Dr Santos joins us for the new academic year 2019.
Dominique Santos’s work explores the intersections of music, play, dreaming and heritage practices with intimate experiences of the self, space and social change. Her doctoral thesis used popular music as a lens to map the dynamics of social change in South Africa over several generations. Music was used as a device to track biographies and stories that explored the dynamic contours of race in 'mixed' communities, including domestic music making in a Scots-Mauritian family in the early apartheid years in Durban, the jazz scene of 1970’s and 1980’s in ‘grey’ areas of Johannesburg and kwaito sub-cultures in the western areas of Johannesburg in the 1990’s and early 2000’s. Her more recent work has looked at how children and communities have occupied public spaces in London and Johannesburg to re-imagine the potential of human experience of place and space in the city. She has acted as an advisor for heritage and youth organisation Return to Origin and is currently developing the project ‘Dreams in Solitary’ on the place of dreaming in sub-conscious refusals of conditions of oppression. Her anthropological trajectory has been informed by a commitment to ‘unsettle the coloniality of being’, connecting the university as a public and intellectual space with the wider community and natural world it is part of.