Sophia O L I V I A Sanan
I am currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Centre for the Study of the Afterlives of Violence and the Reparative Quest, where I study intersections of art, power, and knowledge in an unequal world.
I hold a PhD in Sociology from UCT (2024) and a master’s degree in Sociology, with a specialisation of Global Studies from the Universities of Freiburg, Germany; Jawaharlal Nehru University, India and the University of Cape Town, South Africa (2014). My doctoral dissertation investigated politics of identity, loss, and heritage through a study of the African art collection at the Iziko South African National Gallery.
I have published in both popular media and academic journals on themes related to education and critical citizenship, cultural policy in Africa, museology in the Global South, race, inequality, and visual culture. I have taught and developed coursework and curricula on visual culture, sociology of culture and visual sociology, globalization, and arts education at undergraduate and master’s levels.
Outside of my academic work, I have been engaged since 2014 with various cultural policy consultancies, cultural entrepreneurship training and arts related research projects across Africa (for UNESCO, HIVOS, Arterial Network, SACO, Goethe Institut amongst others). Since late 2020, I have been working with a diverse network of museums and heritage projects in Africa, South America, and South Asia, exploring ideas and practices of museology from Southern perspectives and co-creating a host of publications, research experiments, travelling schools and public dialogues.
I hold a PhD in Sociology from UCT (2024) and a master’s degree in Sociology, with a specialisation of Global Studies from the Universities of Freiburg, Germany; Jawaharlal Nehru University, India and the University of Cape Town, South Africa (2014). My doctoral dissertation investigated politics of identity, loss, and heritage through a study of the African art collection at the Iziko South African National Gallery.
I have published in both popular media and academic journals on themes related to education and critical citizenship, cultural policy in Africa, museology in the Global South, race, inequality, and visual culture. I have taught and developed coursework and curricula on visual culture, sociology of culture and visual sociology, globalization, and arts education at undergraduate and master’s levels.
Outside of my academic work, I have been engaged since 2014 with various cultural policy consultancies, cultural entrepreneurship training and arts related research projects across Africa (for UNESCO, HIVOS, Arterial Network, SACO, Goethe Institut amongst others). Since late 2020, I have been working with a diverse network of museums and heritage projects in Africa, South America, and South Asia, exploring ideas and practices of museology from Southern perspectives and co-creating a host of publications, research experiments, travelling schools and public dialogues.
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Papers by Sophia O L I V I A Sanan
institutions, held an enduring appeal to the white publics of the
apartheid era. In the post-apartheid era, this category of art
occupies a prominent and contested space in South African
museological discourse. Drawn from the authors’ doctoral
research, this article examines some of the ways in which the
Iziko South African Museums engaged the category of rock art
over a 70- year timespan. It locates a tension between the
institution’s need to acknowledge the deep roots of settler
coloniality imprinted in the category of rock art, and the need to
reframe the category in a way that makes space for indigenous
ways of knowing. The latter concern is a project that extends far
beyond the institution itself, as it requires a re- configuration of
knowledge hierarchies to make space for new interpretive
possibilities, and processes of dis-entanglement from problematic
inheritances (cultural, political, governmental, epistemic). This
paper makes a case for ongoing attentiveness the reproduction
of settler colonial logics in contemporary cultural contexts and
their role in shaping cultural institutions in order to continue
working towards possibilities of unlearning and dismantling of
such logics.
playful engagement with new concepts and practices that might move us towards the kinds of museums that we need in the future. Implicit in this project is a question around the viability of the museum as we have known and inherited it, and an attempt to identify
and articulate the practices undertaken by museums that might be shifting this definition. At times during our various exchanges, when prodded from different perspectives, the neutrality of museum terminology (in its quest for universality) was exposed as fronting something far more complex. Sometimes the glossary entry is presented as a list of questions without answers, and sometimes it is presented as a series of questions with responses from our museum partners or project staff. A special thank you to Chiedza Zharare (Mutare Museum), Kritika Rathore, Shreya Jaiswal and Kuldeep Kothari (Arna Jharna), Danford Majogo (Majimaji Museum), Ivan and Rui Laranjeira (Museu Mafalala), YSK Prerana and the team (Conflictorium) José Eduardo Ferreira Santos, Vilma Soares Ferreira Santos, Pablo Lemos, Fabricio Cumming and others on the team (Acervo da Laje), heeten bhagat (Museum Futures project team) for engaging with prompts and providing such rich feedback.
The mobility of artists and other cultural professionals is crucial to maintaining a
heterogeneous world of ideas, values and views. Access to international markets for artists and cultural professionals is also crucial to the promotion of sustainable cultural and creative industries and their potential contribution to human, social and economic development, particularly in the global South. There is a vast gap between the principles and ideals of the 2005 Convention and the world realities concerning the mobility of artists and cultural professionals from the global South. Indeed, implementation of the Convention so far does not yet appear to have contributed to increasing such mobility. The obstacles to the mobility of artists and cultural professionals include increasing security, economic and political constraints, particularly in the global North; hence the Convention needs to be used more effectively in countering these constraints in a spirit of international solidarity.
productive means of enquiry into these social issues, and in the second place, whether it leads to an effective way of articulating policies that serve to alleviate the problem of discrimination faced by African students in Delhi. I will show that by framing the problem within discourses on xenophobia, this phenomenon is placed on the agenda of established global migration policy research. While the broader context of global migration forms an integral part of understanding this phenomenon, the complex construction of racial, cultural and existential difference which emerges from the data, requires a reading which exceeds the analytic framework offered by contemporary understandings of xenophobia. Discourses of race, in turn, place the experience of
the African participants in India in relation to national problems of caste discrimination, colonial categorisation and contemporary reservation politics. Such a line of enquiry enables an engagement with a layered history and culture of struggle politics in India which reveals the structural similarity of experiences of discrimination across various cultural and historical domains (Randeria, 2006; Viswewaran, 2010). The discourse of race allows connections to be made between vernacular understandings of difference rooted in Hindu mythology, which themselves are inflected by global discourses of race (Amin, 2010). The Indian cultural phenomenon of a preference for light skin indicated by a rapidly growing cosmetics industry, is shown to carry purchase within global consumer capitalist culture and contemporary discourses of development (Couze, 2010). By treating race as a living practice, this thesis is able to engage with anti-colonial
thinkers like Franz Fanon and Anibal Quijano. Fanon’s thinking on the topic of discrimination remains grounded in experience, and as such, provides a critical tool to re-engage the histories that the project of imperialism undermined, as well as the agency of those who experience discrimination. I argue that ultimately, the anti-colonial arguments offered by Fanon and Quijano enable a way of thinking beyond a colonised position. Finally, I argue that race, as a category of self-identification, should not be discarded in
the name of assimilation or non-racialism. In this way, the dissertation asserts Winant’s claim that “race and racism also work from below, as matters of resistance (racism continues as something to be resisted), and as frameworks for alternative identities and collectivities” (Winant, 2014: 3). This thesis will demonstrate that the concept of race, though ambiguous, remains indispensible in an analysis of overlapping forms of discrimination in a post-colonial and emerging trans-national context.
Thesis Chapters by Sophia O L I V I A Sanan