Events

Celebrating the archaeological work of Professor Revil Mason, this exhibition recognises and celebrates the African deep past, and the role that African ancestors played in the making of modern South African society. As a history of archaeology at Wits; it is both a celebration of a life’s work and an opportunity to see history through the eyes of an archaeologist. Beautiful archaeological artefacts will be on display and you are invited to immerse yourself in the archaeological world through interactive exhibits.

Since its founding in 2009, WASSUP (Water, Amenities, Sanitation Services, Upgrading Program) Diepsloot, a community-based organization, in collaboration with Sticky Situations, a Johannesburg based organisation, has worked against extraordinary odds to improve water and sanitation services in Extension 1, Diepsloot. For over ten years, WASSUP has been repairing and maintaining communal toilet facilities in Extension 1. Working with limited resources, the co-operative has not only developed a sustainable and accountable repair and maintenance model, it has also developed a water tracking system that has helped to generate important data around water use and huge potential cost savings for the City of Johannesburg. WASSUP’s processes and practices provide scope for innovative best practice. The methodology developed is an easily adoptable model that can be applied at scale to existing City infrastructure.  On the 28^th March a report about the work and research undertaken by WASSUP will be launched in Diepsloot, wrapping up 10 years of community development, 5 years of data capturing, and a final push to local/national government to embed this type of program into existing systems – the findings are clear: it cost R20million to maintain the status quo, or R1.3million to fix it and stop the water loss. This session will present the work undertaken by WASSUP, highlighting and reinforcing the important findings and the pressing need for both governmental and private support so as to continue expanding the essential programme both within Diepsloot and to other parts of Johannesburg more broadly.

Jennifer van den Bussche is the founder and director of Sticky Situations, a Johannesburg-based collaborative organisation with a special focus on participatory and community development. A project manager with more than twenty-five years’ experience, she has strong facilitation skills complemented by a background in construction and architecture and extensive experience in community development, and uses these skills to create successful outcomes to a range of projects, including public art, public space and sanitation upgrades and multimedia exhibitions. van den Bussche studied architecture and completed a master’s degree in international and community development at Deakin University, Melbourne, and is also a research affiliate of the Earth Institute at Columbia University’s Centre for Sustainable Urban Design (CSUD), New York.

 

Despite evidence of widespread and persistent multilingual literary tastes, aesthetics, and practices, literary archives in South Asia have been largely monolingual or selectively bilingual, and have erased all but traces of their subjects' more diffuse multilingualism. This is true of pre-colonial archives, even before new ideas of language, community, and indigeneity under colonialism turned whole languages and traditions into aliens. Rather, in South Asia as elsewhere, attention to the multiple layers of informal as well as formal literary education, and to textual and contextual clues in the archives, help us reconstruct a richer and more connected picture of multilingual literary culture.

Adams was refused entry to Michaelis School of Fine Art at UCT because of Apartheid but went on to study at the Slade School of Art in London, the University of Munich, under Oskar Kokoschka and lecture in Art History at City University, London for 18 years. Although he left South Africa in 1960 he visited frequently and consistently returned to the depiction of themes related to his country of birth. His paintings, drawings and prints reveal a visceral expressionism, deep social commitment and searing commentary. Subject matter includes powerful reflections on the outcasts of society, incarceration, the dark side of celebration and religious imagery.

 

Brown is based at North Carolina Central University (NCCU) where his research areas include international law and regional cooperation. Among other things, he is an advocate and proponent of affordable education and economic development in African American communities. Professor Brown is also passionate about promoting Pan-Africanism in the African diaspora. 

Art galleries and cultural events in and around Johannesburg are open until late. Come and view Wits Art Museum’s latest exhibitions.

Unstructured medical notes, such as pathology reports and medical discharge summaries, contain a lot of information about patients. This information can be mined for potentially actionable insights to improve the care of patients and to improve health systems in general. However, information extraction from these medical texts is a challenge, which has sparked interest from both the natural language processing (NLP) and medical informatics communities. Subsequently, statistical modelling and machine learning approaches are increasingly being used in conjunction with NLP methods to extract relevant content from medical texts effectively and efficiently. In IBM’s recent work, the utility of machine learning in this setting was demonstrated through a case study where machine learning classifiers were built for the automatic labelling of free-text, breast cancer pathology reports, according to their International Classification of Diseases for Oncology (ICD-O) topographical codes across nine classes for breast cancer.

Archives typically do not mention contiguous literary subjects working in different traditions and languages, promoting a view of separate life-worlds despite noticing "curious" similarities. A spatial approach that actively looks for the "multiplicity of stories and trajectories" (Massey) and is attentive to the dialogism of utterances (Bakhtin), by contrast, can go a long way into explaining the utterances themselves and who they are in silent dialogue with. This lecture will present two case studies from North India: the "silent dialogue" between Sufis and Sants (devotional poet saints), and an anthology of modern writing on the city of Allahabad.

Global energy giant Total and partners have announced a major natural gas and condensate find off the south coast of South Africa. Named Brulpadda (Afrikaans for bullfrog), this substantial find “could be around one billion barrels of hydrocarbon resources, gas and condensate light oil,” says Total.

Ebbie Haan has 35 years’ experience in the energy sector: he worked for 26 years with Royal Dutch Shell on assignments in The Netherlands, Oman, USA, Gabon, Algeria and Malaysia, before joining Sasol in South Africa to run their global upstream business for six years. He now lives in The Hague, The Netherlands.

He will address the following questions:

• What are the characteristics and key risks in oil and gas exploration and development?
• What might the impact of significant oil and gas discoveries be on South Africa’s energy balance?
• What are the likely scenarios and timeline for potential development?
• Could this be a game changer for the South African economy? 

Professor Rod Crompton, Head of the African Energy Leadership Centre at WBS, will facilitate the discussion. 

This event will focus on the collection of book arts, which are artworks in the form of books rather than books about art. The Jack Ginsberg Centre for the Book Arts is a dedicated centre that has been established to accommodate the recently donated collection of 3 000 items.

Our special guest, Jack Ginsberg, will be demonstrating the wonderful ways that these books can inspire learning across the curriculum.