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.

Would you like to spend an hour in the peaceful calm of the Wits Art Museum, before you launch into your busy day? Mindfulness is developed through simple techniques that help you bring awareness to the present moment, rather than worrying about the past or the future. It helps develop emotional balance and provides insight into our habitual patterns.

This is a free event, however, booking is essential as space is limited. 

B. R. Ambedkar, radical democrat and state builder, in his critique of caste and untouchability, his unique sense of the modern moment in history and his reflections on the good and just society and polity, transcends his location within Indic as much as Anglo American traditions. How might we characterise these instances of concept-making? What do they tell us about the relationship between vernacular experiences and their English expressions? What acts of miscegnation helped to birth these concepts? Geetha address these questions in the context of a momentous event in modern Indian history: Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism, along with lakhs of his followers in 1956.

Two years ago, Dr Sue Walter was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a bone cancer that has ultimately forced her to stop practicing medicine. The cause that she has now taken up is to fight for the rights of people who are undergoing extreme irremediable suffering to have access to assisted dying or euthanasia, should they choose to do so. The court case is expected to be heard during the second half of this year in the Johannesburg High Court.

Dr Walter is a psychologist and medical doctor who graduated from Wits. She also previously worked as a Palliative Care Specialist. She established a palliative care unit in the private sector with the hope of exposing more HPs to the discipline. Dr Walter also established a Foundation called the 11 Angels which helps people that don’t have finances to receive palliative care.

The seminar will be based on the book, Studying While Black, an intimate portrait of the many ways in which students in South Africa experience university, and the centrality of race and geography in their quest for education and ultimately emancipation. This #WiCDSWednesday will feature a screening of the documentary Ready or Not: Black students’ experiences of South African Universities and dialogue on the book Studying While Black with some of the authors. Speakers include:

• Professor Sharlene Swartz
• William Mpofu
• Alude Mahali
• Professor Relebohile Moletsane
• Rajohane Matshedisho

This discussion brings together stakeholders from academia, business, and government to reflect on key issues and factors contributing to current developments in the South African construction industry. Various industry associations have expressed concern and investors are pulling out of big construction projects, while some engineers consider taking their skills elsewhere as armed gangs violently disrupt construction projects. The violence and intimidation has led to some major projects in the Eastern and Western Cape being abandoned.

For more than two decades Indian feminists have grappled with questions to do with a fractured feminist sisterhood, but through a conceptual lens that we have borrowed from the American context. We thus express our misgivings in terms of ‘intersectional feminism’, and even as we address questions arising from within recognisably Indian realities, of caste, ethnicity and region, we mostly reference conceptual work produced in a context that is quite distinct from ours. This mismatch is not unproductive, but it does not help us understand how, over the decades, we have engaged with ‘difference’ and ‘otherness’ – this history is yet to be mapped out or narrated in ways that capture the idealism of our politics of sisterhood, the manner in which we engaged with questions to do with ‘difference’ and our founded oversights.