The School of Information Management and Victoria Executive & Professional Development are delighted to have renowned international archivist Verne Harris in Wellington to present a class on memory, archive and social justice.

Background

In this masterclass Verne Harris will explore the linkages – conceptual, ethical and practical – between memory, archive and social justice. His fundamental premise is that the work of the archive is justice. He will lead a discussion with participants around this premise, following five lines of enquiry – power, pasts, spectrality, ethics and praxis.

Who should attend: Students, academics and practitioners with an interest in archive, memory work, transitional justice, human rights, and/or deconstruction.

Bio

Currently Director of Research and Archive at the Nelson Mandela Foundation, Verne Harris was Nelson Mandela’s archivist from 2004 to 2013.

He is an honorary research fellow with the University of Cape Town, has participated in a range of structures which transformed South Africa’s apartheid archival landscape, including the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and is a former Deputy Director of the National Archives of South Africa.

Widely published, he is probably best-known for leading the editorial team on the best-seller Nelson Mandela: Conversations with Myself. He is the recipient of an honorary doctorate from the University of Cordoba in Argentina (2014), plus archival publication awards from Australia, Canada and South Africa, and both his novels were short-listed for South Africa’s M-Net Book Prize.

He has served on the Boards of Archival Science, the Ahmed Kathrada Foundation, the Freedom of Expression Institute, and the South African History Archive.

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