Bongani Mgijima, director of the Kleinplasie Museum in South Africa, showing exhibits to Josi Frater, Leslie Witz, and Ivan Karp, 2003.

Supported by the Ivan Karp and Corinne Kratz Fund

The African Critical Inquiry Program (ACIP) seeks to advance inquiry and debate about the roles of public culture, public cultural institutions and public scholarship in shaping identities and society in Africa. ACIP is committed to collaboration between scholars and the makers of culture and history, and to fostering inquiry into the politics of knowledge production, the relationships between the colonial/apartheid and the postcolonial/postapartheid and the importance of critical pluralism as against nationalist discourse. ACIP is a partnership between the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape and the Laney Graduate School of Emory University.

The African Critical Inquiry Program has two main components:

* An annual ACIP Workshop in South Africa provides interdisciplinary, cross-institutional contexts for those working in and on institutions of public culture in Africa to address central issues and to develop comparative, critical frameworks that yield fresh insights, innovative and informed practice, and lively interchange.

* The Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards foster work by the next generation of scholar-practitioners. The awards are open to African doctoral students in the humanities and humanistic social sciences who are enrolled at South African universities and conducting dissertation research on relevant topics.

In these ways, ACIP strengthens public scholarship and institutions of public culture in South Africa and enhances our understanding of these vital sites of cultural production and social action. Calls for new applications and details about past and current ACIP workshops and research awards are available on the ACIP webpage and announced on Facebook through the Ivan Karp and Corinne Kratz Fund page.

ACIP is supported by contributions to the Ivan Karp and Corinne Kratz Fund. The Fund was created to honor the late National Endowment for the Humanities Professor Ivan Karp and to help continue the collaborative work that he and Corinne Kratz have done with universities, museums and other cultural institutions in South Africa.