Deadline- August 31, 2012
The University of Cape Town’s Law, Race and Gender Unit, Centre for Curating the Archive, in partnership with the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, and the Land, Environment and Society in Africa (LESA) Research Programme at Stellenbosch University, and PLAAS and the NRF Chair in Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, is calling for proposals for its conference ‘Land Divided: Land and South African Society in 2013, in Comparative Perspective’, taking place from 24-27 March 2013 in Cape Town.
2013 is the centenary of South Africa’s notorious Natives Land Act, a foundational piece of legislation in the edifice of twentieth-century segregation and apartheid. The centenary of the Land Act presents a major opportunity for researchers in academia, civil society and the state to reflect on the significance of ‘the land question’ in South African society and what can be learned from other contexts and different ways of thinking about land as a social, economic and natural resource.
The conference also aims to stimulate critical reflection on contemporary and future environmental, agrarian and social dynamics within South Africa and the region. In this way it aims to provide a platform for scholarship that is mindful of the significance of the past and also forward looking.
Conference themes-
- The legacy of the 1913 Natives Land Act;
- Land reform and agrarian policy in southern Africa;
- The multiple meanings of land: identity, rights, belonging; and
- Ecological challenges.
These themes will be explored in plenary sessions, where leading figures in the field from South Africa and abroad will identify key issues and open up the debates, which will then be further examined in parallel sessions.
Photographic exhibition–
A highlight of the conference will be the launch of a photographic exhibition on the multiple meanings of land in South Africa, past and present. This will be co-curated by Paul Weinberg and David Goldblatt, who have both spent much of their careers exploring the contested nature of land and landscape in South African society. The exhibition will be a public event that will address all four conference themes visually.
For more information, visit this link
