State personality and state authority: a reading through architecture
Statehood is important yet nebulous, in Africa as elsewhere. Particularly difficult to pin down is the way in which citizens understand their state and bring it into being through their ideas about and engagement with it. This paper explores citizens’ readings of the state through their descriptions of and engagement with state buildings. Drawing on examples from South Africa, it asks how the various faces of the state are manifest through the parliament, presidential offices, city hall, police stations, courts and ministry buildings and how they are read by South African citizens. How do these concrete embodiments of statehood express the collective; and how are they given substance by the people who they have been built to represent?
Reference:
We-OS9 State-Making from Below-P-002
Presenter/s:
Julia Gallagher
Presentation type:
Panel
Room:
Muirhead Room 109
Date:
Wednesday, 12 September
Time:
09:15 - 09:30
Session times:
09:00 - 10:30