Shannon Walsh
University of British Columbia, Theatre and Film, Faculty Member
- City University of Hong Kong, School of Creative Media, Faculty MemberUniversity of Johannesburg, South Africa, Social Change, Department MemberMcGill University, Dept of Integrated Studies in Education, Alumnusadd
- Critical Social Theory, Documentary Film, African Studies, Visual Anthropology, Ethnography, Social Movements, and 16 moreEducation, Visual Ethnography (Research Methodology), Urban Studies, Film Studies, Film Production, Anthropology, Global cities, Cinema, Class, Critical Theory, Political Economy, Critical Geography, Affect (Cultural Theory), Activist Ethnography, Friendship, and Jared Sextonedit
- Shannon Walsh is a filmmaker, theorist and Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia in the Departmen... moreShannon Walsh is a filmmaker, theorist and Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia in the Department of Theatre and Film She has written and directed four feature documentary films, which have screened in cinemas, museums, and over 60 film festivals around the world. Her films have been broadcast on television in Canada, South Africa and the US.
As a theorist, Walsh is interested in the social construction of power its contestations, largely focused on South Africa, and crossing a range of disciplines and methodologies. From 2013-2016 Walsh was a faculty member at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. She is currently a Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg’s Research Chair in Social Change, where she also did her post-doctoral work with support of a SSHRC fellowship. Recently, Walsh co-edited the book "Ties that Bind: Race and the Politics of Friendship in South Africa" (Wits University Press, 2016) with historian Jon Soske.edit
Ties that Bind is an intriguing and long overdue book about race and friendship. It marks a time worldwide when virtual friendships are fast becoming the norm. And yet, after reading the chapters, one is left with a clearer sense of what... more
Ties that Bind is an intriguing and long overdue book about race and friendship. It marks a time worldwide when virtual friendships are fast becoming the norm. And yet, after reading the chapters, one is left with a clearer sense of what it takes – or might take in the future – to actually be friends across race.
Sarah Nuttall is author of Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-apartheid
What does friendship have to do with racial difference, settler colonialism and post-apartheid South Africa? While histories of apartheid and colonialism in South Africa have often focused on the ideologies of segregation and white supremacy, Ties that Bind explores how the intimacies of friendship create vital spaces for practices of power and resistance. Combining interviews, history, poetry, visual arts, memoir and academic essay, the collection keeps alive the promise of friendship and its possibilities while investigating how affective relations are essential to the social reproduction of power. From the intimacy of personal relationships to the organising ideology of liberal colonial governance, the contributors explore the intersection of race and friendship from a kaleidoscope of viewpoints and scales. Insisting on a timeline that originates in settler colonialism, Ties that Bind uncovers the implication of anti-Blackness within nonracialism, and powerfully challenges a simple reading of the Mandela moment and the rainbow nation. In the wake of countrywide student protests calling for decolonization of the university, and reignited debates around racial inequality, this timely volume insists that the history of South African politics has always already been about friendship.
Written in an accessible and engaging style, Ties that Bind will interest a wide audience of scholars, students, and activists, as well as general readers curious about contemporary South African debates around race and intimacy.
http://witspress.co.za/catalogue/ties-that-bind/
Sarah Nuttall is author of Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-apartheid
What does friendship have to do with racial difference, settler colonialism and post-apartheid South Africa? While histories of apartheid and colonialism in South Africa have often focused on the ideologies of segregation and white supremacy, Ties that Bind explores how the intimacies of friendship create vital spaces for practices of power and resistance. Combining interviews, history, poetry, visual arts, memoir and academic essay, the collection keeps alive the promise of friendship and its possibilities while investigating how affective relations are essential to the social reproduction of power. From the intimacy of personal relationships to the organising ideology of liberal colonial governance, the contributors explore the intersection of race and friendship from a kaleidoscope of viewpoints and scales. Insisting on a timeline that originates in settler colonialism, Ties that Bind uncovers the implication of anti-Blackness within nonracialism, and powerfully challenges a simple reading of the Mandela moment and the rainbow nation. In the wake of countrywide student protests calling for decolonization of the university, and reignited debates around racial inequality, this timely volume insists that the history of South African politics has always already been about friendship.
Written in an accessible and engaging style, Ties that Bind will interest a wide audience of scholars, students, and activists, as well as general readers curious about contemporary South African debates around race and intimacy.
http://witspress.co.za/catalogue/ties-that-bind/
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In September 2014, students and Hong Kong citizens took to the streets demanding universal suffrage. Cell phones and video cameras in hand, amateur student filmmakers were some of the first to capture the police tear-gassing young people... more
In September 2014, students and Hong Kong citizens took to the streets demanding universal suffrage. Cell phones and video cameras in hand, amateur student filmmakers were some of the first to capture the police tear-gassing young people that brought the city to its feet. Young people were positioning themselves as storytellers and knowledge producers on the streets. How has this restructured hierarchy of knowledge production often found in university education in Hong Kong? How too has being active participants and/or passive observers of the events of the Umbrella Movement translated into a pedagogy of experience in student’s daily lives, and how has this knowledge returned to the classroom? Specifically, I am interested in ways that young women who are not Cantonese first-language speakers understand their role in the movement and the kinds of knowledge they produced. Through interviews with these diverse students, and visual data from the footage they shot during the protests, we gain a rare glimpse into the multicultural world gathered beneath the umbrella of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, and how a new generation of young female filmmakers are using video to share their changing perspectives on democratic reform, education, and everyday life.
