3rd International Workshop in Nanocarbon

Several local and world experts will come together to investigate the crossroads of nano-diamond and nanocarbon and the benefits this synergy can bring.

Organised by the Nano-Scale Transport Physics Laboratory, the Wits School of Physics and the DST-NRF Centre of Excellence in Strong Materials, the 34d International Workshop in Nanocarbon will focus on properties of carbon structures for a range of applications.

This includes electronic properties of graphene, nanotubes, nanodiamond films, carbon heterostructures and applications in energy generation and storage, carbon-based sensors, synthesis of novel carbon structures and catalysts based on carbon materials.

Visit the Nanocarbon Workshop page for more details.

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MISGSA 2016

Wits University again presents the Mathematics in Industry Study Group South Africa (MISGSA) in January 2016.

A Mathematics in Industry Study Group is a five-day workshop where academic researchers and graduate students work collaboratively with representatives from industry on research problems submitted by local industry.

Study Group's have been organised for over 40 years in many countries around the world. The first Study Group in South Africa was held in 2004.

Visit the MISGSA conference page for more details.

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Climate change exhibition and lecture

The exhibition ‘Climate Change’ is currently on show at the Origins Centre.

The exhibition explores questions raised in a new book, titled: Climate Change: Briefings from Southern Africa, written by world leading experts on climate change from Wits University – Bob Scholes, Mary Scholes and Mike Lucas – that was published by Wits University Press in December 2015.

The exhibition will take place in the Origins Centre temporary gallery and offers a highly interactive family friendly experience.

A public lecture will take place on 2 February 2016.

Speakers:

• Professor Bob Scholes is a Wits Distinguished Professor in the Global Change and Sustainability Research Institute (GCRSI), School of Animal, Plant and Environmental Sciences (APES). 
• Professor Mary Scholes, a leading Wits academic, is a full professor in APES. Her research activities focus on soil fertility and biogeochemistry in savannas, plantation forests and croplands. 
• UCT Associate Professor Mike Lucas’s research focus is in areas of biological oceanography, biogeochemical cycling; Benguela upwelling and Southern Ocean ecosystems.

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Satellite Cities - an exhibition by Svea Josephy

Josephy is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art (Photography) at the Michaelis school of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town

She has held a number of exhibitions of her creative work, nationally and internationally, and curated a number of group exhibitions.

Her research interests include Southern African Photography, documentary photography, contemporary South African lens based practice and colonial photography. Her writing on these areas has been published in various books, journals and catalogues on contemporary art and photography.

Josephy’s research is concerned with notions of post apartheid photography, particularly as it connects to the politics of space and the land and its representation in relation to identity. She is interested in ‘new documentary’ forms that have emerged in post apartheid South Africa.'

The exhibition is co-hosted by the Wits City Institute and the Wits Arts Museum.

There will also be a Talkabout with the artist on Saturday, 5 March 2016 at 12:00.

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12th annual Johannesburg Dermatopathology Symposium

The Faculty of Health Sciences will host the 12th annual Johannesburg Dermatopathology Symposium.

Speakers include:

• Dieter Metze, Professor of Dermatology and Vice Chairman of the Department of Dermatology at the University of Münster in Germany
• Lucille Blumberg, Associate Professor of Medical Microbiology at the University of Stellenbosch and Deputy Director of the National Institute for Communicable Diseases.

Phillip McKee, former Associate Professor of Pathology and Director of the Division of Dermatopathology in the Department of Pathology, Brigham will be the co-chair for the Symposium.

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Bidvest Wits vs Polokwane City

Don't miss the match!

Wits staff members can request complimentary tickets for this match from the Bidvest Wits offices in Sturrock Park, near the Sports Administration offices, on weekdays between 09:00 and 16:00. Please contact the office in advance and specify how many tickets you would like to receive for this match.

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Glueball inflation from gauge/ gravity duality

The Mandelstam and National Institutes for Theoretical Physics will host this seminar to be presented by Dr Lilia Anguelova (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences).

Cosmological inflation plays a crucial role in our present understanding of the universe. However, the standard field-theoretic models, used to describe it, suffer from a well-known problem at the quantum level, known as the eta-problem.

Anguelova will discuss an alternative set of models, which are based on having a composite (instead of a fundamental) inflation, which avoids the eta-problem entirely.

In these models the inflation is a glueball state in a strongly-coupled gauge sector. Since the relevant gauge theory is in a non-perturbative regime, the use of gauge/gravity duality as a powerful technical tool is essential.

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National Minimum Wage Symposium

The National Minimum Wage Research Initiative (NMW-RI) at Wits presents its two-day National Symposium on 2 and 3 February 2016.

The Symposium will profile the research of the NMW-RI, as well as draw together important international and local experts. Policy makers; civil society, union and business leaders; academics; and the press are expected to attend.

International experts include:

• Alan Manning, Professor, London School of Economics (LSE), United Kingdom
• Uma Rani, International Labour Organisation
• Roxana Maurizio, UNGS, Argentina
• Shanmugam Thiagarajan, National Wage Council, Malaysia
• Asghar Adelzadeh, Applied Development Research Solutions

Panels will discuss:

• Minimum wages and employment
• The impact of a national minimum wage on poverty and inequality
• The South African labour market
• International case studies
• The consequences of a national minimum wage in South Africa – outcomes from modelling exercises

Policy sessions will consider:

• Designing national minimum wage to transform the wage structure
• A national minimum wage that business can implement: exclusions, exemptions and incentives
• Institutional design: who sets, monitors and enforces a NMW?

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Wits Sports Night Run

Witsies enthusiastically participate in a 5km night run from Sturrock Park through East and West campuses and ending at the Tower of Light.

Join us for the proud Wits Tradition. Students, staff and alumni are invited to sign up for the race. Registrations open at Hall 29 during registration and at the Amphitheatre during Orientation Week.

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The higher education transformation agenda

Opening the debate on innovation and socio-economic inclusion

The transformation debate is primarily framed in terms of race and language, in terms of whose knowledge is taught and how it is taught.

The aim of this seminar is to open up another facet of the transformation agenda: who benefits from university knowledge and how?

The seminar will bring together leadership, researchers and policy actors in the university, innovation and development spaces to debate the role of universities in innovation for inclusive development.

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High Energy Physics Workshop

The 2016 High Energy Physics Workshop will cover South Africa’s contribution to new discoveries such as new bosons.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has announced a number of excesses that point to new discoveries in 2016. These include new bosons and, possibly, the key to understanding Dark Matter in the universe. The relevance of these discoveries surpass that of the Higgs boson observed in 2012 and they promise to revolutionise our knowledge of fundamental interactions in Nature as we know them. South Africa is a leading participant in these endeavours, among other things, by being the first to postulate the existence of one of the bosons, leading to an overarching explanation of the excesses observed in the data.

This years’s High Energy Physics Workshop will cover South Africa’s contribution to these endeavours and will be attended by a large number of students. 

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Book launch: The language of inclusive education

The Language of Inclusive Education considers the writing, speaking, reading and hearing of inclusive education.

Based on the premise that humans use language to construct their worlds and their realities, this book is concerned with how language works to determine what we know and understand about issues related to in/exclusion in education. Using a variety of analytical tools, the author exposes language-at-work in academic and popular literature and in policy documents.

Guest speaker: Professor Lani Florian, Bell Chair of Education, University of Edinburgh.

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Symposium on knowledge and work

The Centre for Researching Education and Labour at the School of Education, will host this international symposium.

This symposium will explore the relationships between knowledge, curricula, labour markets, and work.

Educationalists, labour scholars and activists, political economists, policy experts, and PhD students will make contributions.

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Blackness: Essentialisms, intersections and faultlines

The Wits Centre for Diversity Studies, in collaboration with the Ahmed Kathrada and Nelson Mandela Foundations, will host this exciting dialogue.

It will address issues of blackness and its entanglement with essentialisms, intersections and faultlines in post-apartheid South Africa.

This interactive dialogue will bring thought leaders, scholars and various members from  civil society. Detailed programme.

Panellists include:

• Dr Lubna Nadvi
• Dr Peace Kiguwa
• William Mpofu
• Aaisha Dadi Patel
• Dr Primus Tazanu

Rejane Williams will facilitate the conversations.

This dialogue forms part of the Public Policy Dialogue programme being undertaken by the Foundation for Human Rights in partnership with the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development.

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Propellant management in space

Dr Phillip Behruzi, senior expert and team leader: Fluid Mechanics in Thermal Engineering at Airbus Defence and Space, will deliver this lecture.

This lecture, hosted by the National Aerospace Centre and the School of Mechanical, Industrial and Aeronautical Engineering at Wits will cover aspects such as:

• Propellant management in spacecraft tanks;
• Propellant behaviour during thrust phases as well as ballistic flight phases;
• Liquid sloshing in spacecraft tanks; tools and models and their limitations;
• Cooperation with South Africa and next steps and;
• Behaviour of cryogenic propellants in spacecraft tanks.

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Intersectional writing in times of protest: Conversations with young woman journalists

This discussion is hosted by the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) in collaboration with Wits Media Studies.

Four young black South African women, who are former and current Wits students, will discuss issues of writing and intersectionality during the #FeesMustFall protests and the movements surrounding them when they were working as student journalists at the time.

They will consider the consequences and problematics of explicitly framing oneself as feminist or rejecting that label entirely; of trying to write, or not write, about #FeesMustFall from within and outside of Wits structures; of public writing as an act undertaken by the journalist-activist; of the tensions between being both a journalist and an activist; of engaging with power structures from a student position; and of operating within physical and online spaces that can be hostile to diverse voices.

Speakers include:

• Michelle Gumede (Journalism/Vuvuzela);
• Pontsho Pilane (Media Studies/Daily Vox);
• Zimasa Mpemnyama (Journalism/Vuvuzela); and
• Aaisha Dadi Patel (Media Studies/Daily Vox). Discussant: Khadija Patel (WiSER/ Daily Vox) 

Chair: Dr Nicky Falkof (Lecturer, Media Studies)

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Changes in the platinum industry: A discussion

The Society, Work and Development Institute will host this discussion.

This presentation by Dr Andrew Bowman, postdoctoral research fellow in Society, Work and Development Institute (SWOP) and the Department of Political Studies at Wits, discusses work in progress on the changing character of platinum mining. In particular, it explores trends in wage inflation, labour productivity, and production costs; changing industry structure; and financial pressures. 

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Walking dynamics from gauge-gravity duality

The Mandelstam and National Institutes for Theoretical Physics will host this seminar by Dr Daniel Elander (Wits).

At this seminar, Dr Daniel Elander (Wits), will discuss solutions in Type IIB supergravity, whose field theory duals exhibit walking dynamics, in the sense that a suitably defined gauge coupling stays nearly constant over an intermediate range of energies. These supergravity backgrounds are deformations of the well-known Maldacena-Nunez and Klebanov-Strassler solutions. Computing the spectrum of scalar glueballs, Elander finds that these theories contain a parametrically light state, the mass of which is suppressed by the length of the walking region.

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Next generation studies for complex traits

Professor Eleftheria Zeggini, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute at Cambridge will deliver this lecture.

The Sydney Brenner Institute for Molecular Bioscience in conjunction with the division of Human Genetics at Wits and the National Health Laboratory Service will host this lecture. t

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Bidvest Wits vs. University Of Pretoria

First 1000 fans into the stadium wearing Bidvest Wits colours will receive free pies.

Wits staff members can request complimentary tickets for this match from the Bidvest Wits offices in Sturrock Park, near the Sports Administration offices, on weekdays between 09:00 and 16:00. Please contact the office in advance and specify how many tickets you would like to receive for this match. There will be a “happy hour” between 18:30 and 19:30 plus free pies to the first 1000 fans into the stadium wearing Bidvest Wits colours.

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Book Launch: Letters Of Stone - From Nazi Germany to South Africa

Letters of Stone: From Nazi Germany to South Africa, asks important questions about guilt, belonging, and our complicated relationship with the past.

The Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) and Penguin Random House invite you to the launch of Steven Robins’s new book, Letters of Stone: From Nazi Germany to South Africa. This book asks important questions about guilt, belonging, and our complicated relationship with the past. Robins is a professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the University of Stellenbosch. He has written on a wide range of topics, including the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the politics of land and identity, and social movements and popular politics in South Africa. He will be in conversation with Terry Kurgan (WISER), Catherine Burns (WISER), and Victoria Collis-Buthelezi (University of Cape Town).

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Climate change and the actuarial profession

How does climate change affect the actuarial profession, and how are we contributing to the way ahead?

Since the Paris Conference of Parties (COP21), climate change has again been occupying centre-stage, and the Paris Agreement has been both hailed as a giant step forward and criticised as seriously inadequate. But how does this all affect the actuarial profession, and how are we contributing to the way ahead?

In this seminar, Rob Thomson, Professor Emeritus in the School of Statistics and Actuarial Science at Wits and Vice-Chair of the International Actuarial Association’s Resources and Environment Working Group, will shed more light on the topic.

His presentation will contextualise the climate change problem within current thinking about the new economics, resource constraints and the development of triple-bottom-line measures for accountability and the modelling of sustainability.

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The rise and development of the Indian Ocean world global economy

Gwyn Campbell: Indian Ocean World Centre, McGill University, will present this talk.

 The Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (CISA) presents a talk by Gwyn Campbell, Indian Ocean World Centre, McGill University. Eurocentric perspectives currently dominate interpretations of the history of extra-European regions.

Campbell will argue that conventional perspectives and paradigms need to be discarded in order to understand the history of the macro-region known as the Indian Ocean World, where it is becoming increasingly clear that a “global” economy emerged over 1500 years before the so-called European “voyages of discovery.”

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Exploiting large population cohorts to capture determinants of chronic diseases

ASSAf Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Professor Philip Awadalla will deliver this lecture.

The Sydney Brenner Institute for Molecular Bioscience and the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf) will host ASSAf Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Professor Philip Awadalla (University of Toronto) to deliver this lecture.

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Book launch: Rape - A South African nightmare

The launch will take the form of a panel discussion, discussing the shock belief syndrome that characterises public responses to rape and many other topics.

In her new book, RAPE: A South African Nightmare, Professor Pumla Dineo Gqola unpacks the complex relationship South Africa has with rape by paying attention to the patterns and trends of rape, asking what we can learn from famous cases and why South Africa is losing the battle against rape. 

The book interrogates the high-profile rape trials of President Jacob Zuma, Bob Hewitt, Makhaya Ntini and Baby Tshepang as well as the feminist responses to the Anene Booysen case.

The launch will take the form of a panel discussion that will include topics covered in the book, such as the shock belief syndrome that characterises public responses to rape, the female fear factory, boy rape, the rape of black lesbians and violent masculinities.

This event is hosted by the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research.

Respondents: Sarah Godsell (Wits) and Malebo Gololo (Founder of Malebosays)

Chair: Dr Danai Mupotsa (Lecturer, African Literature, Wits)

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From test tube to YouTube

Megastar scientist, Sir Martyn Poliakoff, to lecture at Wits about becoming a YouTube phenomenon by making videos on chemistry.

Sir Martyn Poliakoff, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Nottingham (UK) is world-renowned as one of the pioneers in Green Chemistry and as a mega star on YouTube for his videos of The Periodic Table of Elements.

Poliakoff will visit South Africa at the end of February to attend the IAP Meeting of Science Academies in Hermanus, as the Foreign Secretary of the Royal Society. He will visit Wits after the meeting to give a lecture in the School of Chemistry. The lecture will be suitable for a broad audience.

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Reimagining Afrikaner Identities

This dialogue provides a platform to explore and engage with the ambivalent location that Afrikaners occupy in post-apartheid South Africa.

This dialogue forms part of the Public Policy Dialogue programme being undertaken by the Foundation for Human Rights in partnership with the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies and the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development. The previous discussion held in February 2016 was titled Blackness and its entanglement with essentialisms, intersections and faultlines in post-apartheid South Africa..

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2016 Conversation Series: Wits is a racialised society.

How can we as a collective eradicate racism?

Keynote speaker: Professor Chris Malikane

Facilitators: Dr Peace Kiguwa, Rejane Williams and Dr Hugo Canham

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Emerging research in childhood education: Challenges and insights

This seminar will engage with some of the challenges and emerging trends in childhood education.

The Wits School of Education in partnership with Umalusi and the Centre for Education Policy Development will host a seminar that will engage with some of the challenges and emerging trends in childhood education.

Speakers include:

• Dr Lorayne Excell from the Wits School of Education
• Nompumelelo Mohohlwane from the Department of Basic Education
• Professor Lara Ragpot from the University of Johannesburg
• Khotso Tsotsotso from Anglophone Africa Centre for Learning and Evaluation, and the African Micro-Economic Research Unit.

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Multilingualism north/south dialogues

Launch of the INTPART partnership with Wits.

The Wits Linguistics Department in collaboration with the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies invites you to the launch of the INTPART partnership with Wits and the first in a series of Multilingualism North/South Dialogues, featuring Professor Elizabeth Lanza and Profesor Unn Røyneland and facilitated by Professor Tommaso Milani.

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Bidvest Wits vs. Bloemfontein Celtic

ABSA premiership match between Bidvest Wits and Bloemfontein Celtics

Tickets for this match are available on sale at Computicket – R40 for adults and R10 for kids.

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Book launch: Sweet Medicine

Sweet Medicine is the story of a young woman, Tsitsi, who compromises the values of her strict Catholic upbringing to find romantic and economic security.

Panashe Chigumadzi, founder and editor of Vanguard Magazine, a platform for young black women coming of age in post-apartheid South Africa, will host a "book-club style discussion” of her debut novel Sweet Medicine, with Professor Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, Maneo Mohale and Dr Danai Mupotsa, women from different generations, locations and fields. Sweet Medicine is the story of a young woman, Tsitsi, who compromises the values of her strict Catholic upbringing to find romantic and economic security through “otherworldly means”.

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What does it take to live to 120 years?

Genetic and evolutionary aspects of human longevity.

The Sydney Brenner Institute for Molecular Bioscience (SBIMB) housed in the Faculty of Health Sciences, in conjunction with the Molecular Biosciences Research Thrust will host this seminar to be delivered by Professor Almut Nebel, Institute of Clinical Molecular Biology, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Kiel, Germany.

Nebel is the Head of the research group for Healthy Ageing and Acting Head of the research group for Ancient DNA Analysis.

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Negotiating difference in Christian communities

This symposium will focus on diversity.

A symposium to provide purposeful space to explore issues and intersections of diversity; race, class, gender and other forms of differences within Christian communities.

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Why study human ageing and longevity?

The lecture will cover both theoretical and pragmatic study approaches, as well as address evolutionary aspects.

The Sydney Brenner Institute for Molecular Bioscience (SBIMB) at the Faculty of Health Sciences, hosts a workshop presented by Professor Almut Nebel, Institute of Clinical Molecular Biology, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Kiel, Germany. The lecture will cover both theoretical and pragmatic study approaches, as well as address evolutionary aspects, dietary habits and intervention strategies, e.g. caloric restriction.

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Unraveling the mediterranean migration ‘crisis’: Reflections from the field

Professor Heaven Crawley and Dr Katharine Jones, from the Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations, at the University of Coventry will present this seminar.

The African Centre for Migration & Society (ACMS) will host a lunchtime seminar on the current migration ‘crisis’ in the Mediterranean, presented by Professor Heaven Crawley and Dr Katharine Jones, from the Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations, at the University of Coventry.

This seminar will draw from preliminary findings of an Economic and Social Research Council funded research project which explores the experiences of migrants crossing the Mediterranean. The project was conducted through interviews with 500 migrants and refugees in Italy, Greece, Malta and Turkey.

It will consider some of the reasons why so many people have embarked upon the dangerous journey to Europe, what happened to them on the way and their hopes for the future. It will also reflect on the reasons why the European policy response has led to a humanitarian and political crisis which threatens not only the lives of refugees and migrants but also the future of the European Union itself.

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Mirror quintic vacua: Hierarchies and inflation

Dr Nana Cabo Bizet will present this seminar.

The Mandelstam and National Institutes for Theoretical Physics will host this seminar by Dr Nana Cabo Bizet (Wits). Bizet will discuss flux compactifications of type IIB string theory in certain Calabi Yau geometries. Close to a special point in parameter space, she finds vacua with physical hierarchies among the space time and compactification scales. Bizet explores cosmic inflation in this setup and finds that the system favours multi-field inflation rather than the usual axion monodromy inflation. 

Bizet will discuss flux compactifications of type IIB string theory in certain Calabi Yau geometries. Close to a special point in parameter space, she finds vacua with physical hierarchies among the space time and compactification scales. Bizet explores cosmic inflation in this setup and finds that the system favours multi-field inflation rather than the usual axion monodromy inflation. 

Bizet explores cosmic inflation in this setup and finds that the system favours multi-field inflation rather than the usual axion monodromy inflation. 

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Depicting the dead: Facial depiction for forensic identification and archaeological investigation

This lecture is part of the Craniofacial Identification Symposium hosted by the School of Anatomical Sciences at the Faculty of Health Sciences.

Professor Caroline Wilkinson from the Liverpool John Moores University, who created a reconstruction of King Richard III’s head, will present this lecture.

Wilkinson will focus on recent advances in craniofacial superimposition and current practices in forensic facial reconstruction. This lecture is part of the Craniofacial Identification Symposium hosted by the School of Anatomical Sciences at the Faculty of Health Sciences.

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Does gun control reduce fatal violence? Addressing disputes on the evidence

Richard Matzopoulos, Senior Specialist at the Medical Research Council’s Burden of Disease Research Unit will present this lecture.

 Recent epidemiological evidence suggests that the enforcement of the Firearms Control Act of 2000 was largely responsible for the steady decline in fatal violence in South Africa. Various stakeholders in the firearms and security sector dispute this. 

