Education
Humanities on the rise From the perspective of the University of the Western Cape (UWC), the future of the Humanities shines bright with its soon to be opened Greatmore Arts and Humanities Hub in Woodstock, Cape Town. Showing a deep commitment to the future of the Humanities to produce cutting edge research and new experiments in the arts, UWC has invested in refurbishing a derelict, former school building into an intellectual home for a new generation of Humanities scholars and artists. Under apartheid, and as a historically black university, UWC had been denied access to offering formal arts education as well as institutional access to the city centre. The Greatmore building in Woodstock is situated on the former municipal boundary of what was once a designated ‘white’ group area, a space in the city that was blocked to the university and from
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where many of its students and their families had been forcibly removed. Perhaps because, rather than despite the constraints of apartheid, UWC has over decades cultivated world-class research and ground-breaking scholarship in the Humanities and other domains. The Greatmore Hub is the next step in a future that has been long in the making; a visionary project that places the Humanities in the public domain through a research and artmaking programme in sound, documentary cinema, and kinetic objects – enabling a deep exploration of art, society, technology, politics, and alternative traditions of intellectual thought.
www.futuresa.co.za
