Intellectual and cultural work in times of austerity: Introduction

Through what acts of remediation and choreographies of survival have university faculty, staff and students, playwrights, artists, publishers, journalists and curators made up the gap between ambition and deficit, between the state of the art and material scarcity? [...]the term has a much longer and more complex genealogy than conventional understandings acknowledge. The conference was part of a longer-running collaboration, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, that joins the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research with the African Studies Center at the University of Michigan. [...]we call attention to the human actors whose knowledge and dedication make cultural institutions function.