In this presentation, Richard Matzopoulos, Senior Specialist at the Medical Research Council’s Burden of Disease Research Unit and Visiting Associate Professor at Wits in the School of Human and Community Development, examines the competing datasets, methods and interpretations of the evidence in addressing these opposing positions. His findings hold important implications for both the research on the regulation of firearms in South Africa.

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Apartheid in a parka?

Roots and longevity of the Canada-South Africa comparison in transnational perspectives will be discussed at this talk.

The Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (CISA) presents a talk by Dr Simonne Horwitz, Visiting Researcher at CISA and Associate Professor, History University of Saskatchewan. Comparisons between Aboriginal policy in Canada and apartheid in South Africa appear frequently in public discourse, often with claims as to actual links between the two systems. 

The talk interrogates these supposed links within a transnational framework. Horwitz will draw on recent studies of colonial policy viewed as part of a broader spectrum of colonial thought created in multiple formats through various networks and circuits of knowledge to show the nuances of a comparative argument. Specifically focusing on an analysis of land policy and the pass system, the talk looks at similarities across the empire but argues that the claims of direct links in the Canadian-South African public discourse are highly improbable.

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Free the word! At the orbit

Poet Laureate, Professor Keorapetse Kgositsile, and Professor Chris Wanjala, literary critic from Kenya will be in conversation with Simona Škrabec.

PEN International, South African PEN, and Wits University invite you for an evening of readings, discussion, and debate in Johannesburg’s celebrated jazz venue - The Orbit.

Poet Laureate, Professor Keorapetse Kgositsile, and Professor Chris Wanjala, literary critic from Kenya will be in conversation with Simona Škrabec, Chair of PEN International’s Translation and Linguistic Rights Committee.

The event is part of a week long programme, supported by funding from the United Nations Democracy Fund and the Swedish International Development Agency, aims to build the capacity of African writers through training and mentoring to take a lead role as civil society actors to advocate for the repeal of criminal defamation laws in Africa.

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Uncovering unknown unknowns: Towards a baconian approach to management decision-making

Professor Jochen Runde of the University of Cambridge will present this talk.

 The School of Economic and Business Sciences (SEBS) will host Professor Jochen Runde, University of Cambridge to present this talk. Bayesian decision theory and inference have left a deep and indelible mark on the literature on management decision-making.

There is however an important issue that the machinery of classical Bayesianism is ill equipped to deal with, that of “unknown unknowns”or, in the cases in which they are actualised, what are sometimes called “Black Swans”.

Building on ideas originally put forward by Bacon (1620), Runde will show how his approach can be used to build and explore the state space, how it may reduce the extent to which organisations are blindsided by Black Swans, and how it ameliorates various well-known cognitive biases.

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Pandora and Elpis: The future of paediatric oncology

This talk will explore the evolving field of cellular therapies in paediatric oncology and the challenges and excitement these technologies bring.

The Carnegie-Wits Alumni Diaspora Programme will present a lecture by Professor Caron Strahlendorf. The talk will explore the evolving field of cellular therapies in paediatric oncology and the challenges and excitement these technologies bring. 

Strahlendorf is Division Head and Associate Clinical Professor in the Department of Paediatrics, at the University of British Columbia, Canada as well as a graduate of the Wits Medical School. Strahlendorf will be visiting the Wits Faculty of Health Sciences on the Carnegie-Wits Alumni Diaspora Programme and will be hosted by the Department of Paediatrics.

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Rethinking reform and revolution in the 21st Century

Sam Gindin, Packer Chair in Social Justices at York University will deliver this lecture.

This public lecture is hosted by the Sociology and International Relations Departments at Wits University.

The lecture will be delivered by Sam Gindin, Packer Chair in Social Justices at York University and Leo Panitch, Distinguished Research Professor of Political Science at York University.

Discussant: Vishwas Satgar, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Wits and editor of the Democratic Marxism series.

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The life and times of the late Professor Andrew Foley

A memorial lecture in remembrance of Professor Andrew Foley.

The Division of Languages, Literacies and Literatures, Wits School of Education, invites colleagues, students and friends of the late Professor Andrew Foley to this memorial lecture.

Speakers include delegates from the English Academy of Southern Africa and Pan South African Language Board where Professor Foley dedicated his national service till his death.

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Climate finance and the green climate fund

James Bond, Independent Financial Advisory will be the guest speaker at this event.

Wits Alumni Relations invites you to attend a networking event with guest speaker James Bond, Independent Financial Advisor specialising in infrastructure, energy and climate change in emerging economies.

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Bidvest Wits vs. Azam FC

CAF Confederation cup match between Bidvest Wits and Azam FC from Tanzania.

Wits staff members can request complimentary tickets for this match from the Bidvest Wits offices in Sturrock Park, near the Wits University Sports Administration offices, on weekdays between 09:00 and 16:00.

Please contact the office in advance and specify how many tickets you would like to receive for this match. Tickets are allocated on a first-come-first-served basis.

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The Thompson groups F and T and quantum spin chains

Professor Sir Vaughan Jones will present this seminar.

The DST-NRF Centre of Excellence for Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (CoE-MaSS) together with the Wits Faculty of Science will host Fields Medal winner, Professor Sir Vaughan Jones to present this seminar. More information.

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Steel Valley: Environmental justice, the politics of knowledge and the power to pollute

The Society, Work and Development Institute will host Dr Victor Munnik to deliver this presentation.

Dr Victor Munnik, Associate Researcher in the Society, Work and Development Institute (SWOP) at Wits will deliver this presentation.

Mining and mineral beneficiation is often held up as the path to economic development in South Africa. Yet these processes are brutally disruptive for environments and communities.

In this presentation Munnik demonstrates this in relation to the impact of Arcelor Mittal on Steel Valley and points to the mobilizing power of the discourse of environmental justice. This presentation is hosted by SWOP.

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Copyright stakeholder dialogue

Denise Nicholson, Scholarly Communications Librarian, Wits University will facilitate this dialogue.

The Mandela Institute at Wits School of Law in collaboration with the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) will hold this dialogue to stimulate discussion and create understanding on copyright and related matters. Participants will be welcomed by Professor Tumai Murombo, Director, Mandela Institute.

Speakers include:

• Meshendri Padayachy, Director: Copyright, Consumer and Corporate Regulation Division (DTI)
• Kadi Petje, Director: Copyright, Companies and Intellectual Property Commission, and
• Dr Malebakeng Forere, Senior Lecturer, Wits School of Law.

The dialogue will be facilitated by Denise Nicholson, Scholarly Communications Librarian, Wits University.

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Transformation in an unequal society: What is the goal?

Vice-Chancellors from four South African universities will be part of this panel discussion.

The Steve Biko Centre for Bioethics in the Faculty of Health Sciences, invites you to a panel discussion with vice-chancellors from four South African universities at the 2016 Ethics Alive Symposium. The vice-chancellors will make presentations on various aspects of transformation and how it has affected their universities.

Speakers:

• Professor Adam Habib, University of the Witwatersrand
• Dr Max Price, University of Cape Town
• Professor Dan Kgwadi, North West University and
• Dr Mvuyo Tom, University of Fort Hare.

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A food system for the people: Can we learn from Dar es Salaam?

Marc Wegerif who has worked on development and human rights issues will present this seminar.

The Development Studies Programme in the School of Social Sciences will be hosting a seminar presentation based on a qualitative study of the food system that is feeding Dar es Salaam.

The research has explored what enables the food system and some of its socio-economic and environmental outcomes. Of particular interest is how a wide range of small scale and interdependent actors produce the food and get it to urban eaters at a city feeding scale without large vertically, or horizontally, integrated corporate structures.

Marc Wegerif who has worked on development and human rights issues in a range of organisations for more than 27 years and contributed to political and social transformation through other voluntary roles in community and political organisations will present this seminar.

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CALS social and labour plans report launch

The first report presents the findings of an analysis conducted on 50 SLPs for trends in the quality of their design.

The Centre for Applied Legal Studies will officially launch their first report as part of their Social and Labour Plan (SLP) project. The project aims to evaluate the extent to which the SLP system is capable of fulfilling the objectives of transformation of the mining sector and ensuring companies contribute to the development of areas in which mine-affected communities reside. The first report presents the findings of an analysis conducted on 50 SLPs for trends in the quality of their design.

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Family Talkabout

Families are invited to join in fun art activities at this exhibition.

Join in fun art activities in this exhibition with Education Curator Leigh Leyde. Space is limited to 30 families on a first come first served basis.

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Global Spillovers into SA

The Wits Business School invites you to a public lecture by Mthuli Ncube.

Ncube is a Professor of Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford. He will discuss findings from his latest book, Global Growth and Financial Spillovers and the South African Macro-economy including: 

• How are Global growth and financial spillovers being transmitted into the South African economy?
• What is the economic impact of these global spillovers on the SA economy?
• How should SA respond to these shocks in order to minimize their impact?

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Intersectionalities of protest

The Wits Centre for Diversity Studies will host this Symposium on the intersectionalities of protests.

The Symposium will focus on the following case studies:FeesMustFall, violent protest in Greece and Joburg Pride. Speakers include: Dr Danai Mupotsa, Professor Tommaso Milani, Dr Dimitris Kitis and

Speakers include: Dr Danai Mupotsa, Professor Tommaso Milani, Dr Dimitris Kitis andeakers include: Dr Danai Mupotsa, Professor Tommaso Milani, Dr Dimitris Kitis and Aaisha Dadi Patel.

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Unlocking the closet

Coming out narratives of gay, lesbian and bisexual Muslims in Belgium.

The African Centre for Migration & Society (ACMS) will host a lunchtime seminar on coming out narratives of gay, lesbian and bisexual Muslims in Belgium, presented by Dr Wim Peumans, Postdoctoral Fellow at ACMS.

In this seminar, based on ethnographic research on transnational migration, same-sex sexualities, and religion in Belgium, Peumans will look at multiple and ambivalent ways in which lesbian, gay and bisexual men and women with a Muslim background navigate silence and disclosure in the negotiation and performance of sexuality in everyday life, specifically within kin relations.

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Black modernisms in South Africa (1940 - 1990)

This exhibition opens at the Wits Art Museum.

Join the Wits Arts Museum for the opening of an exhibition named Black African Modernisms (1940-1990). This exhibition is part of an extensive African art research project, currently being undertaken by leading African art scholars from around the world.

The project examines the concepts of modernism and modernity in relation to African art. The artworks by over 20 artists, drawn mostly from Wits Art Museum’s permanent collections, will offer insight into the various ‘modernist’ approaches that were of interest to black South African artists from the 1950s to the 1990s.

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Clinical trials

The challenges of monitoring and stopping trials early

Four international experts, Dr Steven Joffe (Associate Professor of Medical Ethics and Health Policy,  University of Pennsylvania, USA); Dr Alwyn Mwinga (CEO, Zambart, Zambia); Professor Andrew Nunn (MRC Clinical Trials Unit, University College London, UK) and Dr Merlin  Robb (Deputy Director, Military HIV Program for Clinical Research, USA) will share their insights and experience of monitoring major clinical trials.

Professor Haroon Saloojee will facilitate this seminar.

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Dean's fireside chat with Sizwe Nxasana

Imraan Valodia in conversation with founder of Sifiso Learning Group.

Wits Business School will host an informal evening in conversation with Sizwe Nxasana, founder of the Sifiso Learning Group and former CEO of FirstRand Banking Group.

Professor Imraan Valodia, Dean of the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management will facilitate the evening.

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Forgotten futures

The South African Theatre Season 2016 returns to Wits.

In a fast changing world, where economic, environmental, digital and political forces collide, have we forgotten about the people who will determine the shape and nature of the future? Have the South African elders failed the youth?

With movements like #FeesMustFall and #RhodesMustFall, we are beginning to see young people tackle this problem head-on and ask pertinent questions about the failure of the transformation agenda.

The Season aims to provide a serious platform to unpack, disrupt, discuss, rebuild and evaluate contemporary youth realities while providing opportunities for meaningful cross generational dialogue to take place.

It will take the form of live theatre performances, films showings, live music and performance poetry by some of South Africa's emerging young voices within the arts, under the theme, “Forgotten Futures”.

The South African Theatre Season is presented by Drama for Life in partnership with Wits Theatre, Wits School of Arts and Wits Counselling, Careers and Development Unit.

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A new model for funding higher education

Wits University presents the first in a series of panel discussions, seminars and workshops to tackle funding challenges.

The 2015/2016 student protests have highlighted the deficiencies in the funding of higher education. There is a dire need to reconceptualise and rethink how the system is funded.

The first panel discussion will consist of panelists: Sizwe Nxasana (Chairperson of NSFAS), Michael Sachs (National Treasury Budget Office), and Fasiha Hassan (Secretary General of the Wits SRC).

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How does a picture act?

The power of images in San rock paintings from South Africa and Namibia, by Renaud Ego.

The analysis of San rock art largely originates in cultural anthropology, founded on the analysis of the systems of thoughts of descendants of the creators of the paintings.

In this regard, the corpus of account and myths, collected at the end the 19th century, plays a predominant role, as do the anthropological studies carried throughout the last century among the Kalahari San.

It is essentially in this double mirror that San art has been studied, as if thi detour was the best access route. It would be absurd to deny that this detour was fruitful.

Nevertheless this approach remains a look in a mirror and rock art is rarely seen as a territory where its own language is forged. In this way, the question of the difference that constitutes a visual language is relagated to the background.

A painting communicates through the work put into its production, and its meaning is fully incorporated into its form. In this way, examples will be discussed, dealing with the themes of rain animals and therianthropes conflating human and animal bodies.

About Renaud Ego

Born in 1963, Renaud Ego lives and works in Paris. He is a french writer, active in the field of literature, especially poetry, and art studies. He is a member of the International Association of Art critics (AICA). In 1999, with other writers and scholars, he created the literary review ‘La Pensée de Midi’. Besides his books of literature, his essays and studies deal mostly with the question, what is an image ?, shared by literature and visual arts.

He is also the author of various studies on art, such as Cézanne, and wrote a book about the famous artist Jean Arp and his wife, the swiss painter, Sophie Taeuber.

Since 1997, Renaud Ego has visited southern Africa numerous times, and wrote two essays dedicated to rock art from this part of the world. In 2000, he published San, and recently, another book, l’animal voyant. Both of them were richly illustrated. His new essay, which will be published in 2016, Le Geste du regard, deals with the birth of images in palaeolithic art in Europe.

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Block release MBA/PDBA information session

Wits Business School (WBS) will host an information session on the MBA/PDBA programme.

With a new curriculum and the introduction of a block release, the programme now has a strong focus on personal development. The new block release will provide students with greater flexibility to work and study. More information.

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Primary uranium deposits: What we know so far

Wits alumnus and Exploration Geology Superintendent at Swakop Uranium in Namibia, Guy Freemantle, will present this talk.

Freemantle is managing the resource expansion and new target generation for 2013. His role includes planning, managing and reporting of drilling activities, sampling and graduate training programs.

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Xolobeni anti-mining struggle

For a decade, the Xolobeni community on the Wild Coast has fought a proposed mining operation by an Australian company on their ancestral land.

Their struggle has involved threats, intimidation, and violence that culminated last month in the assassination of Sikhosiphi ‘Bazooka” Rhadebe, the chair of the Amadiba Crisis Committee, the body elected by the community in 2007 to represent them in their struggle against the proposed mining operation.

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Force Majeure

The Wits School of Arts (WSOA) will host a special screening of the film Force Majeure, directed by Ruben Östlund.

The film is about a Swedish family on a skiing holiday in the French Alps. During a lunch at a mountainside restaurant, an avalanche suddenly occurs. With people fleeing in all directions and his wife and children in a state of panic, the father makes a decision that shakes his marriage to its core. There will be a post screening Q&A session with Kalle Brom.

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Faith, gender and sexuality toolkit launch and dialogue

The Wits Institute for Diversity Studies together with the Institute of Development Studies and Sonke Gender Justice will host this launch and dialogue.

Full invitation is available upon request.  

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Addressing hunger and building solidarity

The Development Studies Programme and the Inala Wits Food Sovereignty and Climate Justice Forum, will host this joint seminar presented by Nick Saul.

Saul is the founder of the community food centre movement in Canada that builds health, skills, independence and solidarity, and is part of what Naomi Klein has called “one of our most visionary movements for justice and equality today”.

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A new model for funding higher education

Wits University will host a series of panel discussions, seminars and workshops to tackle the challenges of funding of higher education.

The 2015/2016 student protests have highlighted the deficiencies in the funding of higher education. There is a dire need to reconceptualise and rethink how the system is funded. Wits University will host a series of panel discussions,

Wits University will host a series of panel discussions, seminars and workshops to tackle these challenges. 

The first panel discussion will consist of panelists: Sizwe Nxasana (Chairperson of NSFAS), Michael Sachs (National Treasury Budget Office), and Fasiha Hassan (Secretary General of the Wits SRC).

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Non Abelian T-duality and AdS/CFT

The Mandelstam and National Institute for Theoretical Physics will host Dr Catherine Whiting to present this seminar.

Non Abelian T-Duality has recently been used to generate new, supersymmetric solutions to supergravity.

These new backgrounds can contain AdS factors and, therefore, can be studied in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence. Whiting will review Abelian and Non-Abelian T-dualities and discuss some recent developments.

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Making the sector skills councils more effective on the demand side: UK and South African experience

The Wits School of Education will host Dr Susan Relly to present this seminar.

Dr Susan James Relly, Deputy Director from the Centre for Skills, Knowledge and Organisational Performance in the Department of Education at Oxford University, will present this seminar.

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Ambedkar’s Dharma: Freedom sovereignity politics

Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar was India's political leader and crusader for equality.

Ambedkar was one of the most distinguished Indians of the 20th century: architect of the Indian Constitution; the political leader of India’s untouchables; and crusader for equality.

In the imagination of independent India, he is remembered in many ways. Within nationalist historiography, his stance on political equality for untouchables is counter-posed to Gandhi’s gradual reformism, and his vision is subtly presented as the defeated alternative. Equally perplexing to the secular imagination of modern India is Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism in 1956 along with several thousands of his followers.

The almost 20 volumes of his collected works still have not received the scholarly consideration they deserve and this conference is an attempt to engage with Ambedkar’s writings to argue for his place as a historian and theoretician of a concept of radical equality.

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A review of individual credit-risk-assessment methodologies of South African unsecured lenders

Daniel Saksenberg, Director of Emerge Analytics will present this lecture.

The provision of credit by one party to another is always associated with the risk of partial or full failure of the borrower to repay the capital amount extended and/or any additional amounts in respect of interest and fees.

In South Africa, the unsecured credit market is a vital source of credit for much of the population and particularly lower-income individuals. However, over-indebtedness is a major concern with 44.9% of the credit-active population possessing impaired credit records.

This situation has been related directly in the press and by the National Credit Regulator to the shooting of mine workers at Marikana, who were desperate to secure higher incomes to cover their debt repayments to credit providers. Analogously, it is also probably somewhat responsible for pressure to secure higher public- and private-sector wages and associated labour union action.

Credit-risk assessment is the entry point to the provision of credit by unsecured lenders to individuals and is therefore critical to the financial and social outcomes of the credit market. This seminar, presented by Daniel Saksenberg, Director of Emerge Analytics, will deal with the methodologies for individual credit-risk assessment by South African unsecured lenders, consider certain potential shortcomings thereof and suggest possible improvements and areas for research.

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Quirky quartz and funny feldspars

What happens in the deep crust during a large impact event?

Professor Roger Gibson, Geosciences Head of School, will present this “Geotalk”. In this talk, Gibson will show how short-term shock processes and longer-term thermal metamorphic processes triggered by giant impacts compete within the lower crust to create a range of complex, but nonetheless distinctive, mineralogical changes that can be used to identify deeply eroded large impact sites.

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Department of African literature public events

The Department of African Literature at Wits will host Professor Nicole Fleetwood to present at four of their public events.

Nicole Fleetwood, Associate Professor in the Department of American Studies and Director of the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, will be a presenter at four public events hosted by the Department of African Literature at Wits.

Fleetwood researches and teaches in the areas of visual culture and media studies, black cultural studies, ethnography, gender theory, and culture and technology studies. Her book: Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness, is the recipient of the 2012 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize of the American Studies Association.

Her book On Racial Icons, which is part of Rutgers University Press’s Pinpoint series, will be released in 2015. Currently, she is completing Carceral Aesthetics: Prison Art and Public Culture, a study of prison art and visuality.

In it, she examines a range of visual art and practices emerging inside prisons and about prison life, including photography, painting, and collaborative works with arts organisations and commissioned artists.

Public events:

Carceral Aesthetics: Prison Art and Public Culture

Date: 14 April 2016

Time: 13:00

Venue: WiSER Seminar Room, 6th Floor, Richard Ward Building, Braamfontein Campus East

Keynote address: Democracy's Promise: Visual Genealogies of Black Male Leaders

Date: 16 April 2016

Time: 17:00

Venue: The Point of Order, Braamfontein

Roundtable discussion: Gender and Visual Culture

Date: 18 April 2016

Venue: Venue: Seminar Room, Humanities Graduate Centre, South West Engineering Building, Braamfontein Campus East

DIVA Talk: Home/Away: Domestic Visions and Carceral Space/Time

Date: 21 April 2016

Time: 13:00

Venue: Apollonia Theatre, Braamfontein Campus East

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Absa premiership match: Bidvest Wits VS Free State Stars

Don't miss the match!

Wits staff members can request complimentary tickets for this match from the Bidvest Wits offices in Sturrock Park, near the WitsUniversity Sports Administration offices, on weekdays between 09:00 and 16:00. Please contact the office in advance and specify how many tickets you would like to receive for this match. Tickets are allocated on a first-come-first-served basis.

