Affiliation: University of South Africa (UNISA)

Topic: Uncertainties, social justice and convenient ignorance: Engaging exhaustion and absences

Bio: Puleng Segalo is a Fulbright scholar, National Research Foundation rated researcher, and a professor of psychology currently holding the position of Chief Albert Luthuli Research Chair at the University of South Africa (UNISA). Her areas of specialization include Africa-centered psychology, gender and trauma, and decolonial feminism in psychology. Her research focuses on historical trauma, visual methodologies, and gendered suffering. Segalo is the 2023 recipient of the UNISA Chancellor award for excellence in research. In 2014, she received the Women in Science Awards (WISA): Distinguished Young Woman in Science and gained South African Young Academy of Science (SAYAS) membership in 2016. Further, Segalo was the recipient of the 2021 World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) Regional Award for Public Understanding and Popularisation of Science. She is currently the 2023-2025 research fellow at the University of Kansas’ African Studies Center and the 2023 research fellow at the University of Ghana’s Institute for African Studies. Segalo has recently (May 2023) been named the Graduate Center, City University of New York Alumni of the decade – and was recognised with a golden award for her contribution in social justice scholarship. Her passion lies in mentoring and capacity building – she currently supervises master and doctoral students, and mentors post-doctoral fellows.

Affiliation: University of Johannesburg (UJ)

Topic: Envisaging the Future of Diplomacy: Challenging Conventional Understanding of Geo-Politics

Bio: Professor Arthur G.O. Mutambara is the Director and Full Professor of the Institute for the Future of Knowledge (IFK) at the University of Johannesburg (UJ). He is a world-renowned roboticist, academic, author, Pan-Africanist and technology strategist. He is a Former Deputy Prime Minister of Zimbabwe.

Affiliation: University of Exeter

Topic: Die Of Ignorance: Stonewalling Our Story Of Section 28

Bio: Dr Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman (they/them) is an independent heritage, or inheritance, consultant and an activist intellectual historian of abolitionist ideas.

Their most recent roles have included Project Director of Reclaiming Community Heritage, a unique partnership, between Empathy Museum, The Ubele Initiative, and 81 Acts of Exuberant Defiance, made possible by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, and Research Fellow for Cast in Stone at the University of Exeter, where they are building a database of contested and contestable colonial statues in Britain and France and researching, in the wake of Black Lives Matter, a biography of Bristol’s statue of Edward Colston.

Born in Birmingham, they are writing a book — The House By The Rivers Of Blood: Birmingham’s Hidden History of British Anti-Slavery—about what we, the Children of Birmingham, that city’s heirs, inherit. We inherit a house Birmingham built, an abolition Birmingham won, and an education Birmingham designed. Accordingly, this book is a trilogy, comprising three distinct, yet related, titles: Remember This House! (a new history of the British Commonwealth), Abolish The Police! (a new history of the British Abolitionist Movement), and Die Of Ignorance! (a new history of Britain’s “Don’t Say Gay” Law, “Section 28”). During their time in Johannesburg, a city not coincidentally twinned with Birmingham, they will be conducting research for a related project, commissioned by the Henry Moore Foundation, called “Emperor Joe's War for Gold: Why Birmingham Began South African Apartheid".

Affiliation: University of Johannesburg (UJ)

Topic: White Lies: On Whiteness, Ignorance, and Disavowal

Bio: Marzia Milazzo is an associate professor of English at the University of Johannesburg. Prior to joining UJ, Milazzo was an assistant professor of English and affiliated faculty in African American and Diaspora Studies, Latino and Latina Studies, and Latin American Studies at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Rhodes University in Makhanda, South Africa. Milazzo’s scholarship is broadly concerned with the relationship between the poetics and politics of both racist and antiracist discourses. The interdisciplinary nature of her scholarship is visible in her publications, which have appeared in journals as diverse as The Global South, the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, the Journal of Applied Philosophy, Research in African Literatures, Cultural Studies, and other venues. Milazzo’s book, Colorblind Tools: Global Technologies of Racial Power, published in the Critical Insurgency series at Northwestern University Press in 2022, offers a global reflection on anti-Blackness and white supremacy that pushes against the dominant emphasis on historical change that pervades current racial theory. Currently, Milazzo is working on a book that examines the racial politics of contemporary South African literature tentatively titled Darkening Rainbow: Post-Apartheid Writing and the Politics of Race.

Affiliation: Kobe University, UNISA, & University of Namibia

Topic: The Geopolitics of Ignorance in the Era of the Ontological Turn

Bio: Artwell Nhemachena is a visiting Associate Professor at Kobe University; a Research Fellow at the University of South Africa and he lectures at the University of Namibia. He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology, MSc in Sociology and Social Anthropology and BSc Honours Degree in Sociology. He has published over 20 books and over 80 book chapters and journal articles in the areas of security, environment, development, food security and food sovereignty, futurology, sociology of anticipation, anthropology of anticipation, sociology of industry and work organisations, violence and conflict, pandemics and society, sociology and social anthropology of science and technology studies, relational ontologies, indigenous knowledge systems and decoloniality. He has been a Laureate and member of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) between 2010 and 2018. He is an editorial board member for several internationally renowned journals; and he has reviewed applications for funding submitted to world renowned global funders of anthropological research. He has been invited to deliver numerous keynote addresses, occasional lectures and guest lectures around the world. Recently, he was part of experts advising the World Health Organization on Dual-Use Research of Concern and Responsible Use of Life Sciences Research.

Affiliation: City University of New York (CUNY)

Topic: The Ignorance of Eurocentricism

Bio: Linda Martín Alcoff is Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York. She earned her PhD at Brown University after doing undergraduate work at Florida State University and Georgia State University.

Her books include Rape and Resistance: Understanding the Complexities of Sexual Violation; The Future of Whiteness; Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self, which won the Frantz Fanon Award; and Real Knowing: New Versions of the Coherence Theory. She has published 12 edited books and over 100 articles. Her writings have appeared in the New York Times, Aeon, the NY Indypendent, among others. For over a decade she has taught courses on decolonial philosophy and epistemology in Spain, Australia and South Africa. She was elected President of the American Philosophical Association in 2012, in 2021 she was named by Academic-Influence.com as one of the ten most influential philosophers today, and in 2023 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is originally from Panama. Go to alcoff.com for more info.

Wednesday 11 October 2023
Time: 17:30 for 18:00 – 20:00
Venue: Senate Room, Wits
Online: Zoom webinar. To register, click here.

Affiliation: University of Connecticut (UConn)

Topic: Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge


Bio: Lewis R. Gordon is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Global Affairs and Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. He is also Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies and Distinguished Scholar at The Most Honourable PJ Patterson Centre for Africa-Caribbean Advocacy at The University of the West Indies, Mona. He is the author of many books, including, most recently, Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (Routledge, 2021); Fear of Black Consciousness (Penguin Books, 2022); and Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge: Writings of Lewis R. Gordon, edited by Rozena Maart and Sayan Dey (Bloomsbury, 2023); and “Not Bad for an N—, No?”/ «Pas mal pour un N—, n'est-ce pas? » (Daraja Press, 2023). His accolades include the 2022 Eminent Scholar Award from the International Studies Association.