Wits University will be welcoming first years as well as new and returning students.
Meet the Vice-Chancellor and Principal, Professor Adam Habib, members of the Senior Executive Team, the Dean of Students, the Student Representative Council (SRC) and many other members of staff.
Parents and students will have an opportunity to engage with Witsies and explore the campus.
First Session:Humanities and Engineering and the Built Environment @ 10:00 to 11:30 Second Session:Science, Health Sciences and Commerce, Law and Management @ 13:00 – 14:30
Orientation week starts with Welcome Day on Sunday, 28 January 2018, and ends on 2 February 2018.
Click on your Faculty for the full Orientation Programme. Remember you and your parents are invited to attend Welcome Day on 29 January 2018.
Student Orientation features a variety of workshops and activities to address the needs of incoming students, including campus tours, meeting Deans, faculty representatives, staff from various support structures, a campus challenge, numerous campus resource seminars and many fun events.
The aim of the Orientation programme is to ensure students will:
Become more familiar with the campus
Identify the resources available aiding in their academic success
Begin developing relationships with our dynamic faculty and staff
Foster student engagement
Prepare students to navigate their new academic environment
The School of Electrical and Information Engineering will be hosting the 26th Southern African Universities Power and Engineering Conference (SAUPEC 2018).
This conference is hosted in conjunction with the South African Institute of Electrical Engineers (SAIEE). SAUPEC brings together academics and students in electrical engineering from the southern African region to present research papers, network and expand the fraternity that has been built as part of the SAUPEC legacy since the first conference in 1990.
The Southern Centre for Inequality Studies (SCIS) will host Gautam Bhan to present this seminar.
Bhan is a researcher at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements in Bangalore, India. He is the co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Planning in the Global South (2018)and In the Public's Interest: Evictions, Citizenship and Inequality in Contemporary Delhi (2016). He works on urban poverty and inequality both as an academic and activist, particularly on issues of housing rights and evictions.
The Psychology Department at Wits will host Professor Barbara Wilson, clinical neuropsychologist to present this brain matters lecture.
Practising neuropsychologists working in adult brain injury rehabilitation use a range of theoretical approaches in their clinical work. In 2002, Professor Barbara Wilson of the Oliver Zangwill Centre, Cambridge UK, published a model of rehabilitation arguing that rehabilitation is one of many fields needing a broad theoretical base incorporating frameworks, theories and models from many different areas. This presentation considers some of the theories and models, which have had the most influence on the field of neuropsychological rehabilitation.
Wilson is a clinical neuropsychologist who has worked in brain injury rehabilitation for 40 years. She has won many awards for her work including an OBE for services to rehabilitation in 1998 and four lifetime achievement awards.
The Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management will host a discussion on expropriation without compensation and what the law tells us.
Wits Property Law lecturers Professor Jackie Dugard and Nompumelelo Seme will join in the discussion which will be chaired by Head of School of Law, Professor Wesahl Domingo.
The School of Economic and Business Sciences (SEBS) will host this seminar presentation by Dr Nyasha Mahonye from Wits.
Mahonye will examine whether physical violence during pregnancy impedes the beneficial effect of pre-natal care on child birth outcomes using comparable and nationally representative household-level data from the IPUMS-Demographic and Health Survey for selected countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The quality, quantity, and adequacy of prenatal care are all considered.
Free webinar: Access to cancer medicines in South Africa
When:
Tuesday, 30 January 2018 - Tuesday, 30 January 2018
Where:
Parktown Health Sciences Campus Philip V Tobias Health Sciences Building, Faculty of Health Sciences, Wits University, 29 Princess of Wales Terrace, Parktown
Access to Cancer Medicines in South Africa: A live discussion and webinar
Kwanele Asante, Chair of the Ministerial Advisory Commission on the Prevention and Control of Cancer, will speak at this lecture, which takes place in the Senate Room at Wits University.
Other speakers include:
Malebona Previous Matsoso, Director General of the National Department of Health
Xolelwa Mlumbi Peter, Deputy Director General at the DTI to discuss intellectual property
Professor Paul Ruff, from the University of the Witwatersrand, representing medical oncology
James Love, international patent and access activist from the UK Union for Affordable Cancer Treatment, and
Sue Johnson, multiple myeloma survivor.
The lecture is available simultaneously as a webinar. To join Lorenzo Raynard (SKA) at ska-vc.tenet.ac.za, use any of the following options:
The Centre for Sustainability in Mining and Industry (CSMI) will host Dylan McFarlane.
Mcfarlane is Senior Program Officer working for Pact, a non-profit international development organisation established to improve the lives of those who are marginalised and submerged in poverty across the world.