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Black economic empowerment compliance and firm operating performance

Dr Thabang Mokoaleli-Mokoteli will present this seminar.

Wits Business School (WBS) will host Dr Thabang Mokoaleli-Mokoteli to present this seminar.

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The poor, human rights and civil society in India

Professor Ashwani Kumar will present the Wits School of Education Wednesday Seminar.

He has worked in the UK, Germany, Korea, China, South Africa and the US as a professor, researcher and as a member of central government committees, global consortiums, and multilateral projects. He is the author of Community Warriors: State, Peasants and Caste Armies in Bihar (Anthem Press, London), a significant contribution to exploring paradoxes of democracy and governance in India. 

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Global oil markets

Professor Bassam Fattouh will discuss the current developments and future prospects in global oil markets.

Wits Business School (WBS) in collaboration with UNU-WIDER present this public lecture by Professor Bassam Fattouh, Director, Oxford Institute for Energy Studies and SOAS University of London.

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Bless me father

Italian Studies in the School of Literature, Language and Media will host South African poet and writer, Mario d’Offizi, to talk about his memoir.

D’Offizi will be in conversation with poet and writer, Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, who also lectures in the Creative Writing Department. Born into a violent and broken family, D’Offizi grew up in a number of welfare institutions.

Bless Me Father reveals his remarkable, often shocking and ultimately inspiring life adventure - one that spans several decades in a country and continent undergoing radical change.

From his tough days at Boys Town (where he was sexually abused) to wild years in the advertising world, a stint in the restaurant business and a sharp edged journalistic adventure in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the story unfolds with the unfailing sensitivity and warmth of a true poet. The book was translated into Italian by Dr Raphael D’Abdon, who lectures at UNISA.

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Forging peace in the Indian Northeast: The world peace brigade and the Nagaland peace mission, 1964

The Centre for Indian Studies in Africa presents a talk by Lydia Walker, PhD-candidate in International History in the Harvard Department of History.

In January 1964, the World Peace Brigade, an international activist organisation, halted its planned march from New Delhi to Peking in Ledo, Assam.

The march was mired in the politics of the Brigade's leaders - J.P. Narayan and Michael Scott - who had offered support to nationalist claimants for an independent Tibet (Narayan) and Nagaland (Scott). Several months later and 300 kilometres away in Wokha, Nagaland, the Naga Baptist Church invited Narayan and Scott to form the Nagaland Peace Mission to broker a ceasefire between the Indian Government and Naga Nationalists.

Based on recent archival research in the papers of Narayan, Scott, the World Peace Brigade, the Naga Baptist Church, the Naga National council, the Nagaland Peace Mission, and the Indian Government, this project looks at sovereignty from the outside in and the role of international civil society, churches, and interested individuals in the negotiations between states and those claiming that status in a contested territory in the “periphery's periphery”.

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Exhibition opening: No place

Join the Wits City Institute in collaboration with the Wits Anthropology Museum for the opening of No Place, an exhibition by artist Jean Brundrit.

In the exhibition Brundrit is interested in the notion of an ephemeral place, a place that remains undefined and temporary that is more of a space than a place. She considers the transience of the form of a wave and the sea, as a visual manifestation of this concept.

To this end she is exhibiting a number of ‘seascapes’ as well as images that reflect on mapping and data collection. Brundrit is a National Research Foundation rated researcher and is a Senior Lecturer at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, where she teaches photography.

She is interested in how photography has influenced the way we understand the world and what it enables us to see. Jean is a visiting research fellow at the Wits City Institute.

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Masculinity and gender equality discussions with Professor Michael Kimmel

Professor Michael Kimmel, an internationally renowned expert on gender will present two discussions on gender equality.

The Gender Equity Office, Professor Tommaso Milani (School of Literature, Language and Media) and the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies (WiCDS) will hold two discussions on 9 May 2016 with Professor Michael Kimmel, an internationally renowned expert on gender, and the Executive Director of the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities at Stony Brook University (US). The evening lecture is chaired by Malosa Langa, and discussants are Dr Peace Kiguwa and Joel Modiri. Details are as follows:

Lunchtime Discussion: Campus strategies for engaging men

Time: 13:15 – 14:00

Venue: WiCDS, 13th Floor, University Corner, Braamfontein Campus East

Evening Lecture: Why men should support gender equality

Time: 17:15 – 20:00

Venue: Seminar Room, Humanities Graduate Centre, South West Engineering Building, Braamfontein Campus East

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What does it means to be Black in the South African Academy?

Join in on this dialogue with students and academics from Wits, Unisa and Universities of Johannesburg and Pretoria.

The dialogue will be kicked off with presentations on the following topics:

• Black and Foreign: Negotiating Being Different in South African Academy
• The Polemic Body
• The Limits of Being and Knowledge in the Academy
• Intellectual and Emotional Toxicity: Where a Cure Does Not Appear To Be Imminent

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Geological research advancement and mine development challenges at Ivanplats

Sello Kekana, a Wits graduate, will present this “Geotalk”.

Kekana is working at the Ivanplats Platreef project near Mokopane in Limpopo. He was the general manager for the project during the extensive deep drilling exploration programme and currently, he is the Head of Transformation. His talk will focus on the geochemical, mineralogical and tenor variations in the upper section of the Platreef; and challenges associated with mine development, and relating this project to the larger Bushveld Complex. 

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The freedom month public lecture

Advocate George Bizos will present this public lecture on freedom, democracy and responsible citizenship.

In celebration of Freedom Month, the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies in partnership with the Department of Arts and Culture will host Advocate George Bizos to present this public lecture on freedom, democracy and responsible citizenship.

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Radio cosmology at UKZN

The Mandelstam and National Institutes for Theoretical Physics will host Professor Jonathan Sievers to present this seminar.

The 21cm transition of atomic hydrogen is rapidly becoming one of our most powerful tools for probing the evolution of the universe. 

New radio telescopes are coming online that will map out the formation of the first generation of stars and the (possible) evolution of dark energy.

The University of Kwazulu Natal (UKZN) is leading two such experiments. Sievers will share the science goals and provide updates on these experiments.

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Observing the cosmos from above the clouds

In this episode of Science & Cocktails in Johannesburg, Cynthia Chiang will share insights on the study of cosmology.

How did the Universe begin? Can we observe the infant universe? How do we build telescopes to make those observations? Why is Antarctica a great place to study the cosmos? And how does it feel to see an instrument, which took a decade to build, dangling precariously from a rope and suddenly accelerating into the stratosphere? Cosmology, the study of the origins and evolution of the Universe, is an exciting area of research that addresses some of

Cosmology, the study of the origins and evolution of the Universe, is an exciting area of research that addresses some of humanity's oldest questions.

How did the Universe begin? What is it made of? What is its ultimate fate? To answer these questions, scientists travel to some of the most remote corners of the earth in order to build specialised telescopes that have access to the clearest skies.

In this episode of Science & Cocktails in Johannesburg, Cynthia Chiang will focus on one of these specialised telescopes, named SPIDER.

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Media freedom and social justice: A conversation with our journalists

A panel discussion held in support of Freedom Week 2016.

The Centre for Applied Legal Studies in partnership with Students for Law and Social Justice invite you to a panel discussion on the current state of media freedom in South Africa and its relationship to social justice. Panellists include Pontsho Pilane, Karabo Rajuili and Franny Rabkin. This event is held in support of Freedom Week 2016.

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WCCO 6th NGO Fair

More than 50 NGO's will exhibit their work at the 6th annual Wits Citizenship and Community Outreach Office (WCCO) annual NGO Fair.

Please visit more than 50 non-governmental organisations (NGO’s) who will be exhibiting their work at Wits.

The Fair provides a great opportunity for NGO’s to market their services to the students and staff of the University while also recruiting supporters and volunteers for their organisations.

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Youth rising in jazz : JBF monthly jazz forum

The Jozi Book Fair (JBF) in partnership with the South African Jazz Appreciators Association hosts a monthly Jazz Forum, Youth Rising in Jazz.

The forum aims to promote jazz appreciation among young people. The Forum will also promote the JBF’s aims, to mobilise youth to read and write in all languages, through developing an appreciation of jazz.

This is part of the JBF’s theme this year is Youth Rising. Wits University is a co-host of the JBF.

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Forging peace in the Indian Northeast: The world peace brigade and the Nagaland peace mission, 1964

The Centre for Indian Studies in Africa presents a talk by Lydia Walker, PhD-candidate in International History in the Harvard Department of History.

In January 1964, the World Peace Brigade, an international activist organisation, halted its planned march from New Delhi to Peking in Ledo, Assam.

The march was mired in the politics of the Brigade's leaders - J.P. Narayan and Michael Scott - who had offered support to nationalist claimants for an independent Tibet (Narayan) and Nagaland (Scott).

Several months later and 300 kilometres away in Wokha, Nagaland, the Naga Baptist Church invited Narayan and Scott to form the Nagaland Peace Mission to broker a ceasefire between the Indian Government and Naga Nationalists.

Based on recent archival research in the papers of Narayan, Scott, the World Peace Brigade, the Naga Baptist Church, the Naga National council, the Nagaland Peace Mission, and the Indian Government, this project looks at sovereignty from the outside in and the role of international civil society, churches, and interested individuals in the negotiations between states and those claiming that status in a contested territory in the “periphery's periphery”.

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The University of the North and building the Bantustans: The cases of Gazankulu and Lebowa

The Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (CISA) will host Dr Anne Heffernan, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, to deliver this talk.

This talk will explore the role of the University of the North (Turfloop) and its impact on the homelands it was intended to serve during the early years of their formation.

In this talk, Heffernan considers the divergence of the ideal of the ‘apartheid university’ and the real role that Turfloop played in influencing the development of two of the Bantustans it was intended to serve: Lebowa and Gazankulu.

In particular, it explores the influence of prominent members of the students and faculty of the university on the early governance structures of these homelands.

It suggests a much broader range of forms of political engagement and ideas for the development of these areas, than the conceptions that Verwoerdian ‘Grand Apartheid’ had allowed, and considers the ways some of these plans were implemented.

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Expelled from the earth: Victims and survivors of violence in Mexico

The African Centre for Migration & Society (ACMS) will host a lunchtime seminar on forms of violence in Mexico City.

 Dr Margarita del C. Zarate Vidal from the Anthropology Department at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM)-Iztapalapa, Mexico City will present this seminar.

This seminar will consider the ways in which drug trafficking and government policies of securitisation have led to an increasing wave of violence and the loss of many young lives in Mexico.

It will also explore categories such as survivors and victims, which are used both by the members of organisations challenging different forms of violence and widely within the social sciences.

In doing so it will examine the meaning of appealing to emotions (especially anger), suffering, the call for visibility for victims of violence, and the demand for “dignified justice”.

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Instrumental and contingent solidarity in the (re) construction of migrant communities

The African Centre for Migration & Society (ACMS) will host a lunchtime seminar on how new migrant communities in Fordsburg, (re)construct space and place.

The seminar will be presented by Dr Pragna Rugunanan from the Department of Sociology, University of Johannesburg.

Drawing from ethnographic research with local South Africans as well as Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Malawian and Egyptian migrants, the seminar considers how communities have been forged through education, religion, conflict, co-operation, reciprocity and solidarity; and examines how people cope in the face of adversity.

Arguing that communities are forged and contested within a tangled web of power relations and rank ordering of migrant groups, Rugunanan addresses the question that if solidarity is the glue that binds migrant communities, then to what extent does this hold true for diverse migrant communities in an enclosed space.

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Glocal competitor: Boosting Johannesburg’s power within the global economic system

The Wits School of Economic and Business Sciences will host Prof. Ronald Wall to present a seminar on Johannesburg’s position within foreign direct investments.

Wall will argue that through smart urban planning and smart corporate benchmarking, the density and diversity of international business connections can be improved, which in turn can (if done correctly) increase social, economic and environmental development.

An important element of this presentation is that policymakers should in future develop policy based on local, regional and global knowledge.

The presentation argues for the need for empirical research, big data, quantitative and qualitative studies, and stimulating interdisciplinary research.

Wall holds the new endowed Chair in Urban Economic Development, in partnership with SEBS, the Wits Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, the City of Johannesburg, and the Institute of Housing and Urban Development Studies at Erasmus University, Rotterdam.  

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The design and development of liquid rocket engine propulsion technologies in South Africa

The National Aerospace Centre and the School of Mechanical, Industrial and Aeronautical Engineering at Wits will host Mark Comninos to present this lecture.

Initially specialising in the aerodynamic analysis of launch vehicles via analytical and Computational Fluid Dynamics methods, Comninos rapidly moved into the design of single and two stage to orbit reusable launch vehicles, building up significant experience in all aspects of space transportation systems.

He possesses extensive experience in the design of liquid rocket engines, having conducted significant research and design of regeneratively cooled, turbopump-fed liquid propulsion systems inclusive of nozzle optimisation algorithms, regenerative cooling analyses, turbine efficiency and overall performance computations. 

Comninos is the CEO and Chief Design Engineer of Marcom Aeronautics and Space (Pty) LTD.

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Turning around MTN South Africa

Mteto Nyati, CEO of MTN South Africa, will present this lecture hosted by the Wits Business School.

Nyati will discuss:

• Strategy & Execution
• Change management at senior leadership team level
• Stakeholder management: Unions, regulators, Department of Postal Services & Telecommunications and Shareholders.

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The art of politics and the politics of art colloquium

The Humanities Graduate Centre will host a colloquium aimed at key scholars in the arts that have responded in various ways to the recent students' movements.

This colloquium will particularly focus on the RhodesMustFall and Shackville movements.

Speakers will make presentations on the topic: The Art of Politics and the Politics of Art.

The colloquium will take the recent student protests as an occasion to probe questions around the visual representation of current struggles, where the act of re-imagining a new scholarly discourse around debates such as de-colonising institutions of learning is not only prompted by a conversation centred on socio-political rhetoric but also by an artistic account that acknowledges the multi-layered ways of exploring history, processes of transformation and present day intersections between art and politics.

It examines the state of the current visual art landscape, which, although somewhat estranged from the political landscape, in many ways offers a much wider scope for exploring issues of representation, inclusivity and redress in more meaningful ways.

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Local self-determination: Facing off mining through the use of land-use planning law

The Society, Work and Development Institute (SWOP) will host Tracy Humbly (SWOP Research Associate) to present this research seminar.

The seminar will focus on formal institutions of local government and the governance values, institutions and processes associated with land-use planning as a form of resistance to the authorisation of mining by national authorities.

The constitutional framing of local government authority in South Africa, together with the legal contestations that have taken place around the meaning of ‘municipal planning’, have afforded local authorities powers to determine the mix of land uses (residential, conservation, agricultural, industrial) in their areas of jurisdiction, and thereby also their political and economic base.

However, where local authorities do wish to reserve parcels of land for agriculture, food and water security, and conservation, they are challenged on the basis that these areas of governance are national competencies.

The seminar will draw on two case studies involving proposed coal mining in the Emakhazeni Local Municipality to illustrate the continuing challenges local authorities face.

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Africa week events

Various Schools and Departments at Wits will celebrate Africa Week in a series of events including panel discussions, poetry sessions, a film festival etc.

TimeTracks – Poetry and spoken word imagining Africa –The School of Literature, Language and Media (SLLM) in partnership with the Faculty of Humanities will host award-winning poets Keorapetse Kgositsile, Lebogang Mashile, Quaz Roodt, Koleka Putuma, David wa Maahlamela and Modiegi Njeyiyana, to perform at this lively event. On the day, staff and students can also sign up at the door for the open mic session.

Date: 11 May 2016

Time: 16:00 – 19:00

Venue:  Wits Theatre, Braamfontein Campus East

Enquiries: Antonette.Gouws@wits.ac.za or call (011)717-4160

The Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, Professor Ruksana Osman, and Professor Zeblon Vilakazi, Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Research, will host two lectures. Professor Olabiyi Yai from Benin will speak on the role of oral poetry in the transformation of higher education. Benin is the Chair of the executive committee of UNESCO. This will be followed by a lecture by visiting scholar, Dr Patrick Effiboley, who will speak on decolonisation of museums as knowledge repositories in Africa.

Date: 11 May 2016

Time: 11:00

Venue: Senate Room, 2nd Floor, Senate House, Braamfontein Campus East

Enquiries: Felix.Maringe@wits.ac.za

Various Schools will participate in Africa Week. The School of Arts will host a number of events including a culture policy panel, a film festival and a dance convergence. The School of Education will present a panel discussion focusing on the impact of transformation on international students.

Date: 9 – 13 May 2016

Wits Language School (WLS) will be hosting a series of live language classes in a variety of local and international languages spoken in Africa as well as a class demonstrating the use of teaching with technology. Join in a celebration of language diversity and stand a chance to win a language course to the value of R5 000. More information.

Date: 9 – 14 May 2016

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The factory as an academics' playground

The Wits School of Mechanical, Industrial and Aeronautical Engineering, in collaboration with Unilever’s new Homecare Liquids Factory, Khanyisa hosts this talk.

The Wits-Unilever partnership aims to change the game of both higher education and manufacturing in South Africa. The partnership includes a work experience program where 28 students, from the School have suspended their studies for the year to work as full time operators at Khanyisa.

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The case for a national minimum wage

Gilad Isaacs, researcher at Corporate Strategy and Industrial Development in the School of Economic and Business Sciences will present this seminar.

Isaacs is currently completing a PhD in economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, will present this seminar.

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Challenges in the United States’ next generation science standards: Looking for solutions

The Marang Centre for Maths and Science Education will host a seminar presented by William Hunter.

Hunter is a  Professor of Chemistry, and Director of the Center for Mathematics, Science and Technology at the Illinois State University.

He will describe some of the recent changes to STEM education proposed in the US, namely the structure and philosophy of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) including the disciplinary core ideas, the cross cutting concepts, and the science and engineering practices.

While being very supportive of these changes. Hunter will show how implementation of the changes is challenging for schools, teachers, and for colleges of teacher education.

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Writing Miriam Tlali: Authority, voice and black feminist imagination

Professor Pumla Dineo Gqola will deliver her Inaugural Lecture titled; Writing Miriam Tlali: Authority, voice and black feminist imagination.

Gqola is a Professor of African literature and gender studies. She is the author of What is slavery to me? Postcolonial/Slave memory in post-apartheid South Africa and RAPE: A South African Nightmare, and other books.  

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Memorial service for Wits7

The official memorial service will take place on Friday for the seven Wits students who tragically passed away on 1 May 2016.

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Book launch: Zimbabwe's migrants and South Africa's border farms - the roots of impermanence

Wits University Press and the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research will host the launch of Maxim Bolt’s book.

During the Zimbabwean crisis, millions crossed the border to South Africa, searching for work as farm labourers. In a time of intensified pressures on commercial agriculture in South Africa following market liberalisation and post-apartheid land reform, Bolt explores the lives of migrant labourers and settled black farm workers and their dependents as they intersect with those of white farmers and managers on the Zimbabwean-South African border. 

Bolt will be in discussion with Tara Polzer (Research Director at Social Surveys Africa) and Eric Worby (Professor of Anthropology at Wits).More information.

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Incarcerated knowledge

The Wits School of Arts Film & TV Division will host a special screening event of the documentary Incarcerated Knowledge , directed by Dylan Valley.

In the documentary Peter has a dream of becoming a hip hop artist. He has survived Pollsmoor Prison and managed to break with the notorious ‘28s’ gang. We follow him from his first day as a free man and experience the challenges he faces in reintegrating himself into his community.

He goes to live in his mother’s house. But has his family dealt with the crime he committed? The documentary provides an insight into those who are trying to break the cycle of violence in our society. There will be a post screening Q & A session with Valley.

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Global Labour University 10th Year Anniversary Celebration

The Global Labour University Programme at Wits celebrates its 10 year anniversary.

The year 2016 marks 10 years of the Global Labour University (GLU) Programme at Wits which offers postgraduate degrees in Labour Policy and Globalisation, specifically for trade unionists and labour activists from Africa and the Global South. Over the last decade, the programme has graduated over 50 trade unionists through the MA and Honours postgraduate programmes.

GLU will host a celebratory event to celebrate its achievements bringing together GLU alumni, partner organisations, key officials from South African trade unions and labour organisations as well as labour scholars and academics. Professor Edward Webster and Dr Frank Hoffer (ILO Geneva), who have been instrumental in initiating the GLU programme in South Africa, will deliver addresses.

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Early antenatal access to improve maternal and infant health

Anja Smith and Laura Rossouw from the Research on Socio-Economic Policy unit in the Economics Department at Stellenbosch University will present this seminar.

One of the factors contributing to high maternal mortality in South Africa is that many women start antenatal care too late in their pregnancies.

In this lunchtime seminar, Anja Smith and Laura Rossouw from the Research on Socio-Economic Policy (ReSEP) unit in the Economics Department at Stellenbosch University will present the findings of two recent studies related to late antenatal care access in South Africa.

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Continuity, complexity and change: Third generation studies in international collaborative teacher e

Professor Michael Samuel will present at the Wits School of Education Research Weekend.

Samuel is a Professor in the School of Education at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He has served locally and internationally as a curriculum designer of innovative masters and collaborative doctoral cohort programs and has been a member of the Ministerial Committee on Teacher Education, assisting the development of national teacher education policy in South Africa.

His research interests focus on teacher professional development, higher education, life history and narrative enquiry. His keynote address asks critical questions about how teacher educators construct themselves in the face of multiple challenges which have come to characterise the world of higher education in an era of corporate managerialism.

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Liquid evil, more pervasive, less visible

The distinguished lecture series of the DST/NRF SARChI Chair in Critical Diversity Studies will feature Dr Leonidas Donski.

