Re-membering Movements Colloquium
8-10 October 2025
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
This year, 2025, marks ten years since students, workers and academics across South Africa forged the Fees Must Fall and End Outsourcing/Outsourcing Must Fall movement. The demands of this movement were vast and diverse, but centred free education, decolonisation and an end to outsourcing eventually bringing higher education to a standstill. In many ways the Fees Must Fall and End Outsourcing mobilisations re-defined a moment of student and university politics in the post-apartheid and post-Marikana periods.
Despite significant academic research focused on FMF and End Outsourcing, a comprehensive history of this mobilisation has yet to be written. The post-apartheid era has also seen the rise (and often the decline) of other important mobilisations, organisations and movements. And while many of these have been the subject of significant academic and activist forms of re-membering, their histories too are contested and open to being reshaped and rethought. As such, we are reminded that ‘every act of re-memory invokes particular choices, focuses, priorities, omissions, styles and everything else that goes into the fictioning of other histories’[1].
As we mark the tenth anniversary of the 2015 student and worker movement, and undertake a re-membering of movements more generally, we invite contributions for a colloquium that will take place in October 2025. The colloquium will place movements and their re-membering in conversation with each other; tracing histories, continuities, articulations and connections. Contributions may take the form of academic presentations, as well as creative interventions that step beyond this form. Theoretical, empirical, methodological and other contributions are welcome. The call includes, but is not limited to, presentations that deal with the following:
- Post-apartheid movements, organisations and campaigns
- Fees Must Fall, Rhodes Must Fall, End Outsourcing, Patriarchy Must Fall and other related campaigns
- Longer histories of movements and struggle
- Student and youth politics on the continent and beyond
- Labour and workers’ movements
- Rural resistance and community struggles
- Archiving movements
- Forms of political and collective subjectivity
All those who are interested in presenting at the colloquium should send a short abstract to swop.wits@gmail.com by 31 August 2025. The colloquium will be hybrid and, we therefore invite those who cannot physically join us to participate online.
Prior to the colloquium, we will also be collectively hosting a series of participatory re-memory workshops on the FMF-EO movement of 2015/2016, the Anti-Privatisation Forum (APF), and others. Those who would like to participate in these should see here
[1] Naidoo and Veriava (2007), Re-membering Movements: Trade Unions and New Social Movements in Neoliberal South Africa. Centre for Civil Society Research Report, no. 28.