Annual Human Needs and Global Resources Symposium

Schedule

• September 30 - Creative Arts Workshop
• October 1- Creative Arts Workshop
• October 2 - Plenary Lecture: The Role of the Arts in the Contested Practices of Imagination and World-Making
• October 3 - Mennonite Dinner and OMD/ICAN/HNGR Coffee House

Speaker

Thandi Gamedze

Dr. Thandi Gamedze is an academic, a writer, a poet, a facilitator, an educator, and a theologian, based in Cape Town, South Africa. Her doctoral research was transdisciplinary, bringing together the worlds of education and theology to better understand the role churches play in both upholding and challenging dominant power relations relating to race, gender, and class. She has broad experience working across multiple sites, including churches, universities, high schools, and community organisations. Her interests include theologies of liberation, social justice, radical pedagogies, and the arts – particularly poetry. Dr. Gamedze works with high school students through an organisation called Bottomup, supporting and equipping them to develop critical consciousness and make change within their schools and wider communities. Among other things, this work has included history workshops, public speaking workshops, and creative writing workshops. For the last several years through an organisation called The Warehouse, she has done a lot of work with Christians grappling with the ways in which their faith speaks to issues of social justice. Among other things, this has included facilitating contextual bible study processes, in which social issues are analysed and become the lenses through which we collectively read and engage the text in order to explore what faithfulness looks like within our contexts. It has also included mobile classrooms or city pilgrimages, in which we read not only our context and the biblical text, but also the space we inhabit, as we move through key sites in the city in order to more deeply understand our world and how our faith speaks to it. This has also included facilitating processes through which participants can grapple with the history of the church in South Africa – both oppressive and liberative – in order to live justly and faithfully as the church today.

Dr. Gamedze is very passionate about the arts and creativity – poetry in particular – and how they can challenge the unjust ways in which the world currently operates and provide glimpses of and pathways to something new.