The special seminar will start off with a presentation by Pontsho Ledwaba on ASM in South Africa. This presentation is based on a project funded by Open Society Foundation for South Africa. This will be followed by McFarlane’s presentation which has two parts. The first part will be an overview of the DELVE project – a World Bank funded project which is aimed at building an online database for ASM. The second part will reflect on the evolution of the placer gold industry of Alaska, USA. Collectively, the ~200 small operations are known as Alaska’s “sixth” large mine and produce around 90 000 ounces per year. Placer gold exploration and mining techniques have changed considerably over the years, and operators continue to innovate in order to target larger, lower grade deposits with more difficult mineral processing challenges.
The Narrative Enquiry for Social Transformation and the School of Human and Community Development will host a public lecture by Professor Corinne Squire.
Squire is from the Centre for Narrative Research at the University of East London, UK.
The lecture is based on a paper which explores the borders of education, recognising that teaching, learning and knowledge-making happens in socio-political and cultural fields whose contours are shaped by who educates whom, about what, and why. These issues are explored in relation to contemporary refugee issues in Europe, specifically addressing the informal ‘Jungle’ camp in Calais, northern France, where UEL students and staff taught an accredited Life Stories short course from 2015 to 2016, and other living contexts for refugees in France and the UK. The paper suggests, first, that this pedagogy, apparently beyond the borders of the conventional university, is in some ways precisely the terrain of the university and education more generally. Secondly, the paper argues that on this terrain, ‘education’ can be seen to operate in a number of different directions for different stakeholders – refugees, teachers, other volunteers, associations, NGOs, and state agencies. Lastly, the paper disassembles ‘education’ itself, in contexts where it is represented and practised as an ethical humanitarian response, one of a set of international human rights within both global and local contexts of inequality.
The talk will be followed by a round table discussion and workshop from 14:00 to 16:00 in the same venue for masters and PhD students.
Professor Squire will be in conversation with Professor Jill Bradbury and Peace Kiguwa to explore issues such as: conceptualising and designing qualitative research projects, the researcher’s role, how and why we decide to study particular things rather than others, the relation between data collection and analytic methods, ethical considerations, the relation between research and other forms of action and knowledge-making. Students will have the opportunity to discuss their own research proposals.
Drama for Life Theatre for Youth and Young Audiences Symposium
When:
Tuesday, 06 February 2018 - Tuesday, 06 February 2018
Where:
Braamfontein Campus East DFL Arts in Conversation Space, 21st Floor, University Corner [WAM], Corner Bertha and Jorissen Streets,
Braamfontein, Johannesburg
Professor Suzanne Osten, award winning director, will deliver a keynote address at the Drama for Life Theatre for Youth and Young Audiences Symposium.
The Embassy of Sweden in partnership with the University of the Witwatersrand Drama for Life, the Market Theatre Laboratory, and ASSITEJ South Africa, will be hosting distinguished guest, Professor Suzanne Osten, award winning director and playwright, and founder of Unga Klara Theatre Company. Professor Osten initiated Sweden’s first independent theatre company in the 60’s and has transformed the nature and status of children’s theatre in Sweden and beyond on issues pertaining to children’s rights, perspectives and politics.
During her visit, Professor Osten will deliver a keynote address at the Drama for Life Theatre for Youth and Young Audiences Symposium. The symposium will highlight practices and models in the field that endeavour to assist youth to find their voice, process the social challenges they face, learn about human rights and social justice discourse, and vision a new way forward. It will showcase work by the Drama for Life Theatre Company, which seeks to develop cutting-edge youth orientated performances about personal love, relationship and intimacy stories. Seminar and performance presentations will regard broader teaching, learning and research in the field, and engage delegates, in conversation with presenters, on the affordances of Applied Drama and Theatre approaches for youth development and social transformation.
Programme: Theatre for Youth and Young Audiences Symposium, 6 February 2018
DFL Arts in Conversation
Space
21st Floor
University Corner [WAM]
09:00 – 09:30
Registration and Tea
DFL Emakhaya Theatre
19th Floor
University Corner [WAM]
09:30 – 09:40
Welcome and Opening: Drama for Life and the Embassy of Sweden Representative
09:40 – 10:00
Forward: Alison Green, ASSITEJ South Africa
Theatre for Children and Young People: A Global Perspective
10:00 – 10:20
Keynote Address: Suzanne Osten
Children’s Rights, Perspectives and Politics in Theatre.
