Start main page content

Gillian Hart

Gillian Hart is Distinguished Professor in the Humanities Graduate Centre at the University of the Witwatersrand, and Professor of the Graduate School in Geography at the University of California, Berkeley.  She is currently working on a set of essays for a book on resurgent nationalisms and populisms in South Africa, India, and the United States since the end of the Cold War.  The most recent essay, entitled “Why Did it Take So Long?  Trumpism through Southern Lenses”, suggests how analyses of South Africa and India can shed new light on Trumpism in ways that speak to urgent political debates around class, race, gender, and other dimensions of difference.  Her prior books include Power, Labor, and Livelihood: Processes of Change in Rural Java (1986); Agrarian Transformations: Local Processes and the State in Southeast Asia (1989); Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa (2002); Gramsci: Space, Nature, Politics (2013); and Rethinking the South African Crisis: Nationalism, Populism, Hegemony (2014). 

Ivan Vladislavi?

Ivan Vladislavi? is a Distinguished Professor in the Creative Writing Department at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is the author of eight books of fiction, including the novels The Restless Supermarket, The Exploded View and Double Negative. Among his more recent publications are the story collection 101 Detectives and a set of reflections on writing called The Loss 雷速体育_雷速体育直播. He has written extensively on Johannesburg, notably in the documentary text Portrait with Keys. His early stories appear in the compendium volume Flashback Hotel. He sometimes works with visual artists and has edited volumes on architecture and art. He has also published a monograph on the artist Willem Boshoff. His work has won many awards, including the Alan Paton Award for non-fiction and Yale University’s Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction.

Samantha Vice

Samantha Vice joined Wits Philosophy Department as Distinguished Professor in 2015.  Her work ranges widely in the fields of ethics, social philosophy and aesthetics. Since the publication of her article, ‘How Do I Live in This Strange Place?’ (2010), she has focused on issues of white privilege and the possibility of leading an ethical life in contexts of systematic injustice.  She has also published papers on goodness and beauty and plans to continue exploring their relation, particularly in contexts of apparent hopelessness and justified pessimism about our place in the natural world.  Other work includes co-edited collections on film and ethics, and on aging, and papers on a wide variety of ethical topics, including cynicism, optimism and the meaning of life, animal beauty, impartiality and partiality, and the philosophy of Iris Murdoch.

Michael Askew

Mike Askew is Distinguished Professor of Mathematics Education in the School of Education at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, having previously been a Professor at King’s College, University of London and Monash University, Melbourne. Mike believes that mathematical activity can be engaging and enjoyable for all learners and that the majority of learners can master mathematics. To this end he is closely involved with both the Primary and Secondary Wits Maths Connect Projects and current research includes studying how foundation and intermediate phase learners come to reason multiplicatively. As well as research papers, this work has lead to a series of teaching guides available to all teachers. His books include: Transforming Primary Mathematics (2016); A Practical Guide to Transforming Primary Mathematics (2016); Mathematics: All that matters (2015). He is currently writing Being mathematicians: Teaching for deep learning in primary mathematics, based on his research in South Africa, Australia and UK.

Share