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In this article I argue that participatory video must acknowledge its often technocratic, liberal presumptions, and take a more critical look at the political underpinnings of 'empowerment' and 'voice'. I am interested in how we can use... more
In this article I argue that participatory video must acknowledge its often technocratic, liberal presumptions, and take a more critical look at the political underpinnings of 'empowerment' and 'voice'. I am interested in how we can use participatory video while resisting the romance of community, seeing beyond short-term individualist approaches towards a longer-term collective project of social justice. A reflexive approach to how power and agency work within participatory video is essential if the method is going to effect change and not merely manage social conflict. While the participatory video process can be discussed from many perspectives, I focus here on a critique of the often-hidden politics of participatory video, its relation to academic research and in turn, to project participants within a progressive social change agenda.
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'I'm too young to die': HIV, masculinity, ... This article draws on the narratives of boys about their lives, and explores some key questions relating to gender ... At the same time, the process of creating... more
'I'm too young to die': HIV, masculinity, ... This article draws on the narratives of boys about their lives, and explores some key questions relating to gender ... At the same time, the process of creating successful prevention campaigns has been daunting and ineffective, causing young ...
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This br~efing arises out of our current action-oriented work as educators, activists and researchers addressing gender and HIV with youth in South Africa. Situated within this work are two fundamental concerns.The first is the need to... more
This br~efing arises out of our current action-oriented work as educators, activists and researchers addressing gender and HIV with youth in South Africa. Situated within this work are two fundamental concerns.The first is the need to explore ways in which youth themselves can be active ...
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Research Interests: African Studies, Indigenous Studies, Feminist Theory, Postcolonial Studies, African History, and 10 moreAfrica, South African Politics and Society, Critical Race Theory, Race and Ethnicity, African Literature, African Politics, Postcolonial Literature, Friendship, Affect (Cultural Theory), and South Africa
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It has become difficult to deny that organised left resistance to capitalism in South Africa has significantly declined in the post-apartheid period. The wave of progressive social movements outside of the African National Congress... more
It has become difficult to deny that organised left resistance to capitalism in South Africa has significantly declined in the post-apartheid period. The wave of progressive social movements outside of the African National Congress (ANC)-led Alliance that many hung
their hopes on through the 1990s and 2000s and that seemed to contest enclosures, the encroachment of capital into everyday life and the commodification of everything have largely dissolved.1
This is not to say that the streets of South Africa are quiet. Hardly: people continue to revolt in one way or another across the country. Yet it is difficult to understand these skirmishes as being akin to the articulated challenges to the dominant order that have previously characterised South Africa. As I argue below, there is a biopolitics at work in which the streets on fire signal tactical negotiations for basic
services more than the arrival of politically coherent ‘movements’.
While the organized left continues to trumpet sites such as Balfour, Ficksburg, Thembilile and other ‘hot spots’ where people take to the streets in battles with police, the reality is far more complex – both in a reading of the potential of such ‘revolutionary subjectivities’ and in understanding this moment in the expansion of empire that manages both crisis and desire.2
The issue is a fundamental one. If we misunderstand what we are fighting against, how can we fight? If the goal is to positively change the world in which we live and to do so with those we feel an affinity, then at the very least we must understand the changing nature of our adversary. If we neglect the micro-scales of power within the post-apartheid moment and the effects that privatised, neoliberal state policies around basic services have had on resistance, we miss both the eruption of new dimensions to the political landscape and the reasons why old political configurations have been hollowed out.
The contradictions are rich, yet they are almost continually homogenized and reduced to an opposition to neoliberalism by the left.3 Something is missing in our analysis of the way that capitalism fundamentally organises and manages desire and crisis. These micro-politics point towards a more-complex reading of both capital and resistance.
their hopes on through the 1990s and 2000s and that seemed to contest enclosures, the encroachment of capital into everyday life and the commodification of everything have largely dissolved.1
This is not to say that the streets of South Africa are quiet. Hardly: people continue to revolt in one way or another across the country. Yet it is difficult to understand these skirmishes as being akin to the articulated challenges to the dominant order that have previously characterised South Africa. As I argue below, there is a biopolitics at work in which the streets on fire signal tactical negotiations for basic
services more than the arrival of politically coherent ‘movements’.
While the organized left continues to trumpet sites such as Balfour, Ficksburg, Thembilile and other ‘hot spots’ where people take to the streets in battles with police, the reality is far more complex – both in a reading of the potential of such ‘revolutionary subjectivities’ and in understanding this moment in the expansion of empire that manages both crisis and desire.2
The issue is a fundamental one. If we misunderstand what we are fighting against, how can we fight? If the goal is to positively change the world in which we live and to do so with those we feel an affinity, then at the very least we must understand the changing nature of our adversary. If we neglect the micro-scales of power within the post-apartheid moment and the effects that privatised, neoliberal state policies around basic services have had on resistance, we miss both the eruption of new dimensions to the political landscape and the reasons why old political configurations have been hollowed out.
The contradictions are rich, yet they are almost continually homogenized and reduced to an opposition to neoliberalism by the left.3 Something is missing in our analysis of the way that capitalism fundamentally organises and manages desire and crisis. These micro-politics point towards a more-complex reading of both capital and resistance.