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Author Bio

Rory Bester is an Associate Professor in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa. He teaches and researches in the areas of modern and contemporary photography, food and kitchen histories, and curatorial, heritage and museum studies. In addition to contributing articles to journals such as African Arts, Art South Africa, Camera Austria, De Arte, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Portfolio: Contemporary Photography in Britain and Social Dynamics, he has written catalogue essays for a number of institutions, including BildMuseet (Umeå), Documenta (Kassel), Fondation Louis Vuitton (Paris), Fotografia Europea (Reggio Emilia), Fotomuseum Winterthur (Zurich), International Centre of Photography (New York), Iziko South African National Gallery (Cape Town), Jeu de Paume (Paris), National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne), Prince Claus Fund (Amsterdam) and Studio Museum (Harlem). He is the co-convenor of the Zeitz MOCAA & UWC Museum Fellowship Programme.

Carla Lever is a South African scholar, writer, and educator working at the intersection of performance studies, visual culture, and political activism. She holds a PhD in Performance Studies from the University of Sydney and has taught across literature, media, and cultural studies at institutions including the University of Cape Town, Stellenbosch University, and the University of the Western Cape. Her research focuses on contemporary South African protest tactics and the role of affect in political life. Carla has published widely in journals such as Social Text and Theatre Research International. Alongside this academic work, she is an award-winning creative writer and journalist. Her current projects explore digital heritage and feminist night-walking practices in Cape Town.

Bongani Kona is a PhD candidate and lecturer in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of the Western Cape. His writing has been featured in various publications, such as Chimurenga, New York Times, The Baffler, and The Interpreters: South Africa’s New Nonfiction. He is the editor of Our Ghosts Were Once People: Stories on Death and Dying (2021) and co-collaborator, with Catherine Boulle, on the BBC Radio 4 documentary, Time, Paper, Bone (2025).

Mona Hakimi is a PhD candidate at the Department of Historical Studies at the University of the Western Cape. Her doctoral thesis is in experimental history writing, using the story of a pomegranate tree to narrate the entanglement of Malawi, Iran and Palestine. In a previous life, Mona taught Writing and Rhetoric and African Studies at the African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg, South Africa and Social Anthropology at Waterford Kamhlaba, the United World College of Southern Africa in Mbabane, eSwatini.

Keywords

Creative practice, assessment, decolonial pedagogy, embodiment, podcasting

Abstract

This essay explores the experience of implementing podcast-based assessment in ‘Feeling History, Making History,’ a semester-long course at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) in South Africa. The course is designed to cultivate broad-based critical and interdisciplinary skill sets in first-year Humanities students. Through pedagogical reflection across three consecutive iterations of this course, we investigate how creative assessment practices such as podcasting both enabled our students to bring their whole “selves” into the academy and productively challenged our own preconceived notions about effective, decolonial pedagogy.

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