10:20 – 10:40
Performance Presentation: Faith Busika
Indigenous Knowledge, Language and Culture in Traditional Storytelling: Ntsomi
DFL Arts in Conversation
10:40 – 11:00
Tea
DFL Emakhaya Theatre
11:10 – 12:10
Performance: Drama for Life Theatre Company
Mainane
12:10 – 12:30
Presentation: Warren Nebe
Personal Story for Social Engagement and Transformation
DFL Yvonne Banning Studio
17th Floor
University Corner [WAM]
12:40 – 13:10
Presentation: Cherae Halley, Bongile Gorata Lecoge-Zulu and Jessica Lejowa
The Politic and Ethic of using Story for Activism
DFL Arts in Conversation
13:15 – 14:00
Lunch
DFL Emakhaya Theatre
14:00 – 14:20
Presentation: Hamish Neill
The Role of Applied Drama and Theatre in Education
14:20 – 15:00
In Conversation: Tamara Guhrs, Clara Vaughan and Namatshego Khutsoane
Facilitated by Jacqlyne Titus and Response by Suzanne Osten
Making Theatre for and with Youth and Young Audiences on experiences from the Market Laboratory and the Inner City School Festival and Drama for Life Mvuso School and Community Education Project
DFL Arts in Conversation
15:00 – 15:15
Tea
DFL Emakhaya Theatre
15:30 – 16:30
Performance: Drama for Life Theatre Company Interns
Insta-Grammar
16:30 – 16:45
Thank You and Closing: Drama for Life and the Embassy of Sweden Representative
The Steve Biko Centre for Bioethics will host its first 2018 Faculty Lecture to be presented by Professor David McQuoid-Mason.
McQuoid-Mason is from the Centre for Socio-Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
In this lecture, McQuoid-Mason will argue that public health officials and MECs for health who allow cancer patients to die because of a failure to renew service contracts for hospital oncology machines – without providing a viable alternative – may be found guilty of having the ‘eventual intention’ to cause such deaths and convicted of murder if the other elements of the crime are satisfied. Should the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) decline to prosecute them for murder they may still be prosecuted for culpable homicide. To succeed in such a prosecution the NPA would have to prove that reasonable public health officials in their position would have foreseen that a failure to renew service contracts for oncology machines at a hospital might deprive scores of cancer patients of early access to oncology services and result in their deaths. The lecture will end with an interactive discussion in which the audience will be invited to consider whether these principles could apply to the Life Esidimeni tragedy in Gauteng.
Fee: R200 sold at Origins or through WebTickets: https://www.webtickets.co.za/event.aspx?itemid=1478
The Origins Centre Museum will host an illustrated talk on the Origins Beads by Severa Rech Cassarino.
This talk will present a light-hearted look at the story of beads from when it sprang up in the midst of the survivalist lifestyle of Early Hominids, through its various roles in ancient cultures - Sumerian, Phoenician, Etruscan, Egypt and Ancient Troy. The talk will be followed by a practical workshop where you will create your own personalised love version of the Trance Dancer.
The Steve Biko Centre for Bioethics will host the annual Ethics Alive Symposium themed Justice, Equity and Health.
The Gauteng Mental Health Marathon Project (also known as the Life Esidimeni tragedy) has highlighted the lack of access not only to clinical and technical resources for patients, but also to ethical practice and care. Equity considerations include the promise of our much anticipated National Health Insurance and whether or not progressive universalism will be a reality in light of the current context.
Speakers include:
Pravin Gordhan (former Minister of Finance and current Member of Parliament);
Professor Malegapuru Makgoba (leading South African immunologist, physician, public health advocate, academic, former Vice-Chancellor of the University of KwaZulu-Natal and first Health Ombudsman in the country); and
Professor Elmi Muller (Head of the Transplantation Service at Groote Schuur Hospital as well as the Head of General Surgery at the University of Cape Town).
The next seminar in the Faces of the City series will be presented by Jesse Harber, Mamokete Matjomane, Alex Parker from the Gauteng City-Region Observatory.
This seminar is based on the research report Taking Streets Seriously which interrogates how what is considered good urban design and liveability of streets may shift in different contexts. The studies unearthed a complex interplay of actors on Gauteng streets, with street users, property owners and the state each operating according to their own, diverse agendas, contingent on the particular street in question. The result is streets that are chaotic, contested, and changing over time.
The School Of Statistics and Actuarial Sciences will host this seminar.
The seminar will be presented by R Lange and P Rumpelt. Since the concept of externalities was developed by Pigou in 1932, economists have committed themselves to analysing and trying to prevent the harmful external effects of economic activity on greater society. Despite this academic focus, the problem of externalities has not been completely solved. This point is most notably illustrated by the quandary of climate change, which threatens the continuation of the human species as a whole. This presentation will discuss why current methods for mitigating externalities are not succeeding and shows that a significant problem with the current methods is an improper approach to the handling of uncertainty. A framework for categorising and mitigating externalities appropriately according to their risk nature will be presented. The application of this framework is exemplified through a case study involving the valuation of a nuclear power plant. This presentation will also suggest that externality regulation should be informed by the risk nature of externalities and demonstrates how this could happen.
