting Bombs and Waste Work Subjectivities in Common
• Soraya El Kahlaoui (Ghent University) – Postcolonial State Building, Dispossession, and its Resistances in Morocco and Tunisia (Online)
• Chester Cunan Arcilla (University of the Philippines) – Urban Subaltern Home-(Re)making as

Democratic Struggle

Chair: Fikile Masikane (University of Pretoria)

Panel 2: Walling Regimes and Migrant Acts of Citizenship (11:00-13:00)

• Junjia Ye (Nanyang Technical University) – Enclave Management: Transient Migrants as Spatial Mediators in Singapore’s Paya Lebar Neighbourhood
• Jessica Breakey (University College London) – The Banality of Good: Sea Rescue and Responding to Emergency in the Mediterranean
• Tamuka Chekero (University of Pretoria) – Mutualism Despite Ostensible Difference: HuShamwari, Kuhanyisana, and Conviviality Between Shona Zimbabweans and Tsonga South Africans in Giyani, South Africa

Chair: Adam Louw (University of Pretoria)

LUNCH: 13:00 – 14:00

Independent Media and Counterpublics in the Age of Autocracy: A Conversation with Simon Allison and Ishan Tankha (14:00-16:00)

• Simon Allison (The Continent)
• Ishan Tankha (Independent journalist)4

Moderator: Dinesh Balliah (Wits University)

DAY 3: PANELS AND FILM SCREENING

09:00-16:00

(The Lounge, Old College House and the Engineering Exhibition Space, Engineering 1)

Panel 1: Literary/Visual Imaginaries, Activist Archives, and Democratic Vocabularies (09:00-11:00)

• Haidar Eid (Al Aqsa University) – Teaching Decolonial Literature in Gaza
• TBC
• Sarah Nuttall (Wits University) – A World-Making Openness: Penny Siopis’s Short Films as

Democratic Art Practice

Chair: Charne Lavery (University of Pretoria)

Panel 2: New Political Communities Against Autocratization (11:00-13:00)

• Cynthia Farid (Advocate, Supreme Court of Bangladesh) – The July 2024 Uprising in Bangladesh: Fragmentation of Solidarity and the Ngo-isation of Politics
• Waruguru Gaitho (Cambridge University) – “How Do you Teargas a Baddie?”: ‘Ideal’ Political

Subjects, Political Consciousness, and the Centrality of Queer and Feminist Struggles in Kenya’s

Third Liberation Movement

• Devaka Gunawardena (Social Scientists’ Association) – Is a New Social Contract Possible? Reconstructing Sri Lanka’s Political Economic Order after the Great Revolt of 2022

Chair: Tamuka Chekero (University of Pretoria)

LUNCH: 13:00-14:005

Film Screening: Land of My Dreams (14:00-16:30) (The Engineering Exhibition Space)

• Nausheen Khan (Filmmaker)
• Shaeera Kalla (Filmmaker)
• Obakeng Kgongoane (University of Pretoria)

Chair: Alf Gunvald Nilsen (University of Pretoria)