Winter School in a Nutshell (or as much of a nutshell as I could make it!)

Alright, this post is my attempt to cram all the information about my week at Winter School into one, coherent post (that also isn’t too long either).  Here we go!

Winter School lasted for 4 days, one at the Center for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, and the other 3 at Laborie, a wine farm in Paarl (a little over an hour outside of Cape Town).  Once we got the wine farm, we would generally have 3 sessions a day, with coffee and lunch breaks in between.  And by lunch I don’t mean any of that nickel-and-dime pizza, I mean full meals with a starter and everything.  And don’t even get me started on our dinners every night!  The food at this place was insanely good.  I was warned from people who had been there last year that they gained like 10 pounds in the week so I was very careful, but man was the food delicious!  Being a wine farm, there was of course some fantastic wine for sale as well.  We certainly did not go hungry or thirsty!

 Can you imagine how hard it is to need to work when you're in a place so beautiful??

Our group was about 40 people, a mixture of professors, graduate students, and post-doctoral students from University of Minnesota and two universities in South Africa, the University of the Western Cape and Fort Hare.  It was great to catch up with some of my UMN friends that I haven’t seen in a few months – Paul and his wife had a baby in May (the adorable little Charlie!), Janeke has been home doing research, Gabbi has been on her first trip to Nairobi – a lot to hear about!  But it was also great to see people from the South African universities who have come briefly to UMN so we could catch up and also to meet others who I had never met before.  We have been working to foster a strong shared intellectual community between our three institutions through things like combined panels to present at the African Studies Association, visiting scholars going from one place to the other, professors co-authoring papers, etc, but the chance to bring so many people together in one place is unique to Winter School and it was awesome to be a part of it!

Love these guys 

The format for each session was a combination of lecture and discussion where a professor would give a prepared lecture for about an hour and then we would have an additional hour to ask questions and make comments for the professor to respond to.  As I mentioned in earlier posts, we were given a reader about a week before Winter School with a selection of readings that each professor chose to accompany their lecture so that we could all have a similar frame of reference from which to approach the material.  As someone who very rarely if ever speaks in class, I was very intimidated not only by the large group (and large group of brilliant minds) but also because the whole thing was being recorded and so when you spoke you had to use a microphone.  I am very proud to say however that in the last session I finally worked up the courage to make a contribution (and Helena, my advisor, says that by next year I’ll be ready to make 5 more – I’m not so sure about that but here’s hoping!).

The entire conference was focused on the question of race – how are ideas of race constructed, how do we use (or not use) them in our work, how are they locally contingent, how do we teach race, etc.  While the majority of the lectures focused on the contexts of South Africa and India specifically, I was able to draw a lot of connections to my own work and left with a lot of things to think about.  Hopefully as I progress in this thinking throughout my work in Liberia I’ll be able to take the time to write about it, but for now I don’t want to make this post too much longer or you’ll all mutiny I’m sure!

Although our days were obviously consumed by these intellectual pursuits, we were able to let our hair down and enjoy one another’s company at night.  Since there were World Cup semi-final games being played 2 of our 3 nights at Laborie, a lot of our time was spent gathered together in a large group drinking and watching soccer.  While I’m generally not a big soccer fan, I couldn’t help but get into it being here and hanging out with Virgil and our friend Michelle leading up to Winter School and so I was quite invested by the time the semis and finals rolled around (although maybe the teams I was supporting would have been better off if I wasn’t invested as it seemed that every team I wanted to win lost – except Argentina in the semis but I went to bed before the end of the game!).

World Cup watching party 

Alright, I think that about sums it up.  Sorry again for the long post!  Hopefully I didn’t scare anyone off :)