Inaugural Lecture: Professor Maano Ramutsindela

Dear colleagues and students

You are formally invited to the next Vice-Chancellor’s Inaugural Lecture, which is to be presented by Professor Maano Ramutsindela. The lecture, titled “Remapping Africa through peace parks: What future for the continent?”, is scheduled to take place on Wednesday, 1 November 2017, at 17:00 in lecture theatre TS2B in the Snape Building on upper campus.

Professor Ramutsindela is the deputy dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of Cape Town. He has a background in human geography with an interest in South Africa's socio-political and development challenges and the world economy. His main research and teaching interests are within the subfields of political geography and political ecology. With his research themes – related to borders, regions, land reform and transfrontier conservation – he engages with the broader debate on the conceptions and institutionalisation of borders and their (im)materiality, territorial politics, regionalisms and society–nature relations.

He is a Canon Collins scholar, a fellow of the Society of South African Geographers and a recipient of the National Research Foundation’s (NRF) Prestigious Award and the NRF Award for the Transformation of the Science Cohort.

The establishment and development of peace parks, also known as transfrontier conservation areas (TFCAs), is an approach to jointly manage natural resources across political boundaries. Professor Ramutsindela’s work on these parks has been featured in the New York Times and in the Conversation. He is the author of Transfrontier Conservation in Africa: At the confluence of capital, politics and nature.

In his lecture, he will talk about the development of peace parks in Africa’s borderlands, the future they promise, their implications for the ownership of resources, as well as how ordinary people experience them. He will also explore the question of whether peace parks are just a new cartographic device by which a colonial project of resource alienation and control is continued in post-independence Africa.

When: Wednesday, 1 November 2017

Where: Lecture theatre TS2B, Snape Building, Upper Campus, University of Cape Town

Time: 17:00 for 17:30

RSVP: Please reply online on or before Tuesday, 31 October 2017.

For enquiries, please email or phone 021 650 3730/4847.

Please note: Due to limited space, seats will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.

Sincerely

Dr Max Price
Vice-Chancellor

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