Perceptions of time and space ‘reshaped’ by pandemic

Faculty of Arts & Humanities: Professor Heidi Grunebaüm - Top Achiever

PROFESSOR Heidi Grunebaüm is the director at the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR). She completed her PhD at UWC in 2007, and then returned in 2011 to take up a post as Senior Researcher at the Centre for Humanities Research.

As a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research at UWC, she completed a monograph entitled Memorialising the Past: Everyday Life in South Africa after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was published in 2011. She also made the documentary feature film, The Village Under the Forest, with Mark J Kaplan about the historiographical debates on the founding national narratives of Israel.

Her most recent collaborative research project, Athlone in Mind (2017) was an exhibition curated by Dr Kurt Campbell, a digital platform and a book catalogue. Over the years, Prof Grunebaüm has made a deep and lasting contribution to establishing the intellectual foundations of the CHR’s research platform on aesthetics and politics.

She has also contributed to the knowledge inventory of the Factory of the Arts and its artists in residence programme. Much of her work is borne from an idea of place that responds to the failed promises of post-apartheid democracy. Her training in literary, historical, postcolonial and cultural studies have given her unique insights into what the pandemic has exposed in society.

“We live in a heteronormative patriarchal world where the structural burden of care for children, the elderly, and the household continues to be disproportionately borne by women, in general and the most economically and socially vulnerable women, in particular. Of course, this has implications for academic labour and for women academics, who also often carry the burden of invisible labour in our capacities as teachers, interlocutors, supervisors and colleagues.”

Reflecting on the pandemic, she says that it “has reshaped our perceptions of time and space”.

“The effects of so much time spent on digital platforms for thinking, studying and teaching – as well as for mental, physical and emotional health – are not yet properly understood. Nor have we forged a shared conceptual language to describe them yet. Another factor has been the absence of the in-person communing that is so fundamental to our health as social beings, and which helps us make sense of all these things. Without that, these difficulties are redoubled.”

She is interested in re-imagining post-apartheid South Africa by rethinking its discursive terms – and is currently engaging with the work of a number of anticolonial thinkers, postcolonial theorists, filmmakers, novelists and poets to sketch the contours of a non-partitioned imaginary.

“At the Centre for Humanities Research, planning for our programmes in the new Greatmore facility in Woodstock is enormously energising and offers a longer, larger time frame into which we are thinking. This brings a very welcome measure of stability and optimism in the midst of so much uncertainty.”