Donski is a Lithuanian philosopher, historian of ideas and writer, and a former member of the European Parliament (2009-2014). Donski has written and edited over 50 books, 19 of them in English.

He combines political theory, history of ideas, philosophy of culture and essayistic style. Among other books, he is co-author (together with Zygmunt Bauman) of Liquid Evil: Living with TINA (2016) and Moral Blindness: The loss of sensitivity in Liquid Modernity (2013).

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Media transformation seminar

The School of Literature, Language and Media will host a critical debate around transformation in the South African media.

The debate will be discussing whether these vital changes have in fact taken place in any meaningful way, and if so how and where they can be seen, and what consequences they have had.

The seminar aims to discuss:

• Issues of ownership, control, power, staffing, control, and policy?
• Whether the media has undergone 'true' transformation or merely engages in acts of racial tokenism?
• Whether and how the idea of transformation is used as a ruse for the politicisation of the media

Speakers include: Lumko Mtimde, Professor Jane Duncan, Sekoetlane Phamodi, Dr Mashilo Boloko, and Dr Glenda Daniels.

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Book launch: Salt Water

Salt Water is a new poetry anthology by Raphael d’Abdon.

He will be in conversation with Phillippa Yaa De Villiers, Poet Flow and Pamela Nichols. Copies of the anthology will be on sale at the launch

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20th anniversary of formal bilateral cooperation between South Africa and Cuba

The Deputy Minister of International Relations and the first Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Cuba, Marcelino González, will present this lecture.

The lecture will celebrate 20 years of bilateral cooperation between South Africa and Cuba.

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Diamonds, dollars, and decline: post-boom extractive economies in DRC

The Artisanal and Small Scale Mining Research Initiative, coordinated by the Centre for Sustainability in Mining and Industry (CSMI), will host this talk.

The talk will be delivered by Joshua Walker, postdoctoral fellow at the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research. Walker will present his research findings from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), followed by a facilitated Q&A discussion.

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Governing morality: Sexuality, gender and migration

The African Centre for Migration & Society (ACMS) will host this afternoon seminar.

The seminar will present new in-depth research from South Africa and Europe on the multiple intersections of sexuality and gender within different forms of migration.

While migration studies have devoted much attention to the economic causes of migration, gender and especially sexuality have frequently been overlooked.

The seminar will address the following issues: the role of gender and sexuality in the decision to migrate; the ways in which gender and sexuality structure the processes of migration; the transformations of migrants’ sexual and gender subjectivities throughout migration; and the contrastive representations of migrants’ sexuality in the countries of arrival. Programme of the seminar.

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Understanding complexity

Professor Zeblon Vilakazi will deliver his inaugural lecture on the study of nuclear matter under extreme conditions.

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Kwesukela’s monthly performance

Gcina Mhlophe and Masoja Msiza will be featured at this performance.

Traditional storytelling with Kwesukela’s monthly performance at the Wits Writing Centre will feature the great Gcina Mhlophe and Masoja Msiza.

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Understanding the economics of political and currency unions: UK's Brexit debate

The School of Economic and Business Sciences will host Professor Peter Sinclair to present this lecture.sess

Sinclair is from the University of Birmingham and is a renowned expert on monetary policy and international economics, having previously been a Fellow at Oxford University and an advisor to the Bank of England.

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Gender-based violence and rape culture on campus

#IAmOneInThree and #RUReferenceList activation have highlighted the need to better engage and respond to gender-based violence and rape culture on campuses.

The Wits School of Public Health, together with student activists, journalists, and researchers at the forefront of rape and gender-based violence advocacy and research, will take part in this dynamic discussion about the growing concern across South African universities and around the world in how we respond to gender-based violence and rape culture following the recent debates brought up by the #IAmOneInThree and #RUReferenceList activations.

INTRODUCTION

Professor Laetitia Rispel (Head: School of Public Health at Wits)

Thandokazi Maseti (Lecturer in Family Medicine at Wits)

Quaz Roodt (Poet)

PANEL

Tshepiso Maleswena and Hlengiwe Ndlovu (#IAmOneInThree student activists)

Li’Tsoanelo Zwane (Masters in Education student and activist)

Pontsho Pilane (Journalist)

Quaz Roodt (Poet)

DISCUSSANTS

Maria Wanyane (Clinical social worker, Gender Equity Office at Wits)

Dumisane Rebombo (One Man Can National Manager, Sonke Gender Justice)

Lisa Vetten (Political scientist at Wits)

Abigail Hatcher (Researcher, School of Public Health at Wits)

Q&A (Open floor)

Professor Laetitia Rispel

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Ripples of hope: RFK historic 1966 visit to South Africa –it’s significance then and now

The Wits School of Governance in collaboration with the United States Embassy, will host the fifth Dialogue on Development & Rights.

Panellists include:

• Former President - Kgalema Motlanthe,
• President of the RFK Human Rights - Kerry Kennedy,
• US Ambassador - Patrick Gaspard and
• Wits Theatre Director - Gita Pather

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Violence, non-violence and the future of democracy

The complex and troubled relations of violence, non-violence and democracy will be at the center of the first of a series of Advanced Research Seminars.

Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) will throughout 2016 – 2017 hold these seminars in collaboration with other international humanities and research institutes.

The aim of these seminars is to provide an interdisciplinary platform for highly informed intellectual exchanges and debates on matters of concern in the field of critical theory.

The first seminar is organised in collaboration with the University of California Humanities Research Institute.

Speakers include:

• Wendy Brown (University of California at Berkeley) on Hollowing out democracy;
• Achille Mbembe (University of the Witwatersrand) on The politics of viscerality; and
• Judith Butler (University of California at Berkeley) on Interpreting non-violence.

A roundtable on Techno-cultures of violence will bring together David Goldberg (University of California at Irvine), Thando Njovane (Rhodes University) and Jane Taylor (Leeds University).

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Should women in Africa celebrate Africa Day?

The Wits School of Governance in partnership with the Thabo Mbeki Foundation hosts a dialogue on the rights of women in peace and security in Africa.

The question of the rights of women is pertinent in 2016, considering lack of progress despite a range of policy interventions (including The Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa, better known as the Maputo Protocol).

Women bear the brunt of exploitation under conditions of fragility, war and conflict, poverty and underdevelopment, and abusive cultural practices.

Their voices are also excluded from the development agenda in terms of planning and implementation policies that affect them.

Speakers will consider the rights of women in peace and security in Africa and address, amongst others, the AU mechanisms in place to protect women in times of distress and in need of dignity and recovery of abuse.

Panellists:

• Former President Thabo Mbeki
• Judge Barney Afako
• Emmanuelle Makendi
• Dr Angelina Kithatu-Kiwekete

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Emerging narratives in the internationalisation of higher education

Professor Felix Maringe’s inaugural lecture will focus on an epistemological ecology for transforming global south academies.

In his lecture, Maringe will argue for the development of an epistemological ecology, characterised by the acceptance of a complementarity of diverse epistemes; the cultivation of epistemological interdependency; and a strong support for the development of local epistemologies that will sit equally and comfortably at the same table as the current dominant ones.

Internationalisation has become one of the major strategic developments in universities across the world. With the intensifying globalisation, necessitating the need for greater connectedness and collaborative endeavor, the importance of internationalisation has been on the rise.

Based on several research projects including the Global Survey of Internationalisation conducted in 2010, Maringe will show a parallel narrative emerging from global south academies. He is Assistant Dean in the Wits School of Education and Head of Research for the Internationalisation and Partnerships Educational Leadership and Policy Studies.

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Unlocking access to global HIV and TB care through molecular diagnostics

The Faculty of Health Sciences presents:

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Physical activity during pregnancy and its effect on the mother and baby

Professor Mireille van Poppel from the VU University Medical Center will deliver this talk.

The Centre for Exercise Science and Sports Medicine presents a talk by Professor Mireille van Poppel from the Department of Public and Occupational Health and the EMGO Institute of the VU University Medical Center.

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Queering (in)formal economies: Latinx immigrant vendors’ spatial entanglements and productive agency

The African Centre for Migration & Society (ACMS) will host a lunchtime seminar presented by Dr Lorena Munoz.

The seminar will consider how economic practices rendered as informal dialectically shape the material and embodied spaces of everyday life of Latinx immigrants/migrants across the Americas.

It will examine the concept of Queering (informal economies) that is rethinking the (in)formal economy by understanding heterogeneous economic processes as queer, entangled and relational.

The presentation will draw from various oral histories on Latinx street vendor immigrants in the US collected over a period of 10 years in Los Angeles, Cancun and Bogota.

Munoz is from the Wits Geography Department and the Department of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota.

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Early childhood development: Environments, genomes and interventions

DST-NRF Centre of Excellence in Human Development and MRC/Wits DPHRU will host a public lecture presented by Dr Stephen Lye and Dr Stephen Matthews.

Matthews and Lye are from from the Fraser Mustard Institute for Human Development at the University of Toronto.

Lye’s lecture is titled: Child developmental trajectories are shaped by early environments and multiple genomes. Matthews’ lecture is titled: Environmental influences on early brain development: Research to intervention.

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Ecology for a small planet

Robert (Bob) Scholes, Distinguished Professor of Systems Ecology will discuss the ecology of a small planet in his inaugural lecture.

Humanity is encountering environmental constraints on many fronts, increasingly at regional to global scales. Climate change, land degradation, biodiversity loss and collapse of fisheries are examples.

The barely 50 year old science of systems ecology is racing to develop tools and insights appropriate to the scale of the issues.

One of the key challenges is how to apply ecological knowledge derived at relatively small scales – a few hectares and a few years – to phenomena emerging over whole continents and centuries.

He will use examples from his research career, which has engaged with many of the issues outlined above, to show what progress has been made and where the future challenges lie. Scholes was one of the pioneers in investigating the ecological causes and consequences of global climate change in South Africa and internationally, including the SAFARI 2000 experimental campaign.

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MSF scientific day Southern Africa 2016

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)/Doctors Without Borders Southern Africa will host the MSF Scientific Day Southern Africa 2016.

The programme includes peer-reviewed abstract presentations from MSF’s medical humanitarian operations around the world, as well as debate around delivering healthcare to vulnerable displaced populations in Africa and Europe. Booking essential.

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Translating metagenomics - making sense of the microbiome

The Sydney Brenner Institute of Molecular Bioscience will be hosting a seminar presented by Associate Professor Ami Bhatt

Bhatt is from the Department of Medicine (Hematology) and Genetics, Stanford University, USA.

Bhatt’s research interests primarily lie in microbial genomics and metagenomics.

The goal of her research programme is to understand the interplay between the microbial environment in immunocompromised patients and, especially those with haematological malignancies (leukaemia and lymphoma), and in individuals from underserved and understudied geographic regions.

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Communication strategies for social change

DST-NRF Centre of Excellence in Human Development and MRC/Wits DPHRU will host a public lecture presented by Dr Eric Lindland.

He is a cognitive anthropologist whose research focuses on how analogies are used in language, symbolism and ethics to bridge meanings across cultural systems.

Currently a fellow at the FrameWorks Institute in Washington DC, Lindland has for five years led research at the Institute to develop communications strategies in the areas of environmental health, child development, education and criminal justice reform, among others.

Lindland will share his experiences with the Early Childhood Development work the FrameWorks Institute has conducted in countries such as Australia and the UK and outline the initial stages of work currently being conducted in South Africa in collaboration with the CoE-HUMAN, the University of Stellenbosch, UNICEF and a range of other stakeholders.

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Revisiting the History of Capitalism

The Centre for Indian Studies in Africa, Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung and the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study will host a conference on capitalism.

Programme for Conference:

14 June 2016

8:30-9:00 – Opening remarks from Professor Dilip Menon and Peter Vale

9:00-10:00 – Kaveh Yazdani (CISA, Wits) – The Histories of Capitalisms – Overview of Debates and the Case of 18^th century Mysore (South India)

10:00-10:15 – Coffee Break

Chair: Professor Eric Worby, Director Humanities Graduate Centre

10:15-11:15 – Henry Heller (Manitoba) – The Birth of Capitalism in Global Perspective

11:15-12:15 – David Washbrook (Cambridge) – INDIA: Capitalism and its Avatars

12:30- 1:30 – Lunch Break

Chair: Dr Kaveh Yazdani, Post Doctoral Fellow, Centre for Indian Studies in Africa

13:45-14:45 – Nelly Hanna (American University, Cairo) - Textile artisans in Cairo and capitalism from below 1600-1800

14:45-15:45 – Rudolph Matthee (Delaware) – Iranian Capitalism: Exceptionalism and Delayed Development

15:45-16:00 – Coffee Break

16:00-17:00 – Discussion

19:00- Conference Dinner 

15 June 2016

Chair: Prof Dilip Menon, Director, Centre for Indian Studies in Africa

9:00-10:00 – Anne Gerritsen (Warwick) – The View from China: Craft Production, Labour and the Issue of State Support

10:00-11:00 – Eric Tagliacozzo (Cornell) – Capitalism's Missing Link: What Happened to Southeast Asia?

11:00-11:15 – Coffee Break

Chair: Professor Peter Vale, Director, Johannesburg Institute of Advanced Study

11:15-12:15 – Pedro Machado (Indiana) - Indian Ocean Merchants in the 18th and 19th Centuries – Institutional Mechanisms and Financial Instruments

12:15-1:15 – Joseph Inikori (Rochester) - The First Capitalist Nation in the World: The Development of Capitalism in England

13:30-14:30 – Lunch Break

15:00-17:00 – Thinking Capitalism from Africa: A Roundtable

Chair:Lumkile Mondi, Senior Lecturer, Wits Business School

Gill Hart (CISA, Wits)  – Revisiting the History of Capitalism: Reflections from an African Perspective

Joseph Inikori (Rochester) –  The Development of Capitalism in West Africa, 1450-1900

Bill Freund (Wits) – White Run South Africa as a Developmental State: An Interpretive Economic History of Twentieth Century South Africa

19:00 – Conference dinner

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Aligning the SDGs to the NDP: Towards domestication of the SDGS in SA

Wits School of Governance together with the Oliver & Adelaide Tambo Foundation and the United Nations Development Programme will host the sixth OR Tambo Debate.

Researcher: Alessandra Casazza ( UNDP Regional SDP Advisor)

Panellists:

• Tshediso Matona ( Director General, Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation)
• Joanne Yawitch ( CEO, National Business Intiative
• Kefiloe Masiteng ( Deputy Director General, Population and Social Statistics, Statistics South Africa)
• Sipho Mthathi ( Executive Director, Oxfam South Africa)

Moderator: Mansour Ndiaye ( UNDP Regional Inclusive Growth Policy Advisor)

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Unpacking AGOA: Eligibilty wrangles and the way forward

The Mandela Institute at Wits will host a seminar which aims to bring together stakeholders to evaluate the trade negotiations between SA and the US.

The seminar also aims to analyse the pertinent health and food safety concerns and consider whether there are other stumbling blocks that could revoke South Africa’s future eligibility.

Xolelwa Mlumbi-Peter, Deputy Director-General, International Trade and Economic Development Division at the Department of Trade and Industry, will be the keynote speaker at this seminar.

Speakers include:

• Ed Winant, Trade and Investment Officer, Embassy of the United States of America
• Siyabulela Tsengiwe, Chief Commissioner, International Trade Administration Commission
• Virusha Subban, Partner, Bowman Gilfillan
• Cyril Prinsloo, Researcher, South African Institute of International Affairs
• Stephen Meltzer, Partner, Webber Wentzel
• Donald Mackay, Director, XA International Trade Advisors
• Tinashe Kapuya, Manager International Trade and Investment Intelligence, Agricultural Business Council
• Dr Malebakeng Forere, Senior Lecturer, Wits School of Law
• Penny Campbell, Director: Food Control, Pharmaceutical, Trade and Product Regulation, Department of Health

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Family research in Africa and post 2015 development goals conference

Dr Assata Zerai of the University of Illinois, and Professor Alex Ezeh, Director, CARTA will be the keynote speakers at the conference.

The Demography and Population Studies (DPS) Programme in collaboration with South South Network for demographic Training and Research in Africa (SSNDTRIA) and Network for Research in Family Demography, will host the Family Demography in Africa and Post 2015 Development Agenda conference. Dr Assata Zerai of the University of Illinois, US, and Professor Alex Ezeh, Director, Consortium for Advanced Research Training in Africa (CARTA) will be the keynote speakers at the conference.

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WBS in conversation with Mark Lamberti

The Wits Business School hosts an informal evening of discussion with Mark Lamberti, CEO of Imperial Holdings Limited.

Lamberti is also founder and former CEO oMassmart Holdings Limited. 

Professor Imraan Valodia, Dean of the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management will facilitate the evening.

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Book launch: Apartheid and the making of a black psychologist

Wits University Press will launch Professor Chabani Manganyi’s new book: Apartheid and the making of a black psychologist.

The author and book will be introduced by Grahame Hayes, founding editor of the journal PINS (Psychology in Society) and retired academic. More information.

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Evidence-based medicine meets standard of care

The Department of Surgery at the School of Clinical Medicine will host the 25th Biennial Surgical Symposium 2016.

Professor Kees Dejong from the Netherlands and Professor David Metz  from the US are some of the speakers at the Symposium.

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Gender and sexual diversity

In this episode of Science & Cocktails, Professor Michael Pepper will examine the relationships between biological sex, sexual orientation and gender.

What is Gender and Sexual Diversity (GSD) and how is it perceived in our society? What is the impact of an inability to embrace this diversity? What are the definable elements, from a biological perspective, which contribute to GSD? Can healthcare professionals distinguish between the different components of GSD, and should they do so?

In this episode of Science & Cocktails Johannesburg, Professor Michael Pepper will examine the relationships between biological sex (physical and psychological), sexual orientation and gender.

Pepper will expand on the important implications that the interrelationship between biological sex, sexual orientation and gender identity has in our society and discuss whether acquiring a more in-depth understanding of the mechanisms leading to GSD can improve its acceptance in society.

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The role of Council for Geoscience in promoting small scale mining in SA

Dr Stewart Foya, Manager of Mineral Resources Development at the Council for Geoscience will present this lecture.

The Artisanal and Small Scale Mining Research Programme, coordinated by the Centre for Sustainability in Mining and Industry (CSMI), will host a seminar presented by Dr Stewart Foya, Manager of Mineral Resources Development at the Council for Geoscience. The seminar will start off with a presentation followed by a Q&A session.

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Learn how to tell election and other stories with data

Wits Journalism offers a special five-day Data Journalism course, which will equip journalists with a range of data skills and knowledge of the field.

The course will be structured around project work that aims to produce publishable results. The week will focus on the upcoming elections and include participants generating story ideas that they will pitch to a panel of editors at the end of the week.

Participants will also learn about a global network of working journalists undertaking data-driven work.

The course will be coordinated by Anina Mumm, a science communication and digital media specialist, and Jeff Kelly Lowenstein, a US investigative journalist who has run similar exercises in several countries. 

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Is ethics pivotal to transformation?

The annual Steve Biko Bioethics Lecture will be delivered by Justice Dikgang Moseneke, former Constitutional Court judge and now Honorary Professor at Wits.

Moseneke, one of South Africa’s leading jurists, will explore the proper role of ethics in transformation in this lecture.

The former Deputy Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court joined the Steve Biko Centre for Bioethics in Faculty of Health Science as Honorary Professor in June this year. He retired from the Constitutional Court in May this year after 14 years of dedicated service. He is also the Chancellor of the University of the Witwatersrand, a position he has held since 2006.

About the Steve Biko Centre for Bioethics

Situated in the School of Clinical Medicine in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Wits University, the Centre is committed to the values of justice, dignity, respect and freedom - both intellectual and academic. It boasts with staff who has a wide range of expertise in ethics and who are deeply committed to furthering the discipline of bioethics in South Africa and internationally. 

At national policy level, staff at the Centre provides advice and consultation in bioethics, human rights and health law for health sciences curricula, regulation, development and ethics in research for the country. At an international level, they contribute to programmes in UNESCO, the European Commission and The National Institutes of Health (US) to name but a few; and to the development of bioethics and research ethics capacity on the different African regions.

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Wits Press exhibits at Vrystaat Literary Festival

Wits University Press authors will participate at the Vrystaat Literary Festival in Bloemfontein.

Authors and scholars include: Professor Achille Mbembe (On the Postcolony); Tshepo Moloi, (Place of Thorns: Black political protest in Kroonstad since 1976); Professors Bob and Mary Scholes (Climate change: Briefings from South Africa); John Kani (Missing: a play); Jill Weintroub (Dorothea Bleek: A life of scholarship)and Susan Booysen (Dominance and Decline: The ANC in the time of Jacob Zuma).

Discussions by these authors will cover a diversity of topics ranging from climate change and its effects on agriculture in the Free State to a discussion on the influence of apartheid on our narrative of the places that shaped us, to how biographers rewrite history as well as a discussion on the prospects for South Africa. Programme.

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Wits Paediatric fund-4th up to Spaed

The Wits Paediatric Department will host the fourth Up To Spaed seminar.

The medical education seminar is aimed at paediatricians, nurses and allied health workers who work with children. Themes include haematology, oncology, gastroenterology, general paediatrics, ethics, neonatology, paediatric surgery and nutrition.

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The Wits Great Debate – Local Government Elections 2016

Wits University, eNCA and Independent Newspapers present two televised election debates - live from the Great Hall.

The Wits Great Hall will be setting for two epic live televised debates between the three major political parties in Gauteng. The debates are hosted jointly by Wits University, eNCA and Independent Newspapers.

ANC vs DA vs EFF

• The Battle for Joburg – 14 July 2016
• The Battle for Tshwane – 21 July 2016

Jeremy Maggs and Iman Rappetti of eNCA’s NewsNight will facilitate the debates and will be joined by a panel of academics from Wits University and editors from Independent Newspapers.

