In the years since its establishment in 2006, the Centre for Humanities Research has accomplished its goal of giving new impetus to the experiments in ideas for building a post-apartheid future that defined the University of the Western Cape in the 1980s. This has allowed it to reflect critically and affirmingly upon earlier debates about foundational concepts in the Humanities placing the arts at the heart of its inquiries. Rather than casting itself as neutral and devoid of perspective, the CHR insisted on beginning with an inquiry into the very conditions that brought the university into being under apartheid. In place of assuming the role of diagnostician, it offered a space of working through but also working out its relation to this untenable inheritance so as to offer a concept of freedom to the world. This conception has defined an ethos shaping the aesthetic and scholarly approaches of the CHR since its inception. A humanities inquiry informed by its location and history, the CHR lends itself to asking pertinent questions that have a significant impact on locating intellectual traditions in Africa in a global discourse on the contemporary human condition.

The CHR’s graduate fellowship and artist-in-residence programmes have nurtured an humanities discourse that is responsive to shaping a discourse on postapartheid freedom exploring the relationship between the human, the arts and technology in our contemporary world, especially as these relate to rapidly transforming notions of society and politics. With partnerships across and between institutions, particularly universities, schools, public

arts projects, museums, archives and art galleries, the CHR nurtures future generations of humanities graduates, educators and arts and cultural practitioners energized by transhemispheric collaborations that extend the reach of local and international humanities scholarship, as well as opportunities for arts education and cultural production beyond the institutional site of the university.