Re-membering Movements Colloquium
8-10 October
Humanities Graduate Centre, Wits University
To RSVP for click here
For online attendance either join on our YouTube page or on Zoom:
Opening Panel: What does a decolonised, public higher education system look like?
Panel 2: Re-membering the 2015/2016 Student-Worker Movement
Panel 3: Re-membering Freedom
Panel 4: Re-membering South African Movements of the 1980s
Panel 5: Re-membering the Archive
For any queries please email swop.wits@gmail.com
Abstracts and biographies available here
A Fidai Film (2024)
Screening 9 October 2025, 5pm for 5:30pm, at the Bioscope Independent Cinema (44 Stanley Avenue). RSVP Essential. Followed by dinner and a conversation facilitated by Niren Tolsi
Conceived and directed by Kamal Aljafari
In the summer of 1982, the Israeli army invaded Beirut. During this time, it raided the Palestinian Research Center and looted its entire archive. The archive contained historical documents of Palestine, including a collection of still and moving images. Taking this as a premise, ‘A Fidai Film’ aims to create a counter-narrative to this loss, presenting a form of cinematic sabotage that seeks to reclaim and restore the looted memories of Palestinian history. It’s a poignant exploration of identity, memory, and resistance, told through a unique blend of documentary and experimental filmmaking techniques.
Previous events
This year, 2025, marks ten years since students, workers and academics across South Africa forged the Fees Must Fall and End Outsourcingmovement. 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].
This year, SWOP will be hosting and facilitating a project on Re-membering Movements, working with the concept of re-memory in relation to post-apartheid movements. This programme will include a series of workshops, mapping exercises, a colloquium and a project on archiving.
This page will be updated regularly with new information, upcoming sessions and dates.
The programme and details about the Colloquium (8-10 October) will be posted up here shortly.
Please join us for the next participatory workshop on Re-membering Fees Must Fall, focusing on 2026, 27 September, 10:30am, Humanities Grad Centre
For in-person attendance please email swop.wits@gmail.com
For online attendance please register here
As part of re-membering this moment, we also invite you to join iPhupho L’ka Biko in a one night only performance at the Market Theatre Vuleka Mbombo, Mbombo Vuleka! [est 2015]: A Sonic Remembrance of the Fallist Movement – 10 Years On.
For more from iPhupho L’ka Biko click here
Call for Participation: Fees Must Fall Re-membering Workshops
Call for contributions: Re-membering Movements Colloquium (8-10 October 2025)
[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