Admittance:

Strictly ticket holders only. Tickets can be collected on a first come basis from the Events Office, Room 2010, 2^nd Floor, Senate House, Braamfontein Campus East. Two tickets per person only.

Enquiries: 011 717 1194/95

Broadcast live:

• eNCA Channel 403 on DSTV
• enca.com

Watch the debates live on Facebook:

@Wits – University of the Witwatersrand Facebook page

Follow the debates on Twitter:

• @Wits_News
• @WitsUniversity
• #Witsdebate
• #WitsVotes
• #WitsExpert

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Before the bullion: The process mineralogy of gold

The School of Geosciences will host Dr Brandon Youlton, a specialist in mineralogy and hydrometallurgy of uranium to present this talk.

During his talk he will place the processing of gold into perspective, specifically dealing with how mineralogical characteristics of various gold ores dictate the process route required for economic gold extraction.

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Food security, equity and World Trade Organisation rules in the climate change debate

Dr Christian Häberli will discuss how countries can implement their commitments to limit the increase in the global average temperature.

He will discuss this as per the Paris Agreement on Climate Change for agriculture. Food security is perhaps the gravest equity issue in the whole climate change discussion.

The paper finds that, contrary to the official discourse of ‘mutual supportiveness’ between trade and environment agreements, World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules and commitments can actually prevent climate action, for agriculture generally as well as with specific solutions for the development dimension.

Dr Christian Häberli is a Senior Research Fellow at the WTI/NCCR (Bern University) and a lecturer and consultant in Europe, Asia, Africa, and in the Americas.

He served as trade negotiator for Switzerland in the GATT and the WTO during the Uruguay and the Doha Rounds (1986 to 2007) and chaired the WTO Committee on Agriculture (Regular Session, 2005-07). He has been a WTO Panellist since 1996.

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Gender as imprisonment and gendering through imprisonment

The Centre for Applied Legal Studies will host a roundtable discussion facilitated by Danai Mupotsa.

This is the third roundtable which aims to bring together various disciplines with the objective of fostering a discussion around the many links between sex, gender, sexual orientation, identity, and imprisonment, as both a theoretical concept and physical reality.

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Positive impact banking

Will positive impact banking address the needs of sustainable development?

Join the Marketing Division in the School of Economic and Business Sciences (SEBS) for a talk with Madeleine Ronquest, Head of Environmental and Social Risk Management, FirstRand Group. Madeleine has extensive experience in green finance, eco-footprint management, climate change; and environmental and social risk management in financing and investment.

She will share her experience in the banking sector, with a focus on trends towards sustainable development.

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Rejecting political opportunism - The humanitarian crisis and migration policing in the EU and SA

The African Centre for Migration and Society (ACMS) hosts Sharon Ekambaram to present this talk.

Ekambaram is the head of the Dr Neil Aggett Unit at Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF South Africa), which provides programmes and advocacy support for MSF’s regional activities.

Ekambaram will reflect on the decision by MSF to reject funding from the European Union over its stance on immigration, and investigates what factors exacerbate the risks for migrants during the migration process, and what role civil society can play to mitigate these.

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Effects of internal migration on mortality

Is the relation limited to infectious diseases?

This talk will provide a longitudinal analysis using hdss data from Kenya and South Africa 

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Bridging South Africa’s Economic Divide

The Wits Business School and the National Treasury invite you to a public lecture by Mr David Lipton.

Lipton is First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund. The discussion will be facilitated by Professor Steve Bluen, Director of the Wits Business School. 

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South-South investment and mismatched expectations: Indian coal mining in South Africa

The Centre for Indian Studies in Africa will host Manjusha Nair to present this talk.

Nair is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore, and the author of Undervalued Dissent: Informal Workers’ Politics in India.

Indian investment in Africa has risen steadily in recent years, especially in the extraction of resources such as coal, copper and iron ore. How much can we understand this investment in extractive mining as a South-South development project? 

Nair will explore this question by ethnographically analysing an Indian coal mining firm's practices in South Africa.

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Wits internet research seminar

Dr Iginio Gagliardone will discuss Big data for development at this seminar.

Indra de Lanerolle from the Network Society Lab in the School of Literature, Language and Media and Luci Abrahams, Director of the LINK Centre invite you to the first meeting of what is hoped will become a regular open seminar, primarily for Wits researchers, to share current and recent research related to the Internet.

De lanerolle will present recent research on how civil society organisations in South Africa and Kenya choose digital technologies. Iginio Gagliardone will discuss Big data for development: Which data? Whose development?

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Court annexed mediation: Successes, challenges and possibilities

The Mandela Institute will host a conference aimed at promoting mediation and specifically supporting the Department of Justice’s court annexed mediation.

Papers will be presented by speakers from Africa and Australia where successful court annexed mediation processes have been implemented. More information.

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Book Launch: Meaningful matters - reflections on joy, loss and our changing world

Join Jeff Kelly Lowenstein as he reads from his latest and third book Meaningful Matters: Reflections on Joy, Loss and Our Changing World.

This selection of blog posts written between 2008 and 2015 bring together pieces on sources of momentary delight, tributes to deceased loved ones, and analysis of the seismic changes gripping our planet. Tackling history’s painful legacies and affirming life’s daily gifts, it is a meditation on living with gratitude and joy in a profoundly imperfect world.

 Lowenstein is the Taco Kuiper Visiting Fellow at Wits University. His work has been published in The New Yorker and by the Center for Public Integrity, among many others, and has earned national and international recognition.

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Epitaphs and dreams: Poems to remember the struggle, by Patrick Fitzgerald

The Wits School of Governance will launch Professor Patrick FitzGerald's new book, Epitaphs and Dreams.

Mainly written in exile while Patrick FitzGerald served as a full-time revolutionary, Epitaphs and Dreams vividly expresses the thoughts, emotions, situations, passions and challenges in the life of a liberation cadre. Struggle themes are artfully threaded through the inner-life of a lively and engaged intellect. The author is at once the militant, the romantic, the analyst and the sardonic observer; the poetry ranging from delicate and lyrical to powerfully directed narrative cadences. Professor FitzGerald is based at the Wits School of Governance.

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Granites of burma and their mineralisation

Professor Lawrence Robb will present this lecture.

Laurence Robb is a Visiting Professor at both Wits and Oxford Universities, and currently also a director of Lerama Resources, a junior exploration company engaged in a number of projects looking for iron,oxide copper, gold  targets in the Bushveld granites.

Robb’s research at the moment is based in Western Sahara and South Eastern Asia, in particular Burma - the geology and metallogeny of the latter country is the subject of this talk. Robb is the author of the widely acclaimed book, Introduction to Ore-Forming Processes. 

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Considerations on southern Marxism: Fanon and beyond

Professor Michael Burawoy from the University of California, Berkeley will present this lecture.

The Departments of Sociology and International Relations are hosting the second lecture in the Democratic Marxism series. Professor Michael Burawoy (University of California, Berkeley) will present the lecture. Burawoy is a leading Marxist Sociologist and Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.

His books include Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism—a study of work and organizations—The Politics of Production, and The Extended Case Method.  He spent four years (1968-1972) in Zambia studying the mining sector and has a long history with South Africa. He studied the fall of state socialism in Hungary (1982-1989) and the transition to capitalism in Russia (1991-2002).

He is a former president of the American Sociological Association (2004) and the International Sociological Association (2010-2014). Professor Dilip Menon (Wits University) will be the discussant.  

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The path to the podium: Expressive and efficient choir conducting workshops

This weekend series of workshops is a pilot programme to investigate the feasibility of a yearly, week-long choral music education course for choral conductors.

The need for education of choir conductors in South Africa was identified by a group of American choir conductors whilst on a tour to this country a few years ago.

The Path to the Podium is the result of their sincere desire to do whatever they could to address this need. The International Partnership for Choral Music Education was formed and in partnership with Dalene Hoogenhout, conductor of Wits Choir, and with the support of Wits University this vision to facilitate choral music education in South Africa has culminated in what is envisioned to be the first of many choral education encounters.

 It is particularly aimed at conductors working at school level or with church and community choirs – conductors who may not have had formal choral conducting training in the past. Register before 20 July 2016.

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How can local government address gendered forms of violence?

How can local government address gendered forms of violence? The Wits City Institute will host a debate to address the topic with the ANC, DA, EFF, IFP and UDM.

In the run-up to local government elections conflict has surged, resulting in violence and the destruction of property. In many instances these bitter struggles have been explained as attempts to control the spoils of power.

But how could local government be made a site of peace? How could its structures and programmes be constructively turned to addressing sexualised violence, as well as violence within the domestic sphere?

What role could the Metropolitan Police play in creating cities safe for sex workers, or lesbian, gay and transgender persons? And how could local government resources support services to the victims and survivors of gendered forms of violence?

As 3 August draws near, the Wits City Institute will host a debate to address these and other questions with the ANC, DA, EFF, IFP and UDM.

Speakers include: Mandisa Mashego, acting chairperson for the Gauteng EFF; Ingrid Reinten of the DA; Sibongile Nkomo, the IFP's Secretary General and representatives from the ANC, UDM and other civil society organisations.

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National minimum wage launch

The National Minimum Wage Research Initiative will launch the report, A National Minimum Wage for South Africa with keynote speaker Dr Stephanie Luce.

The National Minimum Wage Research Initiative will present the results of a year-long study into the likely effects of a national minimum wage at the launch of the report, A National Minimum Wage for South Africa. The event will feature Dr Stephanie Luce speaking on Securing a Minimum Wage: lessons from the United States. Luce was closely involved in the campaign for New York State's recently adopted $15 minimum wage. She is currently a Professor at The Joseph S. Murphy Center for Worker Education at the City University of New York, and edited What Works for Workers?Public Policies and Innovative Strategies for Low-Wage Workers. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2014.

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(Dis)empowered whiteness: Un-whitely spaces and the production of the good white home

The Wits City Institute will host Christi Kruger to present this lecture.

Kruger’s lecture will be based on her paper which draws on ethnographic fieldwork in a white informal settlement in South Africa, to explore the ways in which poorer whites with perceived notions of whiteness and blackness negotiate living in informal settlements.

She will argue that they deliberately identify as informal settlers, or squatters, while consciously displaying normative forms of whiteness. It is specifically through the organisation of their informal houses and homes that white informal settlers seek to construct a whiteness which mimics that subscribed to by poorer Afrikaners in the 1930s.

In this way, they differentiate their living space from that of other — black African — informal settlers in South Africa while not completely abandoning the idea that they, too, are informal settlers.

In the lecture Kruger will argue that white informal settlers negotiate these different social identities by constructing the concept of a whitely squatter camp and are thus able to negotiate perceived contradictory identities. Kruger is a doctoral fellow at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, completing a thesis in anthropology.

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Comparative knowledges: Critical insights or tools of oppression?

Professor Gillian Hart, Associate at the Center for Indian Studies in Africa and will present this lecture.

Hart is also a Professor of the Graduate School at University of California and shewill be giving a series of four seminars between July and October 2016.

In this first seminar, she will critically revisit some of her earlier work and suggest how the concept/method of relational comparison needs to be revised in relation to her more recent research interests as well as changing circumstances.

She will also reflect more broadly on how questions of comparison are always at play in the theories we use to think about and act in the world; on how more often than not they operate in deeply problematic ways; and on how a different approach to comparison might contribute to more critically enabling forms of knowledge production.

The seminars are designed primarily for post-graduate students, and Hart will be holding office hours on 27 – 28 July to meet individually with interested students to talk about their research projects and what they would like to get from the seminar series.

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Scientific writing talk

Professors Roy Zent and Ambra Pozzi of Vanderbilt University will deliver this talk as part of their Carnegie-WITS Alumni Diaspora Programme visit.

It is the third year running that this dynamic duo present their top tips and guidelines for drafting a successful scientific paper. The talk is open to anyone who wishes to improve their writing skills.

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The physics of information: from flipping coins to quantum gravity

What is information? Is it a physical quantity? What are the differences between classical and quantum information?

Does our state of motion have anything to do with information? Are temperature and information related? Can the temperature of the early universe be explained in the same way as that of a hot gas, and why does all of this have anything to do with Einstein, gravity and black holes?

In this episode of Science & Cocktails, Johannesburg, Joan Simón, visiting from the University of Edinburgh, will introduce the notion of information through intuitive examples and highlight the main difference between its classical and quantum counterparts.

Using the fundamental principles of theoretical physics in the 20th century, Simón will explain how these notions can intuitively explain why the early universe or black holes have a temperature, but also how they give rise to deep paradoxes and speculations on the nature of quantum gravity.

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Limitations and possibilities of allyship in practices and research

The Wits Centre for Diversity Studies will host this seminar.

Panelists include: Pontsho Pilane (Feminist Stokvel, Mail and Guardian) on What does allyship look like in black feminist spaces?; Angie Mofokeng (President of the Wits Debating Union) on Women in the Revolution: Known, seen, unheard and misrepresented; Fumani Mabogoane (former president: Activate Wits) on Maneuvering the Chair: A Catch 22 between balancing Activism and Allyship; and Dr Jason Van Niekerk (Department of Jurisprudence, University of Pretoria) on Being a White Problem in Academia.

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Exploring practical ways to manage illegal mining in South Africa: The case of zama-zamas

The Centre for Sustainability in Mining and Industry presents a seminar on illegal mining in South Africa.

Based on a documentary, Common Ground, the seminar will unpack ground-level issues surrounding Zama-Zama mining in South Africa.

With the objective of exploring practical ways to managing Zama-Zama mining, the documentary will provide a base for an informed debate.

Panellists include: Naseema Fakir, Regional Director, Legal Resource Centre; Sandile Nombeni, Ekurhuleni Environmental Organisation; and Janet Munakamwe, PhD Candidate, African Centre for Migration and Society (ACMS), Wits University.

The seminar will include the screening of Common Ground, a panel discussion, and a facilitated question and answer session.

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The portability of social benefits in SADC

The African Centre for Migration & Society and the Southern Africa Trust with support from the Open Society Foundation will host this seminar.

Three key inputs from Professor Alex ven der Heever (University of the Witwatersrand) and Dr Mathias Nyeti (University of Johannesburg) representing academia and Mr Moises Uamusse (Southern African Mineworkers Association) from the trade union sector will feed into a broader discussion about potential advocacy strategies and partnerships.

Key issues to be explored by an expert panel include the following:

• Can regional integration occur beyond the state?
• How can the portability of social security for workers in the region be realized? Does SADC have a role to play in this?
• What policy and political options within SADC need to be strengthened to achieve stronger and more equitable regional integration?
• What can be learned from the success of portability arrangements from other regions of the world (i.e Mercosur, EU)
• What realistic possibilities exist in realising SADC’s agenda on the portability of social security benefits?

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Silent protest

The Silent Protest is a day-long event encompassing a ‘silent’ march.

This event is aimed at raising awareness against gender and sexual violence. From the very beginning, the Silent Protest has been both a politically charged event, aimed at raising awareness of the pervasiveness of rape and sexual violence in hetero-patriarchal societies, and an event that fosters a sense of solidarity with all survivors of rape and sexual violence, and creates a space where healing (both individual and societal) can occur. Moreover, from the very first protest we see an emphasis placed on silence. Sign up or volunteer.

Silent Protest Programme- 17 August 2016

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Photonics for a Brighter Future

Professor Andrew Forbes inaugural lecture will shed light on the technologies of photonics.

Photonics, the harnessing of light and light based technologies, is an enabling technology that permeates our everyday lives. In his lecture, Forbes will outline how research into structured light has defined new paradigms, and how it may fuel exciting future developments, both fundamental and applied. Forbes is a Distinguished Professor and Head of the Structured Light Laboratory at Wits. 

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Back to ekasi

The Student Affairs Division and the First Year Experience Ambassadors will host this event that will re-create the theme and atmosphere of the townships.

Staff and students are invited to play and learn traditional games like kgati, morabaraba, diketo, mogusha and topo. To further enhance the experience we will make available kotas, amakipkip, shwam shwam and apple munch for sale on the day. Tweet @WITSFYE #WITS #BACKTOEKASI.

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Perceptions matter: how participant perceptions shape our research data

The Society, Work and Development Institute will host Dr Robin Turner to present this research seminar.

Turner is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Butler University (Indianapolis) and SWOP Research Associate. The inferences participants draw from our dress, diction, gender presentation, imputed race, apparent disability or lack thereof, and other observable attributes have an effect on our interactions.

In affecting how research participants behave in our presence and respond to our questions, participants’ perceptions of researchers influence all the data generated through interpersonal interactions.

How should researchers address researcher-participant interactions? Drawing from his field research in southern Africa, India and Uganda, Turner will argue in this seminar that all empirically-oriented political scientists should attend to the interactions between researchers and research participants because failing to do so impairs our inferences.

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Launch of Xenowatch: Monitoring xenophobic violence in South Africa

The African Centre for Migration & Society, iAfrikan, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees will host the launch of Xenowatch.

Xenowatch is a newly-created platform to monitor xenophobic threats and violence across South Africa.

Relying on crowdsourcing, the platform will allow anyone to freely report threats of violence, past attacks, or active mobilisation using Free SMSs, email or the website. After verifying reports, Xenowatch will automatically notify the police, international organisations, and civil society of threats, violence, and displacement.

By tracking threats, attacks, and responses, the platform will not only serve as an early warning system, but will help to assess the effectiveness of official responses and to identify the triggers of threats and violence. More information.   

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Communication disorders after stroke in aboriginal Australians

The Health Communication Research Unit will host a Journal Club presentation delivered by Professor Elizabeth Armstrong.

Armstrong is Foundation Chair in Speech Pathology at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia. She has published widely in the area of aphasia and presents regularly at both national and international speech pathology, linguistics, allied health and medical conferences.

Prior to becoming an academic, she worked clinically in both acute hospital and rehabilitation settings, and since that time has established the Master of Speech Language Pathology at Macquarie University and the Bachelor of Speech Pathology program at Edith Cowan University.

Her research includes the application of Systemic Functional Linguistic theory to the everyday discourse of people with aphasia, early intervention strategies, and issues related to communication disorders in Australian Aboriginal populations.

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Laws of nature, human freedom and human laws

Professor Lucy Allais’ inaugural lecture will tackle one of the oldest problems in philosophy: the nature of human free will.

The way we think about causation is often taken to threaten the idea that free choice is really possible: it seems to suggest that everything that happens is a determined function of the way things were in the past.

On the other hand, the idea that we have the capacity to freely choose how we act and that our choices are not settled by the past and the laws of nature, is fundamental to the way we think about ourselves as human beings and as moral beings, as well as to the way we hold each other responsible and the way we appreciate each other.

In this lecture, Allais’ aim is to sketch a way these two different kinds of explanation can be reconciled. She will sketch a relation between this and the ideas of laws and of freedom in politics and psychology.

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Decolonising Feminism

The conference will critically consider the entanglements of feminism with colonialism and anti-colonialism.

The Wits Centre for Diversity Studies will host an international conference on the 23, 24, 25, 26 August 2016 in Johannesburg at the Sunnyside Park hotel, Parktown. The conference will critically consider the entanglements of feminism with colonialism and anti-colonialism.

Feminism has a multifarious history in that, while some critical feminist expressions have conceived of patriarchy as a global concern, many branches of feminism have elided the experience of non-Western women from critical feminism, or have enshrined Eurocentric values within a feminist discourse. Some theorizations have obscured the struggles of women who are queer, transgender, or disabled, and racialized social structures have given white feminists more direct access to political power and public discourse than those feminists who confront combined gender and racial oppression. The mantra ‘feminism is for everybody,’ which is also sometimes written ‘feminism is for everybody,’ calls attention to the need for feminist modes which are not merely adaptable to non-Western experience, but which are rather fused at the root with the diversity of women.  

The conference will feature performances by: Thandi Ntuli, Yonela Mnana, and Drama for Life’s Playback Theatre. 

The opening registration cocktail function will take place on the afternoon of the 23rd August 2016, 5pm, at Sunnyside Park hotel with a special performance by Yonela Mnana. The conference will host Film screenings on the evening of the 24th August, at Sunnyside Park hotel. Films include:

• The One In Nine Campaign's ‘Feminists in Conversation: Sex, politics and leadership’ featuring 7 feminists from different sectors speaking about about feminism, sex, feminist leadership and the movement in SA;
• 'Rights of Passage: Love and Loss in the Time of Mandela'

Thandi Ntuli will be performing at the conference’s Evening Event on the 25 August 2016, at the Living Room, Maboneng Precinct, 5pm. The cost is R350. 

On the evening of the 26th August 2016, 6pm, we will be hosting a Public Event with Dr Grada Kilomba at the Wits Theatre, 6pm. This event is open to the public.

Keynote Speakers

Professor Pumla Gqola

Professor Srila Roy

Dr Grada Kilomba

Professor Maria Lugones

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Jozi Book Fair

The eighth Jozi Book Fair is an educational and cultural festival for schools, children, book clubs, women, men, academics, communities and the public.

Programme: 1 – 4 September 2016

Schools and youth programme

Date: Thursday/Friday – 1 and 2 September 2016 from 08:00 to 14:00

Highlights:

20 workshops related to reading, poetry and all art forms:

• Design the JBF House of Literature
• Meet the authors students have read
• Meet Guests of Fair
• Encounter on Soweto 1976
• Performance play Orphans of Qumbo; and live music with school bands
• Book launch: JBF teenage authors – 2016 short stories
• Exhibitions: Soweto 1976 in Photos; Conditions of Youth in SA; NGO and publisher’s books; Architecture

Speakers/Artists:

Zakes Mda, James Matthews, Kurt Ellis, Michael Williams (via Skype), Ronnie Govender, Guest of Fair Carol Mashigo, and Moses Molelekwa Art Foundation.

