The Politics of The University

Sep 29, 2017
UC Irvine


Saleem Badat will speak on the current state of the university in South Africa, with connections to the United States and elsewhere. Respondents will discuss these remarks with comments about the state of the university in Israel-Palestine and the United States.

Featured Speakers

Saleem Badat
Andrew Mellon Foundation

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian
UCHRI

Glen Mimura
UC Irvine

Saleem Badat is the program director of the Mellon Foundation’s International Higher Education and Strategic Projects program.  His portfolio includes the South Africa program and international grantmaking in higher education. 

Mr. Badat has served as the director of the Education Policy Unit at the University of the Western Cape, as the first head of the Council on Higher Education, which advises the South African Minister of Higher Education and Training, and as vice-chancellor of Rhodes University.  He has been chairperson of Higher Education South Africa, and of the Association of African Universities Scientific Committee on Higher Education.  He is a board member of the Centre for Higher Education Transformation, a member of the Carnegie 3 Study on Poverty and Inequality in South Africa Think Tank, and a trustee of the Harold Wolpe Memorial Trust.

Mr. Badat holds degrees in the social sciences from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, a certificate in higher education and science policy from Boston University, and a PhD in sociology from the University of York.  He holds honorary doctorates from the universities of the Free State and York.  He is a recipient of the Inyathelo Exceptional Philanthropy Award in recognition of Excellence and Leadership in Personal South African Philanthropy.

Mr. Badat is the author of The Forgotten People:  Political Banishment under Apartheid (Brill, 2013), Black Man, You are on Your Own (STE Publishers, 2009) and Black Student Politics, Higher Education and Apartheid (RoutledgeFalmer, 2002); co-author of National Policy and a Regional Response in South African Higher Education (James Currey, 2004); and co-editor of Apartheid Education and Popular Struggles in South Africa (Zed Books, 1991).

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a longtime anti-violence, Palestinian feminist activist and scholar.  She is the Lawrence D. Biele Chair in Law at the Faculty of Law-Institute of Criminology and the School of Social Work and Public Welfare at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Shalhoub-Kevorkian is also the director of the Gender Studies Program at Mada al-Carmel, the Arab Center for Applied Social Research in Haifa. Her research focuses on femicide and other forms of gendered violence, crimes of abuse of power in settler colonial contexts, surveillance, securitization, and trauma in militarized and colonized zones. Her most recent book, Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear was published by Cambridge University Press in 2015.  As a resident of the old city of Jerusalem, Shalhoub-Kevorkian engages in direct actions and critical dialogue to end the inscription of power over Palestinian children’s lives, spaces of death, and women’s birthing bodies and lives.

Glen Mimura is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies, UC Irvine.  His research examines the complex, dynamic and uneven relations between media, social movements and popular culture. His book, Ghostlife of Third Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), brings together two concerns: first, the history of Asian American media arts since the late 1960s in the late Cold War and post-Cold War contexts of nationalism and globalization; and second the recent history of film and cultural theory at the interface of Marxism and poststructuralism. Professor Mimura’s current research examines post-civil rights formations of race and sexuality, and their articulations in popular culture, consumer capitalism and social space.