Guest Speaker:

Prof. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela

Intellectual Life in Academia and Researching Experience: On the Irreducible Nature of Encounter

My project in this lecture is exploratory. I start with a reflection on my own research, and on how one’s foundational ideas find new life when revisited in light of new questions, especially when the inquiry is ethically rich and motivated by intellectual honesty – revisiting one's ideas is part of intellectual life in academia. My work on dialogues after mass violence has moved from a focus on forgiveness and reconciliation to a close study of the subtleties of encounters between people from different sides of violent histories. I will show that this approach enables a language in which the focus is on experience, and might help us discover the possibility that people can, and do face one another in a way that enables solidarity to emerge as fragile, unfolding processes of orientation toward one another rather than positioning them against each other in moral standoffs. The lecture underscores the importance of critical reflection within academic research, particularly when dealing with the complexities of historical violence and its transgenerational afterlife.