Date and time: Saturday/Sunday – 3 and 4 September 2016 from 09:00 to 14:00

Highlights:

• Spelling Bee with 20 schools, featuring Theresa Giorga, Nira Sklair, Karen Lazar, Mpho Masuko and the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation.
• Workshops for school, youth and public on all art forms
• Workshop on social media and new forms of struggle.

Children’s programme

Date and time: Saturday/Sunday – 3 and 4 September 2016 from 09:00 to 14:00

Highlights:

• Special book launch: Poetry for Friends 3 [Poetry by JBF's poetry buddies from various townships]
• Play: Orphans of Qumbu [JBF innercity youth]
• isiZulu Book launch: Penny and Puffy [Zakes Mda and Mpapa Mkoane in isiZulu]
• Sesotho book launch: Mosweu o fapane jwang le Sentsho (How is Whitey different from Blackey); Pitsa Ya Mehlolo (The Miracle Pot) [Tsepo Mohale, Saliwa Publishing]
• Songs by Nacties (National Children's Theatre)
• Other activities: Bring your gumboots and learn to dance; face-painting; playing with languages; storytelling; poetry; meet authors; and open mic for children.

Round tables

Date and time: Saturday/Sunday – 3 and 4 September 2016 from 12:00 to 16:00

Highlights:

• Youth Rising: Conditions of youth in SA
• What is the future of labour?
• Where is the ANC going?
• #Feesmust fall: What is the future of the South African university?
• Local Government Elections 2016: changing political landscape
• Decolonisations: art and artists
• #Feesmustfall: What future for the student movements with a special reflection on violence and intersectionality

Speakers:

Phali Lehohla (Stats SA), Susan Booysen (Wits), Jackie Cock (Wits), Dale McKinley, Justice Malala (analyst), Hein Willemse (UP), Zweli Vavi (tbc), Zakes Mda, Carol Mashigo and Kemang wa Lehulere, Ranjeni Moonsamy (tbc).

Workshops

Date and time: Saturday/Sunday – 3 and 4 September 2016 from 09:30 to 10:50

Highlights:

• Writing for Fundza
• How to blog
• How to publish an ebook
• Meditation for youth
• Stealing ideas: Learning from experts
• Playing and reading music
• Poetry, music and writing short stories
• Introduction to photography using your cell phone
• Philosophy for youth
• Graffiti: reading walls
• Social Media and new forms of Struggle (09:00 – 11:00)
• Build and design the JBF House of Literature

Speakers/Artists:

David Henderson, Jenny Hatton and Joan Rankin, Belinda Mendelowitz, Dale and Tshepo, Jerry Molelekwa, Theresa Giorza, Harmony Rhythms (Zimbabwe), Nira Sklair, Sthembele Ngobeni and Diana Ferrus.

Poetry

Date and time: Saturday/Sunday – 3 and 4 September 2016 [structured performance and open mic]

Highlights:

• All about Poetry: Poetry performed
• Book launches
• Workshops on how to write poetry
• Poetry with music; poetry with art works; poetry with hip hop; and poetry, theatre, social justice
• Special guest poet performance by Diana Ferrus: I have come to take you home – for Saartjie Baartman

Speakers/Artists:

Nkululeke Phandiwe, Kenneth Nkosi, Alan Kyle, Mak Manaka, Brandon Douglas, Jonathan Tucker, Joseph Claassen and James Matthews, Keorapetse Kgositsile and Ronnie Govender.

Seminars and panel discussions

Date and time: Saturday/Sunday – 3 and 4 September 2016 [various times]

Highlights:

• How to publish your own bestseller in SA
• Patriarchy in organisations
• Legal deposit with the National Library of SA
• Literature meets jazz: Jazz in the East Rand
• History, influences and opportunities: Youth Rising in jazz today
• Economic justice: coal and climate change
• Economic justice, drought and food crisis
• Economic justice and waste
• Economic justice and nuclear energy
• Housing crisis in SA: challenges and lessons
• #Endoutsourcing and the #insourcing movement
• Post School Review
• Soweto's contribution to art and literature
• Role of workers in changing SA's labour history
• Youth and socialism today? Lessons from Kerala (India)
• Self-publishing and book launching
• Challenges facing women organising women

Speakers/panelists

Tsenase Webste, Shade Pietersen, Zoleka Mbotshelwa, Salim Vally, Madney Halim, Brett Pyper; Keorapetse Kgositsile; Fitzroy Ncgukana, Tumi Mogorosi, Samantha Hargreaves, Makoma Lekalakala, Thomas Mguni, Jacklyn Cock, Vanessa Black, Vanessa Pillay, Simon Mbata, Mantwa Joyce Mokoena, Simon Ganta, Lindokuhle Qayiso, Mamosweu Tsoabi, Vusi Mahlangu, Thabo Pieterse, Nosiswe Beva, Conrade Malema, Wally Serote, Mandla Langa; Luke Sinwell; David Balwanz and Mokesh Morar.

Literature

Date and time: Saturday/Sunday – 3 and 4 September 2016 [various times]

Highlights:

• Conversations and discussions with various authors, including The influence of Soweto on Literature; Jazz meets literature, and literature related performances and discussions.
• JBF's teen authors (Short Stories)
• PASS on the WORD, a special series for youth by legendary poets Kgositsile, James Matthews and Ronnie Govender
• Flowers of a broke by Mak Manaka
• Marriage has no formula by Naomi Molefe
• Thabo Mbeki by Gilbert Khadiagala and Adekeye Adebajo
• Students must Rise
• Just Work? Migrant workers struggle today
• Africa and Millennium Development Goals
• Mending a broken heart by Banele Lukhele
• Porters rule: slave to the city by Adam Rabinowitz
• Taking equal education into the classroom
• Country Bard Blues by Sello Huma
• House without walls by Alan Kyle
• We kissed the sun and embraced the moon
• Reflections on Community participation in education with N. Cebekhulu, Thami Hukwe and Brit Baatjies
• Community education newsletter, Ikamva, with Fatima Gabru and Hendrina Diedericks Khanyile

Speakers/artists:

Mohale Mashigo and Kemang wa Lehulere, Sylvia Vollenhoven, Liesl Louw-Vaudran, James Matthews, Charles Cilliers, Zakes Mda, Hein Willemse, Yolisa Qunta, Percy Mabandu, Keorapetse Kgositsile, Adam Sher and Palesa Motsumi.

Book launches

Date and time: Saturday/Sunday – 3 and 4 September 2016 [various times]

Highlights:

• JBF's teen authors (Short Stories)
• PASS on the WORD, a special series for youth by legendary poets Kgositsile, James Matthews and Ronnie Govender
• Flowers of a broke by Mak Manaka
• Marriage has no formula by Naomi Molefe
• Thabo Mbeki by Gilbert Khadiagala and Adekeye Adebajo
• Students must Rise
• Just Work? Migrant workers struggle today
• Africa and Millennium Development Goals
• Mending a broken heart by Banele Lukhele
• Porters rule: slave to the city by Adam Rabinowitz
• Taking equal education into the classroom
• Country Bard Blues by Sello Huma
• House without walls by Alan Kyle
• We kissed the sun and embraced the moon
• Reflections on Community participation in education with N. Cebekhulu, Thami Hukwe and Brit Baatjies
• Community education newsletter, Ikamva, with Fatima Gabru and Hendrina Diedericks Khanyile

Speakers/authors:

Mak Manaka, Noor Nieftagodien, Rami Chuene, Naomi Molefe, Chris Landsberg, Banele Lukhele, Mondli Hlatswayo and Aziz Choudry.

Full programme

Visit the Jozi Book Fair website for the complete programme.

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Fak’ugesi Festival - a digital playground

Fak’ugesi acts as a platform, bringing together diverse sectors to collaborate and share skills in digital media and technology innovation.

Now in its third successful year, the 2016 Fak’ugesi African Digital Innovation Festival will explore and celebrate technology and creativity by Africans for Africa.

Themed: Afro Tech Riot, the festival will feature an unmissable calendar of events where community, femininity, notions of the spiritual, and exploring African knowledge systems in the creative, innovative and technological space will come to life.

It takes place in Braamfontein’s Tshimologong Precinct that will be transformed into an energetic techno-sphere for two weeks of playing, making, shifting, and sharing through seminars, talks, exhibitions, game arcades, workshops, performances, innovation riots, installations, tech demos, pitches, parties and future sounds.

Fak’ugesi acts as a platform that brings together diverse digital and technology sectors to collaborate and share skills in digital media and technology innovation.

All events are open for public participation and are aimed at all levels of experience, from ‘just interested’ to professional developers.

Full programme.

About the festival

Now in its third successful year, Fak’ugesi was originally founded by Prof Christo Doherty and Tegan Bristow from Wits Digital Arts, together with Prof Barry Dwolatzky from the Joburg Centre for Software Engineering (JCSE).

In the spirit of celebrating African technology and innovation through creativity, and supporting the festival in its project to develop Johannesburg’s ICT capacity, the primary sponsor for Fak’ugesi 2016 is the City of Johannesburg. The festival’s annual partners also include the JCSE, Wits University, the British Council’s ConnectZA and InnovationZA and the Goethe Institut, together with new partners Pro Helvetia Johannesburg and the Innovation Hub.

Annual favourites return

Fak’ugesi Digital Africa Residency, in which artists and creative technologists work together to better understand and explore contemporary technology from a creative perspective. In 2016 the Fak’ugesi Digital Africa Residency is supported by and is being produced in collaboration with Pro Helvetia Johannesburg. Visitors can attend exhibitions and workshops with artists.

Agile Africa Conference, the software developer’s conference organised by the JCSE. Developers, testers, project managers and line managers participate in three days of sessions focused on the challenges of software development in Africa. The conference will run from 22 to 24 August.

Members of the South African Maker Collective together with the ConnectZA lead Market Hack, to present playful activities around electronics, digital making and general Saturday fun on the 27 August alongside the weekly Neigbourgoods Market in Braamfontein.

A MAZE Johannesburg, a festival in its own right focusing on both local and international indie gaming and playful media will take place from 31 August to 3 September. Visitors can look forward to talks and workshops, as well as playing in the A MAZE Arcade.

Soweto Pop Up, started in 2015 in collaboration between A MAZE Johannesburg and Maker Library Network (ConnectZA), this is a day-long festival pop–up that aims to bring digital making and playful media to locations outside of Braamfontein.

New key events this year

ALIGHT, led by Between10and5 and Create Africa in partnership with the French Insitut and ConnectZA this street event is a spectacular showing of light art, light sculpture, architectural light installation and light based interactive games.

Future Sounds, in this project Berlin based artists and technologists, The Constitute, (hosted by Goethe Insitut Johannesburg) will collaborate with Johannesburg based Create Africa in a project that will bring together SA’s hip-hop and electronic music artists, local filmmakers lead by Lebo Rasethaba and technologists. The outcome of the collaboration will be performed live at the festivals ALIGHT party.

 Smart City Day, a day focusing specifically on Johannesburg and the city’s drive towards better ICT and will feature the 2016 Hack Jozi finalists, the School Project in collaboration with Wits Digital Arts and much more.

Geekulcha Maker Library Pop Up, is the ConnectZA Maker Library grant recipient for 2016 and will be ‘occupying’ the festival for its full length to bring a series of fun, interesting and playful tech related workshops and events. Their full programme will include everything from learning about 3D to making holograms and even space walking.

Fak’ugesi Festival Talks, a fun and informative talk series featuring the Fak’ugesi Residents and projects, with nights curated by special guests such as Bubblegum Club and more. The series is designed to speak directly to the 2016 festival themes; community, the feminine, and spirituality in technology in Africa.

And then there’s more

Along with these key events, the Fak’ugesi African Digital Innovation Festival will be packed with smaller events, workshops and engagements aimed at people, young and old, and at all levels of expertise.  The festival invites everyone to claim their territory in the digital innovation movement, and bring together creativity and technology by Africans for Africa.

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The cutting edge: Towards universal health coverage and sustainable goals

The annual Faculty of Health Sciences’ AJ Orenstein Memorial Lecture will be delivered by Dr Emmanuel Makasa.

Makasa is Counsellor: Health in the Permanent Mission of the Republic Zambia to the United Nations in Geneva and Vienna, and in the Embassy of the Republic of Zambia to Switzerland.

He is an orthopaedic and trauma surgeon turned global health diplomat.

His address will advance the argument that investing in surgery and anaesthesia is a means to achieving universal health coverage and consequently contributing to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).

Makasa will share his experiences in strengthening the Zambian health system to address these issues. He will also share the role he played in the World Health Organization’s resolution WHA68.15. This lecture is hosted by the Adler Museum.

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Agile Africa 2016

Agile Africa is an annual conference where African software professionals meet to uncover better ways of working and developing software.

The Joburg Centre for Software Engineering (JCSE) will host the Agile Africa 2016 conference. 

Agile Africa is an annual conference where African software professionals meet to uncover better ways of working and developing software. Attendants will get the chance to hear leading international and local speakers and, more importantly, interact with professionals from various software development communities.

The 2016 conference will build on last year’s success to create an engaging memorable event. We are offering 10 student bursaries to attend the conference at no cost. In addition, academic staff and students will receive a 50% discount on the standard ticket price.

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Rethinking the rural: Households and internal migration in contemporary South Africa

Harold Wolpe's 1972 article analysing cheap labour in South Africa remains one of the most widely read pieces on the political economy of the country.

Despite this continued attention, much of the substance of his work, and in particular the 'cheap labour thesis', is often considered something of an historical relic rather than a theory that can help us understand contemporary South Africa.

Since Wolpe wrote, a significant new field of labour studies has emerged in the country, which has taken up the issues of power relations in the workplace which Wolpe’s work aimed to explain.

Yet the connections between precarious work in urban areas and precarious livelihoods in rural areas, which were central for Wolpe, have largely been neglected.

During thispresentation, we will focus through a Wolpean lens on how urban rural connections have been retained, and also how they have been transformed through the changing nature of capitalism and the state. In the first section of this presentation, the four major changes (globalisation, financialisation, informalization, and democratization) that have taken place in the 40-plus years since Wolpe wrote his classic work will be examined.

The presentation will also draw on 105 interviews conducted in late 2015 and early 2016 with multiple members of households in the rural villages of the Intsika Yethu Local Municipality (IYLM) of the Chris Hani District Municipality (CHDM) of the Eastern Cape Province.

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Three lectures on Sylvia Wynter

The Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research will host Anthony Bogues (Brown University) to deliver three lectures on Slyvia Wynte

Each of which will explore a facet of the critical thought of this Caribbean theorist.

The lectures will map how the anti-colonial movements for political independence as well as the writings of Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon and Jean Price Mars became foundational in her thinking about issues of decolonizing history, cultural practice and literary theory.

They will also explore her current attempts to posit a theory of the human species and the necessity for human emancipation.

Working from the premise that the praxis of radical anti-colonial thought formulated a distinctive set of philosophical, literary, social and political questions, Bogues will speak to three themes: Plantation, Plot, Decolonization; Black Metamorphosis and the Creation of ‘the Native’and ‘The Human as Praxis’. Readings are available on request.

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29th Annual Labour Law Conference

The Annual Labour Law Conference is now into its 29th year and is organised annually by the Universities of the Witwatersrand, Cape Town and KwaZulu Natal.

Speakers at this conference include Judge President of the Labour Appeal Court, Judge Basheer Waglay;, the Governor of the Reserve Bank of SA, Lesetja Kganyago; the Public Protector of SA, Advocate Thuli Madonsela;, the Director of the Nobel Peace Centre in Norway, Dr Liv Torres; Director General in the Department of Labour, Thobile Lamati; Deputy Minister in the Presidency, Buti Manamela; CEO of BUSA, Khanyisile Kweyama and many others.

Wits academics Professors Roger Southall, Nicolas Pons-Vignon, David Dickinson, Paul Benjamin, Vishwas Satgar and Gilad Isaacs will be presenting at the conference. More information.

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The origin of livestock herding in South Africa

In his inaugural lecture, Professor Karim Sadr will discuss the origin of livestock herding in South Africa.

Professor Karim Sadr has been working on the question of the origin of livestock herding in South Africa ever since he arrived here a quarter of a century ago.

Worldwide, farming and herding are seen as the precursors of 'civilization' or better said 'complex societies,' so studying how, when and why hunters, gatherers, foragers and fishers decided to grow their own food rather than extract it from nature is important.

In South Africa, the oldest evidence for food production, sheep bones to be precise, is only 2 000 to 3 000 years old; relatively recent compared to places like the Near East and China, or even South America. Twenty-five years ago the conventional view was that the first herders in South Africa were an immigrant Khoe-speaking population from farther north who brought sheep and cattle with them.

It seemed clear what route the foreign herders took and how they interacted (or did not) with the local indigenous people, the San hunter-gatherers. Now we know that the matter was a bit more complex. In his inaugural lecture, Professor Sadr will attempt to describe some of this complexity.

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Decolonising work, decolonising the economy: A case for zama-zamas

Christopher Rutledge, Mining Extractives Coordinator at ActionAid South Africa will present this seminar.

The Artisanal and Small Scale Mining Research Programme, coordinated by the Centre for Sustainability in Mining and Industry will host Christopher Rutledge, Mining Extractives Coordinator at ActionAid South Africa to present this seminar. The seminar will be followed by a facilitated Q&A discussion.

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Animist modernity and spatial subjectivity in Africa:Thinking through the road in African Literature

The Wits City Institute will host a seminar to be presented by Professor Harry Garuba from the University of Cape Town.

Colonial administrators everywhere were heavily invested in the enterprise of building roads and railways. In tropical Africa where dense forests made many communities inaccessible, the desire for roads became something of a pillar of faith of the modernising, civilizing mission.

The physical road or railway brought together the twin axes of the colonial enterprise of commerce and civilization, which functioned as the justification for colonial conquest. After initial hesitation, local communities also became equally, if ambivalently, invested in roads for their own different reasons.

In addition to its promise of economic modernity, the possibilities of mobility roads brought forth were seen as limitless by local people, who dreamt of new spaces and places of gain, and of adventure and fulfillment. To each side, therefore, the road promised something materially and symbolically significant. This seminar will be presented by Professor Harry Garuba, University of Cape Town.

The discussant will be Professor Achille Mbembe, Wits University.

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Here, there and everywhere: Rethinking the urban of urban politics

Professor Allan Cochrane (Open University) will present this lecture hosted by the South African Research Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning.

Traditionally there has been little debate about the “urban” of urban politics while it is assumed that it is simply the politics that takes place within urban areas. But what if defining those urban areas is itself more uncertain?

In this lecture, Professor Allan Cochrane (Open University) will reflect on a range of different attempts to respond to the changing realities of urban existence, looking for a way of acknowledging the many spaces of urban politics. The challenge is to move beyond the narrow confines of pre-determined territorial geographies while recognising the continued significance of urban place.

Holding these two aspects of the urban together makes it possible to explore and understand both the nature of existing urban politics and the possibilities incorporated within them.

This event is organised by the South African Research Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning. Cochrane is Emeritus Professor of Urban Studies at the Open University, and held a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship between 2014 and 2016. His work is focused on cities and regions, their politics and policies.

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Energy seminar: Opportunities and solutions to address the challenges of non-refining wholesalers

Maurice Radebe, Executive Vice-President of Energy Business at Sasol and Executive in Residence at Wits Business School, will host this seminar.

The nature and structure of the liquid fuels industry presents substantial challenges and opportunities to new entrants. It is a high-volume, low-margin industry with a highly inter-dependent logistics infrastructure.

Despite these challenges, numerous opportunities exist for smaller players. Non-refining wholesaling is one such opportunity.

Maurice Radebe, Executive Vice-President of Energy Business at Sasol and Executive in Residence at Wits Business School, will host this seminar that will explore possible solutions to these challenges by addressing the following questions:

• How should the liquid fuels industry address the supply constraints in the country?
• How should the industry address the logistics constraints in the liquid fuels value chain?; and
• Is it possible to manage a successful operation in a high-volume, low-margin environment?

Speakers include: Nothembo Mlonzi, MD: Econ Oil; Nona Chili, CEO: Makwande Petroleum; Tseke Nkadimeng, CEO: AfricOil and Stephen Nothnagel, CEO: Royale Energy.  

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Ruzza Wazzi - "Stitch Me Up" Video

The Wits City Institute will host a screening of Ruzzi Wazzi's, "Stitch Me Up" video.

Ruzza Wazzi’s personal journey and quest evokes the deep-seated yearning for personal liberation and perspective which various migrants are confronted with.

It is trying to depict what it is like to live as a hybrid, in a constant state of being somewhere but not wanting to be there, of being physically in a place but mentally and spiritually elsewhere, of facing daily struggles but still hoping for something better, of being saddled with an identity which derives not from who you are but from where you come from and where you currently reside, and of struggling to find the tools and abilities to make sense of it all.

By exploring Stitch Me Up, through which Wazzi tries to transcended his daily life it also becomes an opportunity to marvel at how one can make a home in what is considered to be a transitional space within the city, how people find peace in harsh circumstances and how the tenacity to dream persists, even where no tangible pathways to liberation are present. This film screening is hosted by the Wits City Institute.

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Decolonising knowledge: A performance lecture

The Annual ST Lee Lecture will be delivered by Dr Grada Kilomba.

The lecture forms part of the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies Conference, titled: Decolonising Feminism.

In this lecture, Kilomba will explore forms of decolonising knowledge using printed work, writing exercises, performative narrative, and visual art, as forms of alternative knowledge production. Kilomba raises questions concerning the concepts of knowledge, race and gender: What is acknowledged as knowledge?; Whose knowledge is this?; and Who is acknowledged to produce knowledge?

