For PALESTINE, SUDAN, CONGO, HAITI, ETHIOPIA
At VIAD Research Centre, we are deeply committed to critically reimagining history and envisioning new futures within the complex legacies of racial slavery, colonial modernity, and apartheid. The ongoing devastation in Palestine reminds us of the remaining harm of apartheid in South Africa. The layered histories of Haiti, Sudan, Ethiopia are also manifest in current damage and the awakening of unresolved histories highlights the urgent need to rethink our understandings of freedom and justice.
Revolutions, both seen and unseen, should ensure lived freedom for people and the environments they co-exist in. The current turbulent times call for new ways of understanding contemporary catastrophes by intersectional terms. The world as we know it requires decolonisation and new imagination. Centres of research, such as ours at VIAD, who exist for world-building in creative capacities are called to refuse death as the status quo. VIAD has had to look closely at the future we are part of building and recognise being entwined in a world market that makes survival a daily concern, forcing “us” versus “them” frames of thought to exacerbate. The precarity of centres of art, planetary thought and the humanities is entangled with the lives of marginalised peoples and ecological emergencies. It is the imbricated nature of ongoing crises that makes it critical to refuse disconnection from others, from the networks of life. VIAD mourns expansionist greed, its concomitant othering and human disposability.
We ask: Who and what is being destroyed, and how can we create analytic models, through creative practices of worldbuilding? What tools are needed to perceive the depth of violence incurred by the ecosystem in which we relationally exist? What is our responsibility to act for the most precarious lives simultaneous to repairing the environment that cares for their living? As genocide, ecocide, scholasticide and culturecide intersect in the unabating destruction of Palestine, VIAD asks for collective thinking and creative action to drive toward transformative world-building. The world faces an ongoing climate crisis, exacerbated fear and the rise of the far right. This world is netted by histories unresolved. Sudan, Congo, Haiti, Ethiopia are also in critical states of wounding, but justice cannot be conceived without rethinking the racial capitalocene that makes mass violence endemic. The impact of these catastrophes on the most vulnerable has devastating and far-reaching consequences.
VIAD honours the creative capacity of peoples who- while they should not be under siege- are resisting. Guided by these peoples’ fight for freedom, we continue imagining different futures where human, animal, plant, living and non-living matter can co-exist in healthy ecologies.
VIAD Research Centre stands in solidarity with marginalised indigenous peoples, people with disabilities, sexualised, gendered and racialised minorities who are rendered vulnerable in intersecting ways. VIAD denounces the violence of displacement.
*This statement does not reflect the views of the University of Johannesburg.
VIAD STATEMENT IN SUPPORT OF UNIVERSITY STAFF RESISTING REDUNDANCIES IN THE UK
The circumstances of high staff redundancies in the arts and humanities in the UK has sparked widespread concern over the future of higher education, with many fearing that these cuts will severely impact the cultural sector and the quality of teaching and research. VIAD Research Centre stands within an intersectional and transnational framework that draws insights from African and African Diasporic art. Internationalism is a key strategy of thinking across the black diaspora for located and global understandings of the world. It is of key importance for VIAD to acknowledge the plights of our fellow scholars where their careers and very livelihoods are at stake. As academic staff redundancies in the UK highlight financial and structural vulnerabilities within higher education institutions, VIAD recognizes a current of precarity that has been on-going across many universities globally.
As Mlamuli Nkosingphile Hlatshwayo writes, “The country’s [South Africa’s] shift from single party national governance to the GNU offers us an opportunity to rethink and reimagine a new social contract in South African public universities, one rooted in social justice, democratic thought and inclusivity.” (12 July 2024). What is understood, is that the Government of National Unity (GNU) presents a new agreement between society and state. The formation of this new pact surfaces- amongst other interconnected issues- the issues regarding South Africa’s universities and fees. UK universities’ redundancies are part of a complex situation including one where local students’ fees are kept lower in relation to a reliance on international students paying higher fees. As part of South Africa’s decolonial efforts (especially as one of the UK’s former colonies), it is important to recognise the urgent need to address historical injustices and transform higher education. Redundancies at UK universities show a trend that deems ‘redundant’ or unnecessary, courses in the arts and Humanities at large, as the Full scale of university arts cuts emerges | News | ArtsProfessional reports.
The recent staff challenges in the UK's higher education sector highlight significant issues that resonate globally, including the need for proper consultation, union involvement, and transparency in decision-making processes. In the UK, the transitions away from EU labour legislation and the ongoing funding crisis at universities have exacerbated staffing challenges. Redundancies and restructuring efforts, often justified by falling student numbers and financial constraints, raise critical concerns about the end goals and the ethical responsibilities of educational institutions. The situation at Middlesex University, where about 181 staff members face redundancy, particularly underscores the critical need for transparent and meaningful consultations. The social contract is a constitutional notion through which democracy is practiced. The University and College Union (UCU) has criticised the consultation process as insubstantial and has called for a reconsideration of current redundancies.
Focus on decolonial transformation must go hand-in-hand with ensuring fair labour practices and cultural worker protections. VIAD calls for a social contract of consultation, collaboration and most importantly care. We call for educational institutions in the UK, and like institutions across the globe, to rethink their strategies of redundancy and exercise a level of regard that considers their staff’s dignity and livelihoods, both for those who are facing unemployment and those who face the burden of employment under extreme stress.
*This statement does not reflect the views of the University of Johannesburg.