Doing a PhD can be a long, lonely journey no matter the field or year of study. The “Somebody, Somewhere” PhD colloquium, held on 1 and 2 April for all PhD students across the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, under the custodianship of the Graduate School, proved to be a much-needed platform for covert community-building, an antidote to the intellectual solitude and anxiety, the feeling of lostness, that one often experiences during a PhD.
“We named the colloquium after an HBO series” said Vice Dean-Research, Professor Stella Viljoen, “because this show represents the power of unlikely friendship to arrogate loneliness and a lack of purpose. It is about a woman, living in a small town in Kansas who finds friendship in an unlikely community, a friendship that heals some of her grief and sense of futility.” The colloquium was held at the Department of Visual Arts but was a hybrid event that also included presentations from students at universities in the PANGeA network (including students from, for instance, the Universities of Ghana and Nairobi). The colloquium was designed to give students the opportunity to pitch their PhD projects to peers from other fields and future collaborators, receive constructive feedback and criticism from an attentive audience, discover new sources and methods of research, and to forge new networks across disciplines and the continent. Presenters were given 15-minutes to present their papers and then entertain commentary and questions from the audience. The projects represented an incredibly diverse range of topics, including Linda Mang’eni’s analysis of the the metaphors used by the Kenyan politician, Raila Odinga; Eddington Maseya’s study of elephant management in national parks and Vasti Calitz’ assertion of the need to recognise alternative forms of intimacy.
Reflecting on the standard of the presentations, Prof Taryn Bernard, the Vice-Dean of Learning and Teaching in the Faculty, said, “I’m blown away”. Three prizes were awarded to the best papers. The winners were Emmanuel Phiri (History) who is researching the defiance of women beer brewers in Zambia’s Urban Copperbelt between 1927-1939, Nicola van der Westhuizen (Sociology and Social Anthropology) who is writing about what she calls infrastructural subjectivities and subjective infrastructures, the governance, relations, and livelihoods of precarious communities in the Hermanus area, and Florence de Vries (Journalism), who is writing about the portrayal of mental illness in the media, specifically News24’s coverage of two international athletes’ mental health.
“The colloquium exceeded our expectations” said Dr Candice Steele, manager of The Graduate School of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. “We are already immensely excited about hosting this event again next year. It is our hope that through the many events taking place throughout the year, the doctoral students in the faculty will continue the important work of community-building!”
Read more on the proceedings of the day and abstracts of the Presenters:
https://arts.sun.ac.za/files/2025/04/Somebody-Somewhere-Programme-ABSTRACTS-LIST.pdf