Workshop “Remembering Mining. Conflicting memories for an uncertain heritage”, 1 March 2024

March 1, 2024 | 10:00 – 11.30am

IFAS, 1st floor | 62, Juta Street, Braamfontein

Prof. Judith Hayem (University of Lille) and Prof. Barbara Morovich (IFRA-Nigeria) will present and discuss their joint project on mining heritage, entitled “A forgotten heritage? Minority, competing and contradictory memories of mining in South Africa”, sharing insights into the results of their 2022-2024 fieldwork in Springs and Marikana.

Prof. Judith Hayem is a professor of anthropology at the University of Lille and a member of Clersé (Lille Centre for Sociological and Economic Studies and Research). As a political anthropologist, she has been conducting research on workers in France and South Africa since the mid-1990s. In particular, she has investigated forms of labour thought in car factories in the aftermath of apartheid (La figure ouvrière en Afrique du Sud, IFAS Karthala, 2008), the management of HIV/AIDS in the coal mines of Mpumalanga in the early 2000s and, more recently, the subjectivity of striking platinum miners in Marikana in 2012. With Barbara Morovich, she initiated a research project in 2022 entitled ” A forgotten heritage? Minority, competitive and contradictory memories of mining in South Africa”.

Prof. Barbara Morovich is an anthropologist, HDR Associate Professor at ENSA, University of Strasbourg, and Director of IFRA-Nigeria since 2022. Her research focuses on changing urban contexts and ‘minority’ groups in Africa (Kenya, South Africa, and Nigeria), South America (Argentina) and Europe (France). She studies urban projects that emphasise memory and culture as key factors for change in neighbourhoods affected by evictions, demolitions, and mobilisations, and is carrying out several projects on the relationship between the various players involved in heritage development, particularly artists. Following research in a stigmatised district of Strasbourg, which she conducted as part of an association, she published Miroirs anthropologiques et changement urbain (Anthropological mirrors and urban change), Paris, L’Harmattan, 2017. Since 2016, she has been involved in research at the Drill Hall in Johannesburg, publishing, with Pauline Guinard, “An Uncertain Heritage and Resistance: Transforming the Drill Hall in Johannesburg”, in Hilton Judin (ed.), Falling Monuments, Reluctant Ruins, Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 2021.