Shannon Walsh

Assistant Professor, Department of Theatre & Film, University of British Columbia

Documentary, South Africa, Politics of friendship, Social movements, Film production

Media

2017 Wall Scholar Profile | Shannon Walsh

Shannon Walsh reflects on her time at the Peter Wall Institute

2017 Wall Scholar Shannon Walsh, UBC Theatre and Film, reflects on her time at the Peter Wall Institute.

Are you interested in becoming a Wall Scholar? The Institute’s Wall Scholar Award is available to UBC Faculty members to spend one year in residence at the Peter Wall Institute. Applications for the 2020-2021 year are now open. Apply here https://pwias.ubc.ca/program/wall-sch...

Wall Scholars are provided with office space and $30,000 for research. With departmental approval, additional funding is available for partial to full administrative and course release.

2017 Wall Scholar Profile | Shannon Walsh

Ties that Bind: Race and the politics of friendship in South Africa
by Shannon Walsh, Jon Soske (Eds)
Wits University Press
9781868149681

What does friendship have to do with racial difference, settler colonialism and post-apartheid South Africa? While histories of apartheid and colonialism in South Africa have often focused on the ideologies of segregation and white supremacy, Ties that Bind explores how the intimacies of friendship create vital spaces for practices of power and resistance. Combining interviews, history, poetry, visual arts, memoir and academic essay, the collection keeps alive the promise of friendship and its possibilities while investigating how affective relations are essential to the social reproduction of power. From the intimacy of personal relationships to the organising ideology of liberal colonial governance, the contributors explore the intersection of race and friendship from a kaleidoscope of viewpoints and scales. Insisting on a timeline that originates in settler colonialism, Ties that Bind uncovers the implication of anti-blackness within nonracialism, and powerfully challenges a simple reading of the Mandela moment and the rainbow nation. In the wake of countrywide student protests calling for decolonisation of the university, and reignited debates around racial inequality, this timely volume insists that the history of South African politics has always already been about friendship. Written in an accessible and engaging style, Ties that Bind will interest a wide audience of scholars, students and activists, as well as general readers curious about contemporary South African debates around race and intimacy.

Biography

Dr. Shannon Walsh is a filmmaker and interdisciplinary theorist. Her most recent feature documentary, Jeppe on a Friday (2013), has been screened at the 56th Venice Biennale, the Pompidou Centre in Paris, and film festivals around the world. Her award-winning first film, H2Oil, was recognized as one of the top ten independent documentaries of 2009. She followed with St-Henri, the 26th of August (2011) co-produced with the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). Her films have played in over 50 film festivals and museums, on television and in cinemas, and have been supported by Société de développement des entreprises culturelles (SODEC), the Gauteng Film Commission (GFC), Canada Council for the Arts, among others.

As a theorist, Walsh publishes extensively in areas such as cities, social movements, pedagogy, sexuality, critical race theory, ethnography and visual and participatory methodologies, largely focused on South Africa. She has won numerous fellowships and awards; and her research has been supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Fonds Quebecois de la recherche sur la societe et la culture (FQRSC), the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID), amongst many others. Walsh was a faculty member at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong, from 2013-2016, and continues to be a Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg’s Research Chair in Social Change, where she did her post-doc. She received a PhD in anthropology and education from McGill University in 2010.

Expertise

  • Documentary
  • South Africa
  • Politics of friendship
  • Social movements
  • Film production

Education/Éducation

  • Concordia University
    Photography, minor English Literature
    BFA, 2000
  • Concordia University
    Special Individualized Program: Sociology, Education, Women's Studies, Film Studies
    MA, 2004
  • University of Johannesburg
    South African Research Chair in Social Change
    Post-Doc, 2012
  • McGill University
    Anthropology/Education
    PhD, 2010