Societies of Southern Africa: seminar papers series

Collection of the Month for April is the series of collected seminar papers from the Societies of Southern Africa seminar, which ran at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies from 1969 until the 1980s. The papers were published in twenty volumes, and we will be adding these to SAS-Space over the next few weeks. The first few are now live, including a 1969 paper by Albie Sachs, scholar and activist, and subsequently Judge in the Constitutional Court of South Africa, who completed a doctorate at Sussex University in the 1960s, which formed the basis of this paper, and his 1974 book Justice in South Africa.

Here, Professor Shula Marks, former Director of the ICS and founder of the series, reflects on the series and its seminal importance for students of southern African history and politics at a critical time. A fuller version of this reflection is also available.

Professor Marks writes:

"In a very real sense the seminars at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies were the equivalent for the social sciences of the laboratory for the natural and hard sciences – a place where ideas were tested and probed, expanded and at times jettisoned. Scholars – post-graduate students and staff - from all over London and often from all over the UK – were drawn to the Institute – to exchange research with one another and the many visitors to the Institute from all over the Commonwealth.

"It was with this model in mind that I set out in 1969 to establish a new seminar at the Institute on `The societies of southern Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’; from the papers that are reproduced here you will get some taste of its proceedings, though not of the lively discussions which characterised them. The intellectual mix was eclectic and heady: as Colin Bundy has remarked, the seminar was:
… a rich seedbed for a critical, self-consciously revisionist flowering of southern African scholarship, and especially South African, history. Its activities were fertilised by a number of currents: by British social historians, by French Marxist anthropologists, and by comparative history. One does not have to dig very deep in the first couple of volumes of collected papers to discern the influence of E P Thompson, Barrington Moore, Meillasoux, Genovese, Gunder Frank, and so on.

"To this list I would add the importance of the proximity of the recently established department of African History at SOAS, not least because it did not allow us – mostly radical white South Africans - to forget that South Africa was still in Africa, that any history of South Africa had to be the history of all its peoples, and that we had to address the most profound silence in the historiography of southern Africa, the silence of its African majority. In the 1960s there was no South African university teaching African history – though this was to change through the 1970s in part as historians who trained at SOAS and elsewhere in the UK and the USA began to filter back into university positions in South Africa.

"In many ways the seminar was launched at exactly the right moment – more by serendipity than by good management By 1969, the pall of quiescence that seemed to hang over South Africa after Sharpeville was beginning to show cracks; with the emergence of the Black Consciousness movement and splits in the façade of Afrikaner unity, there was room for more open discussion of Southern Africa. But what made the Societies of Southern Africa Seminar special was the presence, mostly, but not only, in London, of a substantial number of academics in a variety of fields; most were inevitably South African but the focus was always importantly southern and not simply South African, with papers on all the countries of the region. Many of its participants over the years had left South Africa – or been forced to leave – for political reasons during the era of apartheid, and were still passionately engaged in trying to understand the nature of southern African society. Many of the issues addressed could not be stated openly let alone answered in South African universities at the time. As a result, as fresh waves of South African students, émigrés and exiles came to the UK, the seminar remained in touch with what has happening in South Africa, and was in a state of constant renewal. This gave its proceedings a particular edge even when the subject matter was remote - in time if not in place - from their immediate concerns.

"In retrospect it is astonishing how many young and not so young South Africans who were later to make their mark passed through the doors of the ICS – no fewer than four of South Africa's future high court and constitutional court judges were among its student audience in those years. In South Africa itself the volumes of the Collected Seminar Papers reproduced here were widely – if secretly – read by succeeding cohorts of young students in South Africa in the 1970s and 80s. Today, however, as we greet the digital recording of the ICS seminar papers perhaps we can be forgiven for rejoicing in the way in which this project will nonetheless safeguard our past.

Shula Marks, March 2012

W G Hart Workshop Papers

Collection of the Month for March is the collection of previously unpublished papers from the W. G. Hart Legal Workshop. The workshop is a major annual legal research event organised and hosted by the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies. Beginning in 1981, this eponymous workshop series, subsidised by funds from the W. G. Hart Bequest, has focused on a wide range of comparative and international legal issues and topical interests, and we're delighted to have begun to make selected past papers available in SAS-Space.
In addition, video recordings of the 2010 event are now available. The 2012 event, on 'Globalisation, criminal law and criminal justice' will take place in June.

Research papers on the Americas

Collection of the Month for February is a growing collection of occasional research papers from the Institute for the Study of the Americas, and the Institute of Latin American Studies (one of the two institutions that came together to form ISA), recently digitised. Once finished, we'll have added 85 new papers, dating from the late 1980s to the present. The collection has particular strengths in studies of Brazil and Argentina, but also in the history and  economic development of central and south America.

Gounod in the Midi

New for 2012 is a series focussing each month on a particular collection of material within SAS-Space.

For January, we're featuring a new collection of critical writing on a series of key performances of Charles Gounod's 1864 opera Mireille in the Roman arenas of the Midi: at Arles. Nîmes, St-Rémy and Marseille between 1899 and 1914. The performances are of particular note as the opera itself is set in Provence, and indeed Act 2 takes place outside the same amphitheatre at Arles.

It is part of the larger Francophone Music Criticism project, in association with the Institute of Musical Research.

History in Education: dispersed data delivery in action

I'm delighted to be able to draw attention to the data collection of the History in Education project, recently concluded at the IHR. The project investigated the major curricular changes in history over the last century, and also the changing experience of history at the chalkface in English state schools.

It is another successful example of a research project within the School of Advanced Study using SAS-Space as a solution for their needs in data management and preservation, whilst maintaining their own distinct web presence which draws content from SAS-Space as it needs it. The collection of interviews and digitised samples of schoolwork can be accessed in two ways. Users of the project site can access the data using a browse interface tailored to the project. Users of SAS-Space can access the whole collection directly, and may also stumble upon data from the project whilst searching SAS-Space for something else.

Another example of this dispersed model is the Francophone Music Criticism project, whose data is similarly held in SAS-Space, but also accessed from the project's own search engine.

Workshop event: Open Access journal publishing, Oct 20th

We've now finalised the programme for this afternoon workshop at Senate House; see the programme and further details.

The event is aimed at editors of existing printed journals who are contemplating a move towards online publication, and also at those planning to start a new journal title. There will be presentations from both a prospective new journal, and from the staff of Amicus Curiae, currently making the transition from print alone to a print-and-web solution.

There will also be an opportunity for delegates to discuss issues of common concern, including business models, marketing and staffing.

The event will also see the launch of our new SAS Open Journals system, in which Amicus Curiae will be the first journal.

To book a place, contact Peter.Webster@sas.ac.uk

How well used is SAS-Space ?

One of the recent new features of SAS-Space is the provision of download statistics for the materials that it holds, as PDF or in other formats. These are now shown at the foot of each item's page, under the Statistics tab. There is also a digest for the whole site.

Champion resource remains the Register of Research in Commonwealth Countries, from the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, the various files for which were downloaded 2371 times since October 2010.

The most read paper was The Limits of Self-awareness by Michael Martin, originally published in Philosophical Studies in 2004, with 359 downloads. (See the graph below)

The top dissertation was from the Institute for the Study of the Americas: Mulherres do morro: the representation of women in Brazilian funk (2009), with 343 downloads.

The installation of the IRStats software add-on for Eprints that makes this possible was generously funded by the Dean's Development Fund of the School. It was installed for us by Richard and Rory from ULCC's Digital Archives team.