A History of WOZA! NEWSA and Beyond
WOZA! - the Workshops on Southern Africa - is the 2024 reconstitution of what was formerly called the North Eastern Workshops on Southern Africa (NEWSA). NEWSA grew out of several preceding scholarly networks and workshops. These include the Southern Africa Research Program (SARP) at Yale, funded by the Ford Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) from 1977 through 1994 to assist the research and education of African scholars in higher education, and the Canadian Research Consortium on Southern Africa (CRCSA), an independent network of scholars in Canada facilitated first by Alan Jeeves in 1992. NEWSA grew out of efforts to link those of CRCSA and the American northeast after the end of SARP.
The first “proto-NEWSA” workshop, the South African Workshop, was held at Brown University in 1997, envisioned by Newell Stultz and organized by Nancy Jacobs, with a second at Boston University in 1998, planned by Chris Lowe. Alan Jeeves proposed connecting these events with CRCSA and the first NEWSA in 1999 came to the Bishop Booth Center in Burlington, Vermont, with the support of Glen Elder and Robert Gordon of the African Studies Program at the University of Vermont. As Belinda Dobson wrote about Elder’s role in these early days of NEWSA, “Glen played a crucial role in fostering a sense of community and inclusiveness amongst scholars of South and Southern Africa in North American academia.”
From the beginning in 1999, NEWSA sought to build relationships between senior and junior scholars. The previous workshops were reliant upon grants, so NEWSA organizers had to think about self-sufficiency, while being sensitive to avoiding the exorbitant costs of attending national meetings. The Bishop Booth Center offered a rustic, inspiring, and inexpensive venue for regionally-based scholars. As Gordon remembers, NEWSA served as a low-cost meeting where fellow southern Africanists from the northeast could, “meet, schmooze, and develop a supportive network for those located on the Africanist periphery. Not only was conviviality created by physical co-presence important but also the idea of promoting Southern African studies (at least in the region) by sharing resources such as guest speakers and movies.”
The workshop still serves to connect scholars to one another and with journal and book editors, many of whom attend as participants, discussants or in official editorial capacities, such as the 2005 publication workshop with Gill Berchowitz of Ohio University Press. Friday night events included a plenary session with Mac Maharaj, roundtables on “Digital Southern African Studies” in 2008 and 2014, and film showings such as RFK in the Land of Apartheid: A Ripple of Hope with the filmmaker Larry Shore and Dear Mandela, the latter facilitated by film scholar Cara Moyer Duncan.
The NEWSA community has grown since then, welcoming scholars beyond the northeast. From the roughly 15 participants at the first meeting at Bishop Booth, more recent workshops numbered more than 50 participants. See just a few of our past programs here. In 2014, after discussion at the business meeting, NEWSA took a new step forward by incorporating as a nonprofit organization. This allowed us to set up our own bank account and better manage funds as we considered setting up travel grants.
After our 2016 meeting, NEWSA began fundraising to offer the Glen Elder Travel Award to recognize the late Pr. Glen Strauch Elder’s contributions to the fields of queer studies, geography, and Southern African studies, and to the spirit of NEWSA. This grant has supported the travel of scholars based outside of North America as well as graduate students and non-tenure track scholars based in North America. Past awardees include: Sifiso Nldovu, Mphatso Moses Kaufulu, Ruth Castel-Branco, Farai Nyika, Martha Ndakalako-Bannikov, Aldrin Magaya, Gift Wasambo Kayira, Thuto Thipe, Trishula Patel, and Thoko Sipungu.
Following our 2017 meeting, NEWSA affiliated with the US African Studies Association (ASA) and held its first annual gathering at ASA's annual meeting.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, NEWSA pivoted to an online workshop for the first time for the 2020 workshop. In that same year, the shared outcries over the death of George Floyd, the subsequent global proliferation of anti-racist discourse, and critical calls among our long-term participants about our own organizational praxis catalyzed our board to engage in serious self review. In turn, we wrote and clarified our organizational Statement of Values.
In late 2024, NEWSA was reconstituted by its current board members (listed below) as WOZA!, to continue to emphasize it's regional scholarly and collaborative focus, but to expand the geographic scope of its participants and potential future workshop locations outside of the Northeast region of North America especially.
Statement of Values
As our board membership rotates through three-year appointments, WOZA! continues to evolve from its original form as a regional workshop for those based in the northeast to a more globally inclusive organization. With this “Statement of Values,” we aim convey to our existing and future community members what makes WOZA!’s environment so supportive and how we can make it better.
Keguro Macharia’s essay on “Reviewer 2” inspires us to make a call for our community “to extend intellectual curiosity and generosity to work that is different, work that uses different methods and archives, work that draws from and builds different theoretical trajectories, work that speaks from and to different geohistories.” We intend this for both the Program Committee and the participants at each workshop.
Being part of the WOZA! community requires that we think about our positions and investments in terms of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, age, academic generation (here we mean those of the tenured and full professoriate), and precariat labor when we speak. Is space on the floor being given equally? In what ways do we wield power we might not recognize? Co-founder of Land Relationships Super Collective and Critical Race Indigenous Studies scholar Eve Tuck points out that “it is the audience’s responsibility to help craft a positive public speaking experience for graduate students and early career scholars.”
We also need to think about how historical interpretations have undergirded and perpetuated economic, social, cultural, and political marginalization. We need to be cognizant of not providing a forum for such marginalization in our workshops. This also means that we should be open to critique and challenge as we strive to be better intellectuals and colleagues. Critique and challenge are direct efforts that help to remake our WOZA! community for the better.
This is the kind of intellectual community that we aspire to with WOZA! As such, the programming committee has the mandate of our community to create and prioritize diverse panels.
Some concrete steps that we aspire to and encourage participants to in order to promote the these values:
- Identify a mentor/mentee.
- Take responsibility for an inclusive panel. Talk to the WOZA! Treasurer about donating to the Glen Elder Award. Talk to your own university administration to organize guest talks at your university before/after the workshop to help cover costs from southern Africa. This benefits WOZA! as well as your home institution.
- Avoid replicating institutional networks in your panel proposals and citations.
- Donate some extra funds to the Glen Elder Award.
- Be conscious of the time allotted to you as a discussant, panelist, or audience member. How much space are you taking?
- Pass the #GrayTest, named after Kishonna Gray, meaning a journal article or paper must not only cite the scholarship of at least two women and two nonwhite people but must discuss it in the body of the text: Cite African scholars. Cite scholars of color. Cite women scholars.
- Invite a newbie to join you at breakfast, lunch, or dinner. We are all excited to see old friends and colleagues at WOZA! and gravitate to them. It’s great! But it also replicates our circles and our scholarship. Break out! We’ve got the whole weekend to do both.
Current Board Members of WOZA!
Zachary Kagan Guthrie, University of Mississippi - Program Committee Member
Trishula Patel, University of Denver - Program Committee Member
Rachel Sandwell, Cornell University - Program Committee Member
Liz Thornberry, John Hopkins University - Program Committee Member
Liz Timbs, University of North Carolina, Wilmington - Program Committee Member and Digital Coordinator
Tyler Fleming, University of Louisville - Local Arrangements Coordinator
John Aerni-Flessner, Michigan State University - Co-Treasurer
Myra Houser, Ouachita Baptist University - Co-Treasurer, Advisory Board Member
Casey Golomski, University of New Hampshire - Advisory Board Member
Shireen Hassim, Carleton Univesity - Advisory Board Member