On 9 June, Professor Siona O’Connell from the School of Arts presented her inaugural lecture titled ‘We are not a community of nobodies, what may we yet become?’ 

Prof O’Connell’s lecture was based on her research, which looks at the ‘archive of the ordinary’ to understand what freedom might look like in the 21st century, and provided an overview of her scholarly approaches, underpinned by her understanding that the entanglements of colonialism, slavery and apartheid are the cornerstones that continue to uphold and increase inequality in South Africa. Her work focuses on the structures that limit people's freedom and she uses creative measures, such as film-making, to detail the ordinary experiences of the racially oppressed and the long reach of an oppressive past. She emphasised personal and academic commitment to understanding how power and domination operate and suggested new interdisciplinary approaches to asking difficult questions of each other as social beings. 

She concluded her lecture by saying: ‘We are human, we are creative beings, each capable of magnificent things. We are here, and we are here with you. We are a community of somebodies.’ 

Commenting on the lecture, Prof Vasu Reddy said that it had tapped into a very rich archive about the personal, the political and indeed the memory, and that Prof O’Connell had touched on many issues such as place, space, identity and forms of solidarity. Most importantly, however, her work ‘has much to do with the practice of storytelling, of relating actuality, the recounting of history, the personal, the social and the political’. 

We would like to congratulate Prof O’Connell on delivering a marvellous, insightful and important inaugural address.