Kilomba’s project exposes not only the violence of classic knowledge production, but also how this violence is performed in academic, cultural and artistic spaces, which determine both who can speak and what we can speak about.

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Imagination, politics, music and other spectacles with Vuma Levin

The Wits Centre for Diversity Studies will host this event with guitarist Vuma Levin.

Guitarist Vuma Levin's music is an attempt to interrogate conceptions of identity, nation, culture, power and being both globally and in the emergent, post 1994 South African democratic project. Levin has performed with some of the top musicians in South Africa at a number of top venues and festivals in South Africa and abroad. 

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Reading the bones: Forensic analysis and interpretation of bone trauma

Can we tell whether a bone fracture is due to a fall or a beating?

What is the importance of healed fractures in child abuse investigations? How do we distinguish between blunt and ballistic bone trauma? How can bone fractures indicate a particular cause and manner of death?

In this episode of Science & Cocktails Johannesburg, forensic anthropologists Ericka L'Abbé and Steve Symes will discuss the foundational principles used to evaluate traumatic injuries to bone and provide an overview of bone trauma and bone trauma analysis in the forensic sciences.

Through a series of case studies, they will explain how injuries associated with falls from heights, child abuse and beatings are described, interpreted and applied in a medico-legal context.

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The Scandinavian model: An interpretation

The Wits School of Economic and Business Sciences will host a seminar to be presented by Karl Ove Moene.

Moene is a Professor at the Department of Economics, University of Oslo, founder and leader of the Centre of Equality, Social Organisation and Performance at the University of Oslo. The economies in Scandinavia have for long periods had high work effort, small wage differentials, high productivity, and a generous welfare state. 

This seminar will explore the economic and political equilibrium in these economies and how they combine models of collective wage bargaining, creative job destruction, and welfare spending.

Moene will give an overview of the wage bargaining systems and how they fuel investments, enhance average productivity and increase the mean wage by allocating more of the work force to the most modern activities.

He will also show how the political support for welfare spending is fueled by both a higher mean wage and lower wage dispersion.

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Advancing health informatics by enabling and nurturing local talent

The Biomedical Informatics Unit and the Research Day Committee in the Faculty of Health Sciences will host a plenary lecture to be delivered by Dr Paul Harris.

Harris has over 20 years of experience working in the field of clinical research informatics. His lecture will provide insight into lessons learned over a decade of building, growing and supporting the international REDCap community.

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Journeys towards transformation’ science faculty teaching and learning symposium

This symposium will focus on the meaning of transformation in the context of the sciences and in relation to teaching and learning in science

In the higher education environment, ‘transformation’ is a concept with many different meanings. The above mentioned symposium, hosted by the Science Teaching and Learning Centre, focuses on the meaning of transformation in the context of the sciences and in relation to teaching and learning in science. The programme includes a guest presentation by William Mpofu, who is becoming well known for his philosophical ideas on decolonising, transforming and Africanising higher education.

Other speakers include the Dean of the Faculty of Science, Professor Helder Marques, and the Head of the School of Education, Professor Karin Brodie, who, as a mathematician, will use examples from mathematics in her presentation on Epistemological access and identity in teaching and learning. 

A student perspective on transformation will be offered by Noluthando Zuma (SRC), and the Faculty representative on the Transformation Committee, Dr Ida Risenga, will speak on the work and mission of the Wits Transformation Office.

Making up the rest of the programme, Dr Melanie Samson will bring the perspectives of a human geographer to the topic of ‘decolonisation and the science curriculum’; KayG Nhlengetwa will focus on transforming teaching in the Geosciences; and Professor Shane Durbach and Dr Paul Franklyn will share their work in the School of Chemistry’s Research Assistantship Programme.

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Architectural education @ all scales symposium

The Wits School of Architecture and Planning and the Architectural Education Forum (AEF) will host this symposium.

The symposium is hosted in conjunction with the South African Institute of Architects’ AZA16 Congress will host this symposium. The keynote speakers on architectural education will be Professor Baerbel Mueller of the Vienna University of the Arts, Professor Mark DeKay of the University of Tenessee and Professor David Andrew of the WSOA.

There will be Saturday morning workshops by Professor Lone Poulsen of Open Architecture on studio teaching using blended learning, and Dr Ariane Janse van Rensburg on a multilevel teaching model to facilitate a successful transition from school to university for students from diverse contexts.

The AEF discussions focus on architectural education in Africa and lecturers from Nigeria, Uganda, Botswana, Namibia and South Africa will present academic papers. It is essential to book before 27 August online. More information.

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On the numbers 1,3,8,120 and other Diophantine sets

The numbers 1,3,8,120 have the property that the product of any two plus 1 yields a perfect square.

In his inaugural lecture, Professor Florian Luca will show guests other sets of numbers like that, called Diophantine, provide them with an opportunity to ask questions about them, give some answers, and present several extensions and generalisations on the subject of “Diophantine sets.”

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AZA16 Conference

In its sixth year, the AZA16 conference and festival will focus on best practices, novel ideas and developments in the architecture profession.

Thought-leaders and visionaries in this space will delve into the challenge of ‘SCALE’ at this year’s conference. Co-hosted by Wits and the South African Institute of Architecture (SAIA), the conference reflects recent critical thinking on the role of architecture and includes masterclasses, workshops and presentations to address all points of scale. More information.  Programme. 

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Ruzza Wazzi - "Stitch Me Up" video installation

Stitch Me Up is an immersive video and music installation.

It seeks to document the experiences of Ruzza Wazzi, a migrant living in the tumultuous, liminal space of Hillbrow. Ruzza’s personal journey and quest evokes the deep-seated yearning for personal liberation and sense of self which various migrants are confronted with.

The combination of light, sound and visual imagery is used to attempt to depict what it is like to live as a hybrid, in a constant state of being somewhere but not wanting to be there, of being physically in a place but mentally and spiritually elsewhere, of facing daily struggles but still hoping for something better, of being saddled with an identity which derives not from who you are, but from where you come from and where you currently reside, and of struggling to find the tools and abilities to make sense of it all.

Through the narrative constructed by the music and visuals, Ruzza tries to transcend his daily life. The project therefore also becomes an opportunity to marvel at how one can make a home in what is considered to be a transitional space within the city, how people find peace in harsh circumstances and how the tenacity to dream persists, even where no tangible pathways to liberation are present.

It is thus a meditation on the themes of self, identity, home and belonging and a medium through which individuals’ relationships with the city and the spaces they find themselves in are mediated, performed and re-constructed daily. This event is hosted by the Wits City Institute. View the trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Crogwavtmng

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If black girls had long hair

The Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) will host this talk by Professor Hlonipha Mokoena.

Hair is once again at the centre of public debates about race, inherited colonial norms, the education of desire and female sexuality. To make sense of what is at stake, the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) will host a talk by Professor Hlonipha Mokoena.

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The Madala hypothesis and new scalar bosons at the LHC

The Mandelstam and National Institutes for Theoretical Physics will host a seminar by Professor Bruce Mellado.

Based on a number of features in the proton-proton collision data collected during Run I by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, the Madala hypothesis was formulated.

These features in the data were interpreted as being due to the existence of a new scalar, the Madala boson, with a mass around 270 GeV. A conservative statistical combination yielded a three sigma effect. The ATLAS and CMS collaboration have just released new data at the international conference ICHEP2016.

Prof. Mellado will summarise the reappearance of these features in the data that were used to formulate the Madala hypothesis, and its implications.

In particular, Mellado will discuss a prediction, namely of the production of anomalously large 4 W bosons, leading to a striking and unequivocal signature.

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Traditional glues and poisons used by San in Namibia: The archaeological implications

Professor Lyn Wadley will  present this seminar as part of the Archaeology lunchtime seminar series.

Wadley will talk on the use of traditional glues, adhesives and poisons used for composite weapons by the Ju/’hoan San in Nyae Nyae, Namibia and how archaeologist can use these traditions to inform the past. She is an Honorary Professor of Archaeology in the Evolutionary Studies Institute at Wits. Her research interests are the African Stone Age, cognitive archaeology, experimental archaeology and gender studies.

She is best known for her excavations of Sibudu, KwaZulu-Natal, and Rose Cottage Cave, Free State. She is listed on the Thomsen-Reuters highly cited list for the top 1% of researchers globally and is one of about 80 A-rated scholars from across all disciplines in South Africa. She was recently named the first runner up in the South African Women in Science Awards (Humanities and Social Science).

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Drama for life sex actually 2016: Revealing vulnerable bodies

Drama for Life is bringing critical, bold theatre into the public domain through its 9th annual Drama for Life Sex Actually Festival.

Hosted at Wits University, the Drama for Life Sex Actually Festival is a cross-community arts education, activism and therapeutic intervention.

The festival is curated in a way that allows arts practitioners and audience members to holistically engage with and interrogate the complexities surrounding themes of sex, sexuality, relationships, culture, gender, HIV and sexual reproductive health, within human rights and social justice discourse. The Drama for Life Sex Actually Festival 2016 asks: what does it mean to be vulnerable?

Vulnerability is exposing, daunting, dangerous and deeply embodied in our understanding of what it means to be human, to feel, and to be witnessed by others.  The 2016 programme offers young theatre-makers an experimental space to showcase their work. The full festival programme can be found online or on the Drama for Life Facebook page.

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Is ethics pivotal to transformation?

Join the Faculty of Health Sciences for the 2016 Steve Biko Bioethics lecture.

Justice Dikgang  Moseneke, one of South Africa’s leading jurists and recently retired Constitutional Court judge will explore the proper role of ethics in transformation, during the annual Steve Biko Bioethics lecture hosted by the Steve Biko Centre for Bioethics in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Wits. Moseneke was recently appointed Honorary Professor at the Steve Biko Centre for Bioethics.

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The spread of economic doctrines and policymaking in Postcolonial Africa

Professor Thandika Mkandawire will present this seminar.

The African Programme on Rethinking Development Economics, the Development Studies Programme together with the School of Economic and Business Sciences ( SEBS) will host a joint  seminar to be presented by Professor Thandika Mkandawire.

Mkandawire is former Director of the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development and the first person to take on the position of Chair in African Development at the London School of Economics.

He was formerly a Director of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Development Research in Copenhagen and has taught at the Universities of Stockholm and Zimbabwe.

His research interests are mostly in development theory, economic policy and development and social policy in developing countries, and political economy of development in Africa.

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The more languages, the more english?

Dr Andreas Hettiger will deliver this lecture on the contribution of languages to the internationalisation of universities.

“The more languages, the more English” – is  Abram de Swaan’s famous quote a realistic statement or is it over-simplified and exaggerated?

This lecture, to be presented by Dr Andreas Hettiger, Director of the Language Centre of the Technical University of Braunschweig gives an overview of the most relevant literature on the topic of “languages and the internationalisation of universities”, ranging from classics such as “Language Planning” (1997) by Robert B. Kaplan and Richard B. Baldauf to more recent publications such as “Scientific Babel” (2015) by Michael D. Gordin.

The topic is controversial and easy answers are not to be found. This is all the more true when it comes to a comparison between universities and their language planning in the European Union and in South Africa. Although comparing these two different academic regions has its limitations, this is exactly what this presentation aims to do.

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The digitalisation of (inter)subjectivity and its (dis)continuity with psychologisation

The School of Human and Community Development and the School of Social Sciences will host a seminar to be presented by Dr Jan de Vos of Ghent University.

De Vos will begin the seminar by speaking about neurologisation and connecting it back to psychologisation by critically examining the issue of neuro-education, and arguing that this shows, in an exemplary way, how the neuroturn is tributary to the psyturn.

Then he will look to the future and the digitalisation of education. He will observe that the rationale of the “Smart School” leans a great deal on psy- and neuro-arguments.

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The state, business relationship and industrial policy

Minister Malusi Gigaba will present the Alice Amsden Memorial Lecture

Malusi Gigaba is the Minister of Home Affairs. He was South Africa's Public Enterprises Minister and prior to this appointment, he was the Deputy Minister of Home Affairs for South Africa. Gigaba is also the former President of the African National Congress Youth League and a Member of the African National Congress' NEC. He is a Member of the National Working Committee of the African National Congress and a Patron of the OASIS for Hope Hospice.

About Alice Amsden:

 Alice H. Amsden, an expert in economic development who served as the Barton L. Weller Professor of Political Economy in MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning, died suddenly on March 14 at her home in Cambridge at age was 68. A prolific scholar, Amsden wrote extensively about the process of industrialization in emerging economies, particularly in Asia. Her work frequently emphasized the importance of the state as a creator of economic growth, and challenged the idea that globalization had produced generally uniform conditions in which emerging economies could find a one-size-fits-all path to prosperity.

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IHeartFest:Mindfulness Week

All students and staff members are invited to participate in mindfulness week.

The Development and Leadership Unit in collaboration with the Counselling and Careers Development Unit are proud to present the ‘#IHeartFest” which is a week long programme focused on Mindfulness and Kindness.

Mindfulness is a way to pay attention to whatever is happening in our lives. Whilst it may not eliminate adversity in our lives, it enables us to respond in a calmer manner that benefits our heart, mind, body and soul. The act of Mindfulness is a scientifically researched approach that essentially helps one improve their quality of life.

It is through this awakening of one’s Self that a week long programme has been designed in order to actively facilitate the process of becoming more aware.

The offering will be a tailored programme that will promote theoretic and practical methods to apply the practice of Mindfulness i.e. Yoga on the Lawns ( 6 September: 13:15), Active Mindfulness ( 6 September: 15:00), How to Understand Mindfulness and Observation ( 7 September: 13:15), Listening and breathing techniques( 7 September: 14:30).

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My contributions to the problems of inspection and replacement models in reliability theory

Honest Chipoyera, from the School of Statistics and Actuarial Science, will present this seminar.

Many research articles dealing with the problems of inspection and replacement models have been published in the last half century. Most of the research has focused on the problem of inspection and replacement models with an infinite planning horizon with very few papers dealing with the case of finite planning horizons.

Chipoyera’s research has tried to fill this void as well as look at the case of another class of inspection models (called hierarchical inspection models) which has been somewhat ignored. His ongoing work is centered on 1) inspection and replacement models which have imperfect inspections and 2) inspection and replacement models with inspections that take a non-negligible amount of time to complete.

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Green paper on international migration dialogue

Academics and postgraduate students across the fields of immigration, social science, economics and law are invited to attend a dialogue the above dialogue.

The Green Paper can be downloaded here.

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Invisible Disabilities Awareness Day 2016

Join the Wits Disability Rights Unit and the South African Depression and Anxiety Group to learn morehow to support people with invisible disabilities.

How much do you know about disabilities like mental illnesses, chronic illnesses and learning disabilities? Not all disabilities are easy to see! Join the Wits Disability Rights Unit and the South African Depression and Anxiety Group  to learn more about how to support people with invisible disabilities.

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Masculinities and community protests in post-apartheid South Africa

The Society, Work and Development Institute will host a seminar to be presented by Associate Professor Malose Langa.

For the past few years, violent community protests have been spreading across South Africa over access to basic services, such as water, electricity, housing and job opportunities. In this seminar, Langa will draw on two case studies in which in-depth group and individual interviews were conducted with key informants who many were males about violent protests in their communities.

This seminar provides a gendered analysis of community protests by focusing on Connell’s (1995) notion of hegemonic masculinity, which refers to cultural stereotypes of men’s ability to support their wives and children (being a breadwinner), keeping secret lovers, being decisive and having the final say in the house and so forth.

This seminar also discusses the impact of violent community protests on women‘s participation in local politics and lastly how community protests are associated with notions of violent masculinities through blocking roads, singing, brandishing pangas, sticks, guns, burning public buildings, houses of councilors, stoning police officers and looting shops owned by foreign nationals.

All these violent practices draw on the repertories of the struggle against apartheid, which raise questions about the current socio-economic factors that influence young men to become involved in violent community protests.

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Enhancing the quality of curriculum delivery in TVET colleges

Improving the quality of teaching and learning at the TVET Colleges remains a major priority.

The Researching Education and Labour (REAL) Research Centre at the School of Education is hosting a seminar to be presented by a researcher at REAL, Mary Madileng.

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Wits Writing Centre author events

The Wits Writing Centre presents two authors, coming straight from the Open Book Festival.

Daniel Browde, Wits alumnus, will talk about his new released and already popular book,The Relatively Public Life of Jules Browde, published by Jonathon Ball. The WWC will also host Shane Evans, American children’s book writer and illustrator. Evans will conduct a master class on writing for minorities and in different languages at 13:30 (early registration required).

Daniel Browde

Date: 15 September 2016

Time: 18:00 for 18:30

Shane Evans

Date: 16 September 2016

Time: 13:00 (Registration); 13:30 – 15:00 (Workshop)

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The resilient bank: Human touch and digitalised proposition – blending the best of both worlds

an Walsh, Senior Partner and Managing Director with the Boston Consulting Group's banking practice in London will present this lecture.

The Wits Business School (WBS) is proud to host a Master Class with Ian Walsh, Senior Partner and Managing Director with the Boston Consulting Group's banking practice in London. Walsh will explore the various stages to becoming ‘bionic’, and will unpack the latest thinking in banking, the impact of changes taking place in the industry and how new players are challenging traditional financial services. The Master Class will be moderated by Euvin Naidoo, WBS's Executive in Residence.

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Building community and local business through GIS in Jeppestown

Chantal Mann, an Urban Programme Manager for Bjala, will present this Geospatial Sciences seminar.

Jeppestown has a rich urban fabric. After the decline of the CBD in the 80’s and 90’s and further exodus of industry following the development of industrial centres outside the city, Jeppestown quickly became an important residential area for low-income groups.

Through both formal and informal conversion of industrial buildings, cheap housing is available at scale in Jeppestown. Like many urban communities, Jeppestown is socially fragmented, but Bjala, a Jeppestown social enterprise hopes to change this through GIS.

Applying the principle of Asset-based Community Development (ABCD) which purports that if organised well, communities have both the resources and know-how within their localised area to solve a majority of its social and economic issues, and with the use of participatory GIS mapping, it is hoped to establish a variety of data sets that can help to begin community organising through, amongst others, identifying building use, distinguishing formal and informal residential areas, identifying employers in the area and creating a platform for sharing local job opportunities and local labour (job-seekers), understanding social themes of interest and connecting people who are interested in the same themes etc. 

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An investigation into the ability of the reverse yield gap to forecast future inflation and economic

The seminar investigates the ability of the reverse yield gap (RYG) to predict future economic growth and inflation rates in South Africa.

Keren Gossman and Mark Hayes will present the above mentioned seminar. Gossman and Hayes found no evidence that similar studies on the RYG have previously been done in the South African context.

The RYG could then be a useful input for the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) in making monetary policy decisions, specifically for incorporation into the SARB’s core macroeconomic model. In their study, they tested for linear relationships between the RYG and economic growth and inflation over the period 1960 to 2014.

The results indicate that a slight linear relationship may exist in the case of economic growth, with the RYG based on earnings yields showing better out-of-sample forecasting abilities. Further investigation indicates that the linear relationship is stronger during times of economic upturn.

The results for inflation forecasting, however, show no signs of a reasonable linear relationship. The authors therefore believe that there is evidence for the SARB to consider whether the RYG can replace other economic variables in its core model without loss of predictive ability. Interestingly, this study found evidence to suggest that the RYG has an inverse relationship to future economic growth in South Africa, which is not what was expected.

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Old hats and new genes

The Carnegie-WITS Alumni Diaspora Programme will host a Faculty lecture to be delivered by Carnegie-Wits Fellow, Dr Robert Jacobson.

With half a century in practice, Jacobson has extensive experience in a wide range of benign and malignant blood diseases. He is currently an Affiliate Professor of Clinical Biomedical Science at Florida Atlantic University College of Medicine, teaching medical students and residents haematology and oncology. Jacobson hosted by the School of Pathology.

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An overview of the Cleveland museum of art's exhibition:"Senufo: art and identity in West Africa"

The Wits City Institute will host Wits City Institute Visiting Research Fellow, Susan Gagliardi, from Emory University to present this special lecture.

The lecture will include a discussion on the subject of Gagliardi's next book, namely the seen and unseen dimensions of West African power association arts and Mapping Senufo, the collaborative born-digital mapping publication that she initiated and is currently developing.

Gagliardi holds a PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles, and her research interests include: historical and present-day arts of West Africa, with focus on arts sponsored by Senufo- and Mande-speaking communities; practices and theories of power and assemblage, of the seen and the unseen, of secrecy, and of masquerade; patronage; museums and display methods. More information.

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Europe: Populism, refugees and the British referendum

The Wits Business School will host a public lecture by renowned British politician, activist and author Peter Hain.

Now that the dust is settling following the dramatic Brexit announcement in June, and Britain is entering a new political era, there are compelling and urgent questions around populism and the refugee issue that need to be interrogated. 

The Wits Business School (WBS) will host a public lecture by renowned British politician, activist and author Peter Hain, the Right Honourable Lord Hain of Neath. Brought up in SA his parents were jailed then banned and forced into exile in 1966.

Peter served in the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown for 12 years. As Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, he negotiated an end to the conflict, and as a staunch anti-apartheid leader, Hain was instrumental in stopping all-white South African sports tours from 1969 onwards.

An author of 21 books, Hain is Visiting Adjunct Professor at WBS. The depth and breadth of Hain’s personal and political experience internationally will make for an enriching and stimulating lecture. 

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Artisanal and small scale mining of gold in the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe: archaeological, ethno

The Centre for Sustainability in Mining and Industry will host a presentation by Njabulo Chipangura, PhD candidate from Wits Anthropology.

