Keynote Speaker: Verne Harris
Friday 11 April 1.15– 2.15
Verne Harris
- Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory, Johannesburg
Against the grain: archive(s), discourse(s) and outside(s)
Verne Harris explores the degree to which it still goes against the grain for archivists to open their discourses to what is “outside”. He suggests that conditions of postmodernity have challenged the insularity of these discourses in profound ways, and argues that they have been enriched by engagement with other disciplines, professions and traditions. Reading against the grain of archival discourses, he goes further and argues that the boundaries between inside and outside have always been, and will always be, permeable. And yet, he points out, considerable energy is still being spent on patrolling these and related boundaries.
Verne Harris is a Programme Manager for the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory and Dialogue at the Nelson Mandela Foundation, and an honorary research associate with the University of the Witwatersrand. He participated in a range of structures which transformed South Africa’s apartheid public records system – amongst others, the African National Congress’s Archives Committee, the Arts and Culture Task Group, the Consultative Forum which drafted the National Archives of South Africa Act, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the South African History Archive. Widely published, he is best known for the books Exploring Archives: An Introduction to Archival Ideas and Practice in South Africa (1997, 2000 and 2004), Refiguring the Archive (2002), A Prisoner in the Garden: Opening Nelson Mandela’s Prison Archive (2005), and Archives and Justice (2007). He is also the author of two novels, both of which were short-listed for South Africa’s M-Net Book Prize.
Back to Speakers/Abstracts