Faculty of Arts & Humanities P r o f e s s o r H e i d i G r u n e b a ü m t o P ac H i e v e r
Perceptions of time and space ‘reshaped’ by pandemic PROFESSOR Heidi Grunebaüm is the director at the Centre for continues to be disproportionately borne by women, in general Humanities Research (CHR). and the most economically and socially vulnerable She completed her PhD at UWC in 2007, and women, in particular. Of course, this has implithen returned in 2011 to take up a post as cations for academic labour and for women academics, who also often carry the burSenior Researcher at the Centre for Humanities Research. den of invisible labour in our capacities as teachers, interlocutors, suAs a postdoctoral fellow at the pervisors and colleagues.” Centre for Humanities Research at UWC, she completed a monReflecting on the pandemic, she says that it “has reshaped ograph entitled Memorialisour perceptions of time and ing the Past: Everyday Life in space”. South Africa after the Truth “The effects of so much time and Reconciliation Commisspent on digital platforms sion, which was published for thinking, studying and in 2011. She also made teaching – as well as for the documentary feature mental, physical and emofilm, The Village Under the tional health – are not yet Forest, with Mark J Kaplan properly understood. Nor about the historiographical have we forged a shared debates on the founding naconceptual language to detional narratives of Israel. scribe them yet. Her most recent collaboraAnother factor has been the tive research project, Athlone in absence of the in-person comMind (2017) was an exhibition cumuning that is so fundamental to rated by Dr Kurt Campbell, a digital our health as social beings, and which platform and a book catalogue. helps us make sense of all these things. Over the years, Prof Grunebaüm has Without that, these difficulties are redoubled.” made a deep and lasting contribution to esShe is interested in re-imagining post-apartheid tablishing the intellectual foundations of the CHR’s South Africa by rethinking its research platform on aesthetics discursive terms – and is curand politics. She has also contrib“We live in a heteronormative rently engaging with the work of uted to the knowledge inventory of patriarchal world where the structural a number of anticolonial thinkers, the Factory of the Arts and its artpostcolonial theorists, filmmakers, ists in residence programme. burden of care for children, the elderly, novelists and poets to sketch the Much of her work is borne from an and the household continues to be contours of a non-partitioned imidea of place that responds to the disproportionately borne by women.” aginary. failed promises of post-apartheid “At the Centre for Humanities Redemocracy. Her training in literary, historical, postcolonial and cultural stud- search, planning for our programmes in the new Greatmore faies have given her unique insights into what the pandemic has cility in Woodstock is enormously energising and offers a longer, larger time frame into which we are thinking. This brings a exposed in society. “We live in a heteronormative patriarchal world where the struc- very welcome measure of stability and optimism in the midst of tural burden of care for children, the elderly, and the household so much uncertainty.”