The presentation is based on his research work on artisanal and small scale mining (ASM) activities in the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe. The seminar will start off with a presentation and then a facilitated discussion in the form of Q&A.

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Psychoanalysis and social violence

Professor Stephen Frosh will present this public lecture.

Psychoanalysis has always been concerned with violence, both theoretically and as a consequence of its engagement with personal and social hurt.

In violent contexts, particularly those involving state violence, psychoanalysis can be haunted by the impact of past and present destructiveness in ways that creep into clinical work as well as institutional practices. This presentation explores the relationship between psychoanalysis and state violence through an example of a psychoanalytic relationship that founders on a history of violence that has personal and social ramifications.

He will argue that the story of this psychoanalytic encounter reveals the workings of an affiliation towards violence in psychoanalysis itself, and also references how political violence blocks acknowledgement, reparation and justice. Frosh is Pro-Vice-Master and Professor in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. He has a background in academic and clinical psychology and was Consultant Clinical Psychologist at the Tavistock Clinic, London, throughout the 1990s.

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the economy, inclusive growth and jobs

Minister Pravin Gordhan will join the 7th edition of the OR Tambo Debate Series on the economy, inclusive growth and jobs.

The Wits School of Governance, Department of Planning, Monitoring & Evaluation, Oliver & Adelaide Tambo Foundation and United Nations Development Programme in collaboration with the European Union will host the 7^th edition of the OR Tambo Debate Series.

Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan will join Marcus Cornaro (European Union Ambassador to South Africa), Thabi Leoka (Strategic Economist, Argon Asset Management), Jabu Mabuza (Business South Africa) and Dennis George (General Secretary, Federation of Unions of South Africa) in a debate focusing on the South African economy, inclusive growth and jobs. Cas Coovadia (Managing Director, Banking Association of South Africa) will moderate the dialogue.

Documents: 7th OR Tambo Debate Series Concept Paper for 22 September 2016 and  6th OR Tambo Debate Series Report. The 6th OR Tambo Debate Series was held on 17 June 2016. 

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Cities in the BRICS: What are we comparing?

The Wits City Institute will host a seminar to be presented by Dr Yan Yang, Wits City Institute Honorary Research Fellow.

When Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs invented the term BRIC in 2001, he was using it as an analytical construct to refer to large emerging economies experiencing rapid growth rates with the potential to change the nature of the global economy. In 2009, BRIC was used to refer to a political alliance. In 2010 South Africa joined the alliance and BRIC became BRICS.

However, South Africa had a small and slow growing economy, and BRICS no longer held as an analytical construct. By 2016, even the idea of the original BRIC grouping was no longer true – Brazil and Russia are in an economic recession, and China’s growth has slowed considerably, although India is the exception as it is still experiencing accelerating growth.

Today the BRICS is a diverse grouping of countries with very little in common analytically speaking. Across the BRICS urban processes and challenges are very different, and yet various forums and studies are investigating BRICS cities in comparative terms.

This includes the study on “BRICS Cities: Fact Sheets and Analysis” which Yang is project managing on behalf of the South African Cities Network (SACN) in a partnership also with the South African Research Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning (SA&CP) at Wits. As Jennifer Robinson has argued, comparison need not be about places which have obvious similarities. However, in the case of the BRICS there is one key point of similarity. The different and similar outcomes provide a key point of comparison between the cities in these countries.

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Youth and generation in South African historiography

Professor Clive Glaser’s inaugural lecture will look at concepts of youth and generational conflict in the shaping of South African history.

Glaser will argue that generational conflict has been an important feature of our history since the 19th Century and continues to be so. Using an inter-generational lens, the lecture will focus on the origins of migrant labour, urban gangs and, finally, youth political organisation.

Generational conflict and expressions of youth identity usually manifest themselves in a-political forms (at least in the formal sense of politics.) Rather than taken as a given, explosions of mass-based youth politics therefore need to be understood in specific historical contexts.

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5th Annual International Economic Law Update

The Mandela Institute will host the 5th Annual International Economic Law Update.

The topics to be presented this year include COMESA-EAC-SADC Tripartite Free Trade Agreement; Brexit-trade and regulation issues; and WTO appellate body-governance issues. The Update is aimed at academics, practitioners working in the fields of trade and investment, economists, attorneys, policy makers, and employees in government and civil society organisations. More information.

Registrations: Mandela-Institute-Events@wits.ac.za  or call (011) 717-8468 by 10 October 2016

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Beyond trafficking and slavery policy debate

Dr Joel Quirk together with eight other leading experts on modern slavery in supply chains will contribute to an online written debate.

The debate is convened by two leading academics: Dr Genevieve LeBaron, University of Sheffield Department of Politics (UK), who currently holds a UK ESRC Future Research Leaders grant and a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award to research the business of forced labour; and Dr Joel Quirk, University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa) Department of Political Studies, who is the author or editor of six important books on slavery. Dr LeBaron and Dr Quirk are editors of the Beyond Trafficking and Slavery section of openDemocracy.net, a London-based global digital commons with over nine million readers.

The debate is co-sponsored by openDemocracy and Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition (information below).

The debate will kick off an important public dialogue - between activists, corporations, and international organizations working to tackle modern slavery - about whether voluntary corporate efforts are enough to combat modern slavery, or whether a new approach is needed to effectively govern global supply chains and prevent modern slavery. The International Labour Organization estimates that there are over 21 million victims of forced labour in the global economy today, producing illegal profits of over US$150 billion per year.

Participants include:

• Anannya Bhattacharjee—President of Garment and Allied Workers Union (GAWU) and Executive Council Member of the New Trade Union Initiative (NTUI).
• Urmila Bhoola—United Nations Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery. @ubhoola62
• Anna de Courcy Wheeler—Senior Program Officer for the Freedom Fund. @Freedom_Fund
• Houtan Homayounpour—Technical Specialist within the Special Action Program to Combat Forced Labour at the International Labour Organization (ILO)(Geneva). @ILO_EndSlavery
• Hugh Helferty—Executive-in-Residence at the Smith School of Business, Queen's University. 

• Cathy Feingold—Director of the AFL-CIO’s International Department. @AFLCIOGlobal
• Ed Potter—former the Director of Global Workplace Rights at the Coca-Cola Company. @ed__potter
• Leonardo Sakamoto—activist, journalist, researcher and Director of the NGO Repórter Brasil. @blogdosakamoto
• Lara White—Senior Labour Migration Specialist for the Labour Mobility and Human Development (LHD) division of the International Organization for Migration (IOM). @IOM_news

The debate format will involve a first round of statements from participants published on September 14, 2016, with rebuttals published on 28 September 2016.

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Resource allocation in healthcare: the centrality of opportunity costs

PRICELESS SA in the the Wits School of Public Health will host a talk to be presented by Paul Revill.

Revill is a Research Fellow for the Team for Economic Evaluation and Health Technology Assessment (TEEHTA) and is the Theme Lead in Global Health Economic Evaluation at the Centre for Health Economics, University of York, England.  He was previously an economist at the Ministry of Health, Malawi, and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Global Health and Health Policy Management at Trinity College Dublin. 

His research interests revolve around the development of methods and applied economic evaluation to inform resource allocation decisions within healthcare sectors of low- and middle-income countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and related to HIV.  The underlying aim of his work is to ensure that resources committed to healthcare are spent in ways likely to lead to greatest improvements in population health and wellbeing, recognizing the complexities of real world healthcare systems.

Revill is a key partner in the HIV Modelling Consortium, a network of modellers and health economists that supports scientific decision-making on resource allocation in HIV.  He collaborates closely with the HIV Epidemiology and Biostatistics Group at University College London and has an affiliated position with the Medical Research Council (MRC) Clinical Trials Unit (CTU). 

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The fourth industrial revolution: Artificial intelligence and society

The 65th Bernard Price memorial lecture will be presented by Professor Tshilidzi Marwala.

Marwala is currently the Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Research,Internationalisation and the Library at the University of Johannesburg. He was previously a Dean of Engineering at the University of Johannesburg, a Professor of Electrical Engineering, the Carl and Emily Fuchs Chair of Systems and Control Engineering as well as the DST/NRF South Africa Research Chair of Systems Engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand.

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Chasing the trail of nitrogen pollution through the Anthropocene

Professor Chris Curtis will describe the evolution of the science around nitrogen deposition impacts in his inaugural lecture.

The effects of human activity  on the global nitrogen cycle (through fertilizer production and burning fossil fuels) form one of the defining features of the Anthropocene, to the extent that nitrogen isotope signals in remote lake sediments have been used to support the formal recognition of the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch. In his inaugural lecture, Professor Curtis will describe the evolution of the science around nitrogen deposition impacts, bringing us up his present day studies in the mountain regions of South Africa.

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In conversation with Sim Tshabalala

The Wits Business School will host an informal evening of discussion with Sim Tshabalala.

He is joint Chief Executive of the Standard Bank Group and Chief Executive of Standard Bank South Africa. Professor Imraan Valodia, Dean of the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management will facilitate the evening

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Humanitarian interpreting: Covering the last mile in interpreting action

The Health Communication Research Unit will host a presentation to be delivered by Professor Barbara Moser-Mercer (University of Geneva).

 Billions are being spent on humanitarian action, but the bulk of the cost for humanitarian response will be borne by local and domestic actors. There will be a mix of local, national, regional and international actors who coordinate crisis and disaster response.

But nowhere in this new humanitarian response in architecture is there any mention of how this diversity of actors will ensure smooth coordination across the aid spectrum and good communication with beneficiaries.

This presentation will unpack the challenges for humanitarian communication on the last mile, the expectations and hopes of beneficiaries, the standard operating procedures of NGOs and INGOs as they implement programs in the field, and identify ways in which humanitarian interpreters contribute to quality crisis response and how to support them in enhancing their skill sets despite operating in crisis mode.

The presentation will provide an introduction to the various dimensions of humanitarian interpreting and then engage participants in working on specific dimensions of the topic with a view to finding creative solutions embedded in international humanitarian law and that are responsive to the realities of fragile contexts.

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Invisible boundaries and the future of the customary

The Wits Institute for Social & Economic Research will host this event.

This day and a half event hosted by the Wits Institute for Social & Economic Research (WISER) will examine the ongoing transformations in South African rural societies and the afterlives of the Bantustan system in relation to the changing valencies of chieftaincies, customary law, land tenure, and new modes of subjection and patron-clients relationships.

The extractive and rent-based economy underpinning these transformations will also be analyzed as well as the cultural and symbolic shifts in the social order.

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National Health insurance public engagement

The Steve Biko Centre for Bioethics in the Faculty of Health Sciences will host this seminar.

 Does the white paper adequately respond to SA’s Constitutional Human Rights obligation?

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Ethical leadership : In pursuit of ethical leaders

The Wits Business School will host a panel discussion on ethical leadership, and the value it can add to an organisation.

The value of ethical leadership is well recognised and widely accepted as a very influential factor in addressing unethical behaviour and corruption. The importance of the role of leadership is supported by Chief Justice Mogoeng Mogoeng’s statement that “if there ever was a time to embrace ethical leadership, that time is now”, as well as the shift in the definition of corporate governance in King IV to “the exercise of ethical and effective leadership”.

The benefits of ethical leadership apply not only to an institution or organisation and its citizens or stakeholders, but also to the avoidance of the huge costs of fraud and corruption. More information.

Panellists include:

• Cynthia Schoeman (Managing Director: Ethics Monitoring & Managing Service)
• Dr Yondela Ndema (Chief Compliance and Ethics Officer: Sasol)
• Adriaan Groenewald (Managing Director: Leadership Platform & Leadership Activist) and
• Ansie Ramalho( King IV Project Lead: Institute of Directors in Southern Africa)

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Chick lit in a time of African cosmopolitanism

The Wits Institute for Social & Economic Research will host this seminar.

This one day seminar hosted by the Wits Institute for Social & Economic Research (WISER) aims to map the landscape, texture and colour of the chick lit genre in a transnational African context by creating a forum in which writers and scholars are in conversation.

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Globalisation and the impasse of capitalism: Harold Wolpe memorial lecture 2016

The annual Harold Wolpe Memorial Lecture will be presented by Professor Prabhat Patnaik, renowned Indian Economist and Political Commentator.

In this lecture, Patnaik will explore issues of income distribution in the world economy. He argues that the current globalisation, whose hallmark is the globalisation of finance, generates a problem of aggregate demand.

However, state intervention in demand management to head off stagnation as proposed by Keynes, is circumscribed under the current global regime.

He argues that nation states needs to intervene to manage aggregate demand. But this is only possible if nations delink from globalisation, something that the Left has failed to grasp because it has not come to understand the impasse that capitalism has run into.

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How food and nutrition security is understood and measured

The Centre for Learning on Evaluation and Results Anglophone Africa (CLEAR-AA) at Wits and the Wageningen UR Centre for Development Innovation, Netherlands.

Panellists include:

• Dr Caryn Abrahams (Wits); Dr Naude Malan (University of Johannesburg);
• Daniel McLaren (Studies in Poverty and Inequality Institute). 

The seminar will be moderated by Dr Marlene Roefs (Wageningen University).

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Profits and chronic disease: How the junk food industries damage our health

The School of Public Health invites will host a public lecture by Professor Rob Moodie.

In his lecture he will address the question Is junk food killing us? Moodie is Professor of Public Health at the College of Medicine, University of Malawi, and Professor of Public Health at the University of Melbourne’s School of Population and Global Health.

He chairs the GAVI Alliance’s Evaluation Advisory Committee, and is on the WHO’s Expert Advisory panel for Health Promotion. 

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Imperialism, global governance and resistance

Prominent Marxist economist and political commentator Prabhat Patnaik will present this lecture.

Patnaik will speak about how geopolitics, economic crisis and multilateralism's failures can be analysed and contested. One feature of the global economic and environmental crises still unfolding is the difficulty of their resolution through multilateral institutions.

Due to imperialist power relations applied to the regulation of finance, trade, commodity prices, labour and economic (in)equality, food security, military divisions of labour, and climate change, the multilateral system is dysfunctional. Multinational corporations and financial institutions remain the dominant forces.

Their systematic transfer of wealth is evident across Africa, including through chaotic minerals trade, illicit and licit financial flows, direct investments, labour migration and ecological degradation. But the system is unstable. Given the incoherence and incompetence of governance from above, what sorts of resistance sites, strategies and tactics are appropriate? Patnaik, will bring together with South African critics of imperialism, to compare notes on framing and resisting the next stage of the process.

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2016 Carlos Cardoso Memorial Lecture

‘If we give up, this world will deteriorate." - Investigative journalist Bob Rugurika will deliver this year's lecture.

As a student at Wits, Carlos Cardoso was deported to Mozambique in 1974 because of his support for the Frelimo government. He became a journalist, and while investigating political and financial fraud, he was assassinated in Maputo on 22 November 2000.

Bob Rugurika (38) is an investigative journalist and the director of the private and independent radio station Radio Publique Africaine (RPA) in Burundi. It frequently broadcasts information viewed as critical of the government, including detailed accounts of alleged human rights abuses and financial scandals.

The most recent investigation looked into the murder of three Italian nuns. The station broadcasted an interview in which a guest claimed to be involved in the murder of the nuns and implicated several intelligence and police officers in the murders. After refusing to say where the guest was located, Rugurika was arrested on January 19, 2015 and held for one month. He was charged with complicity in murder and breach of public solidarity. Rugurika was forced into exile after his release and continues to work as a journalist from Rwanda.

In the past years, Burundi has seen a shrinking media space, coupled with a government crackdown on the independent press. Rugurika’s arrest forms part of a pattern of government attacks on freedom of expression, particularly targeting journalists, activists, and members of political parties.

More about the 2016 Carlos Cardoso Memorial Lecture.

African Investigative Journalism Conference

The annual Carlos Cardoso Memorial Lecture is part of the prestigious African Investigative Journalism Conference, organized by the Journalism Programme of the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits University) in Johannesburg, South Africa.

It is Africa’s premier investigative journalism conference. The conference gives African and international investigative journalists an opportunity to learn new skills, hear about the top investigative stories and share experience.

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Photographs beyond ruins: The Usakos old location albums, 1920s-1960s

This exhibition will run until 3 December 2016.

 The Wits City Institute in partnership with historians Giorgio Miescher (University of Basel) and Lorena Rizzo (University of Bielefeld and Harvard University), curator Tina Smith (District Six Museum Cape Town) and photographer Paul Grendon, (Cape Town), together with the University of Namibia, the Museums Association of Namibia and the Municipality of Usakos  and the International Conference "Circulations": the (un)making of Southern Africa beyond and across borders” on will host this exhibition. 

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Anaerobic biohydrogen production at the thermodynamics limits for atp biosynthesis

Professor Vincent Gray will present his inaugural lecture on the above topic.

 Under dark anaerobic thermophilic conditions the maximum efficiency for biohydrogen generation by a single or multi-species bacterial culture is constrained by thermodynamic conditions to four moles of hydrogens (H2) per mole of glucose.

However, our laboratory has demonstrated that under certain operational conditions an anaerobic multi-species bacterial consortium in a fluidized bacterial granular bed bioreactor can generate more than four moles of hydrogen per mole of glucose.

Partitioning of dissolved hydrogen between mobile solid, liquid and gaseous phases creates conditions which are thermodynamically favourable for the reduction of protons by syntrophic bacteria in the absence of methanogens.

The explanation for this phenomenon is based on the hypothesis that if the actual Gibbs free energy for the coupling of syntrophic proton reduction with the anaerobic oxidation of acetate, propionate and butyrate is not less negative than -20 kJ/mol then ATP can be synthesized, and biohydrogen production will reach efficiencies that exceed four moles of H2 per mole of glucose.

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Perspectives on Africa-China reporting

Leading journalists from Africa and China gather to discuss their reporting experiences.

The Wits Africa-China Reporting Project (the Project), located in Wits Journalism, hosts the Africa-China Journalists Forum (the Forum) where some of the leading journalists from Africa, China and elsewhere will convene to discuss perspectives on Africa-China reporting in the context of their own recent reporting experience.

The Africa-China Journalists Forum: Perspectives on Africa-China reporting is a one-day programme to be hosted by Jeremy Goldkorn, host of the Sinica Podcast and founder of Danwei.

The event will also serve as the official launch of the Project’s new branding and identity. The event will culminate in a celebratory social with drinks provided in a marquee on the Library Lawns.

Open to all with an interest in Africa-China relations and quality journalism.

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Symposium in honour of Justice Dikgang Moseneke

Wits and UCT to celebrate one of the best legal minds in the country.

The Wits School of Law and the University of Cape Town will hold a joint symposium in honour of retired Constitutional Court Deputy Chief Justice and Chancellor of Wits University, Dikgang Moseneke.

Distinguished guests will present on key areas:

• Drawing the Line: Separation of Powers, the Democratic will and Judicial Public Engagement
• Doctrinal Transformation? Constitutional Adjudication and the State of the Law
• Freedom Fighters and Revolutionaries? Law, Activism and Justice

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Book Launch: Fees must fall

Wits University Press and the City Press newspaper will launch a new book edited by Professor Susan Booysen from the Wits School of Governance.

Wits University Press and the City Press newspaper invite you to the launch of a new book entitled FEES MUST FALL: Student Revolt, Decolonisation and Governance in South Africa edited by Professor Susan Booysen, Wits School of Governance. Join a discussion with Booysen and some contributors to the book Darlene Miller, Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh, Vishwas Satgar and Refiloe Lepere. City Press lifestyle editor and columnist Gugulethu Mhlungu will moderate the discussion. Book synopsis.

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14th Prestigious Research Lecture: “Art: do or die”

The 14th Prestigious Lecture will be presented by Professor Ian Sanne and Professor Francois Venter.

The 14^th Prestigious Lecture will be presented by Professor Ian Sanne, Director of Clinical HIV Research Unit and Professor Francois Venter, Deputy Executive Director of Wits Reproductive Health and HIV Institute. The speakers will provide insights into the history of access to antiretroviral treatment (ART), ranging from the pre-ART era to the historic 2000 IAS conference where the call for universal treatment originated. The lecture will also cover failure of HIV prevention, including the much hoped-for recent ‘’test and treat’’ approaches and how this has improved as well as the hope for new ART drugs.

More information.

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TM1 2016 Celebration

Professor Jill Adler and the Wits Maths Connect Secondary Project will celebrate the culmination of the Transition Maths 1 (TM1) course for 2016.

Lindiwe Tshabalala from the Gauteng Department of Education will be the guest speaker.

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Book launch: Sol Plaatje’s native life in South Africa - Past and Present

Wits University Press and WISER will celebrate the life and work of Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje through the launch of a new book.

Wits University Press and the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) will celebrate the life and work of Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje through the launch of a new book, Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa: Past and Present, edited by Janet Remmington, Brian Willan and Bhekizizwe Peterson. Sol Plaatje’s Native Life in South Africa was written by one of the South Africa’s most talented early 20^th Century black intellectuals and journalists. Plaatje’s pioneering book arose out of an early African National Congress campaign to protest against the discriminatory 1913 Natives Land Act. The book launch will take place in a form of a discussion on how and why Native Life came into being at a critical historical juncture, and how it can be read in relation to South Africa’s heightened challenges today.

Speakers include:  Brian Willan, Keith Breckenridge, Khwezi Mkhize and Khumisho Moguerane. The discussion will be chaired by Catherine Burns.

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Book launch: We, the People: Insights of an Activist Judge

Exclusive Books and Wits University Press will launch the book: We, the People: Insights of an Activist Judge, authored by Albie Sachs.

He will be in conversation with Zamandlovu Ndlovu, public commentator and author, about the value of constitutionality in the ongoing struggle to advance human dignity, equality and freedom. More information.

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Were business schools to blame for the 2008 financial crisis?