PAC@75 Closing Event
18 October 2020
PAC@75 Closing Event
We are determined to be free. We want education. We want the right to earn a decent living; the right to express our thoughts and emotions, to adopt and create forms of beauty… We will fight in every way we can for freedom, democracy and social betterment.
The Challenge to the Colonial Powers, Statement from the Fifth Pan-African Congress, Manchester 1945.
The issues that were discussed at the Congress which included the problems with racial discrimination in the UK have still dogged society in the UK and elsewhere today, as evidenced with the Black Lives Matter protests that has impacted Manchester as like many other British cities. The pandemic has also meant that celebration of this unique festival online. This however will have allowed us to reach an international audience. We are also proud to have worked in association with all three Manchester Universities and other institutions including See My World, NBAA MCPHH, and the AIURC.
To close the PAC@75: 75th Anniversary of the 5th Pan African Congress ‘Viewing the Past and Looking to the Future’, please join us in this online event Carol Ann Duffy DBE will be reading her poems. Curator of PAC@75 Professor Ola Uduku (Manchester School of Architecture) will share her reflections and visions for the future. She will be joined by Professor Jennifer Watling (Manchester Metropolitan University), Berrisford Edwards (University of Manchester), Dr Jade Munslow Ong (University of Salford) and others with closing reflections. This event will be accompanied by Poetics of Freedom by Tania Camara. We thank you for your participation. Here’s to the next 75 years!
Video
Biographies
Professor Jennifer Watling
Professor Watling became Pro-Vice-Chancellor for International at Manchester Metropolitan University in September 2016. Professor Watling leads on the long-term vision for the MMU International presence. This includes developing global partnerships, enhancing our Transnational Education (TNE) activities, attracting international students, increasing staff and student mobility, and engaging our international alumni. In addition, Professor Watling contributes more broadly to the overall leadership of the University. View full profile
Professor Ola Uduku
Ola Uduku took up a Professorship in Architecture at the Manchester School of Architecture in 2017. Prior to this she was Reader in Architecture, and Dean International for Africa, at Edinburgh University. Her research specialisms are in the history of educational architecture in Africa, and the contemporary issues related to social infrastructure provision for minority communities in cities in the ‘West’ and ‘South’. She is currently engaged in developing postgraduate research and teaching links in architecture urbanism, heritage and conservation between West African Architecture schools and those in North West England. She has in the past published in the areas of African Architecture, African Diaspora Studies, Gated Communities, and environmental design teaching pedagogies. Professor Uduku is also the co-ordinator of the EdenApp Tools for Environmental Analysis Lab, which focuses on developing apps for use in teaching environmental concepts such as lighting, thermal comfort, and acoustics to undergraduates through the use of personal apps and sensors.. View full profile
Dr Jade Munslow Ong
Jade is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Salford, UK. She is the author of Olive Schreiner and African Modernism: Allegory, Empire and Postcolonial Writing (Routledge, 2018), and articles in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing and Journal of Commonwealth Literature, amongst other things. She is currently working on a book with Matthew Whittle, entitled Global Literatures and the Environment: Twenty-First Century Perspectives (forthcoming with Routledge), and has recently been awarded an AHRC Early Career Research Grant for a project entitled South African Modernism 1880-2020
Dr Kai Syng Tan
Dr Kai Syng Tan FRSA SFHEA is an artist, curator and consultant whose work is distinct for its ‘positive atmosphere’ (Guardian 2014), ‘radical interdisciplinarity’ (UCL geographer Professor Alan Latham 2017) and ‘eclectic style and cheeky attitude‘ (Sydney Morning Herald 2006), which is also ‘positively disruptive’ (National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement Images Award for Culture Change, 2018). She is Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader for a new Executive Arts Leadership MA/MFA at MM and Peer Review College Member for AHRC and UKRI Future Leadership Fellowships. She completed her PhD at Slade School of Fine Art as a UCL scholar. As an artist Kai has participated in >900 shows including Guangzhou Triennale, Biennale of Sydney, Wellington International Arts Festival, Tokyo Designers’ Week. Venues: MOMA New York, Moscow International House of Music. Recognition include San Francisco International Film Festival Golden Gate Award 1999, while collections include Museum of London, Fukuoka Art Museum. She was Visual Director and Communications Director for the £4m Opening and Closing Ceremonies of the ASEAN Para Games 2015 which were praised by the Singapore Prime Minister as ‘spectacular’, and Association for the Deaf as ‘game changing’. Kai’s current pro bono work in EDI, the arts and social change in 20 UK and international groups as founder, trustee, consultant, lead, member or volunteer include: the Neurodiversity In/And Creative Research Network (185 members), Music in Detention, UK Adult ADHD Network (professional body for mental health experts), PsychArt (supported by Royal College of Psychiatrists), Unlimited (disability arts), Royal Society for the Arts, RUN! RUN! Biennale (running as arts and humanities discourse), Running Cultures Research Group (80 members), and the Global Art & Mobilities Network. kaisyngtan.com/artful
PAC@75
