The book entitled Beautiful Ugly. African and Diaspora Aesthetics (2006) was heralded by its editor as a beautiful book. ‘Beautiful’ it certainly is, in a manner of speaking. The correspondence set up between its description ...

Walter Benjamin’s famous statement in the eighth of his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” that “the state of [exception] in which we live is not the exception but the rule,”1 has become as normalized as its ...

Between the sphere of civil society associated with the idea of active, democratic citizenship, and the governance of precariously living populations ‘in most of the world’ (i.e. not simply ‘in the margins’), lies the ...

The concept of polycracy is beset by a number of paradoxes: it designates a form of political rule in the absence of such rule. In such circumstances, a multiplicity of social formations, economic and financial agencies ...

A sociology of knowledge of a specific kind, namely that emerging from observations on the work of scientific thought collectives, is what Thomas Kuhn acknowledges as Ludwik Fleck’s (Denkstile und Tatsachen. Gesammelte ...

This article examines the relation between the University of Pretoria and the City of Tshwane, outlining seven different kinds of relation as they have taken shape historically. The first type relation between the ...

The academic institution in which I work makes of me – unintentionally on my part – a sociographic observer. The first thing to be noted in this sociography concerns the changing definition of the role of the university that ...

Approaching the city of Pretoria/Tshwane from the south, one is greeted by three monumental structures perched atop three hills surrounding Pretoria, from west to east: the Voortrekker Monument, Freedom Park, and the ...