The Southern Centre for Inequality Studies will host this seminar to be presented by Professor Emeritus Edward Webster and David Francis.
The seminar will examine the reproduction of inequality in South Africa, with a particular focus on power in the workplace. It will present a critical analysis of how the post-apartheid labour regime has addressed (and failed to address) inequality in the workplace.
Alli Applebaum, South African Research Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand will present this seminar.
South Africa’s belief in its own exceptionalism within the African continent has a long history, and South African (white) middle-class identity has been, at least partially, constructed in relation to Africa as the ‘Other’. A large part of the binary construct between South Africa and the rest of Africa, in the eyes of the South African middle class, is the ‘modern’ infrastructure that typifies South Africa’s cities, as opposed to the perceived rural and chaotic Africa. Middle-class concerns about flaws in the South African road surface are so great as to shape the governance strategies for local municipalities. A key argument of the paper is that the predominantly white middle class hysteria about potholes is driven by fear that the white diasporic modern vision for South Africa, inculcated under apartheid, is crumbling. Tracing the historical and contemporary discourse of potholes in South African media, this paper uses potholes as a lens to explore the relationship between the middle class and the state, as well as the way in which the South African middle class construct their identity; express anxiety, and understand their position in South Africa.
This seminar will be presented as part of the Faces of the City series.
The Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) will host this three day conference.
This conference will investigate connections between histories that persist into the present and reflect on the role of memory in our understanding of political time. Click here for the full programme.
The Wits Transformation and Employment Equity Office will host Professor Shirley Zinn, CEO of Shirley Zinn Consulting.
She recently released her autobiography entitled Swimming Upstream: A Story of Grit and Determination to Succeed in which she shares insights into her life growing up on the Cape Flats, and the relentless pursuit of her goals in the face of significant challenges. The Transformation Office will be giving away 10 copies of Professor Zinn’s book.
The School of Actuarial Sciences will host Alwyn Grobler from Lightstone Property to present this seminar.
We are presented with many tools today that allow us to link different data sources, manipulate data, visualise data and ultimately add some kind of value through this process. This talk takes a look at general concepts telling data stories through visualisation with the help of Microsoft Power BI.
Drama for Life will host distinguished guest, Dr Phillip Speiser for a town hall presentation.
The presentation will explore the relationship between mental illness and substance abuse and the unique contributions that drama therapy can make towards treating and caring for individuals who are affected by these diseases.
Speiser is an expressive arts educator, therapist, drama music therapist, and “psychodramatist” who has developed and implemented integrated arts therapy and educational programs for over three decades. He is currently Director of Parkside Arts and Health Associates in Boston USA. Speiser has worked in the mental health and an addiction field for over three decades and has successfully integrated drama and arts therapies into mainstream treatment centers working closely with medical and mental health staff.
The NRF/British Academy Chair in Political Theory will host a public lecture by Dr Paulo Faria, Universidade Agostinho Neto.
African states reflect complex past and present political trajectories. This can be understood as entailing four interconnected dynamics and processes: first, a mix of hasty decolonisation processes; second, the battleground of fierce proxy wars; third, ideological struggles for the balance of power; and fourth, the rule of perennial autocratic systems sustained by domestic, international, state and non-state actors. On the one hand, this has deterred the blossoming of civic rights and rule by law, and on the other hand, fed into narratives about the paradox of plenty, social imbalances, and institutional decay as undermining the struggle of African states to guarantee basic political, social and economic rights to citizens. Yet, despite enduring power structures that often interlace with repressive impulses within existing regimes, an emerging pattern of change seems to be taking place across the continent. It is hard, however, to foresee whether the efforts to reform the African Union will help to address the gulf between power-holders and the people or fall prey to a complex web of vested interests. This talk is based on a paper that attempts to tackle the challenges and opportunities facing the continent.
The next seminar in the Faces of the City series will be presented by Crispian Olver, Research Fellow at the Public Affairs Research Institute.
The seminar will be based on the book, How to steal a city, authored by Olver. The seminar will explore different ways or perspectives for analysing city dynamics, and discuss some of the thorny ethical issues that confront researchers, including the role of the researcher as an actor within the city space. The book paints a world in which both heroes and villains share human frailties, questionable motives and endearing characteristics, and moral boundaries are not as clearly delineated as the author initially expected.
The Wits Sociology Department together with the Afro-Middle East Centre host this seminar by
Ayman Odeh and Mustafa Abu-Raiya.
Odeh is Head of the Joint List – a coalition of Palestinian-Arab political parties in the Israeli parliament. Abu-Raiya is a pharmacist and water specialist, and is currently the Chief Operating Officer for the Galilee Water and Wastewater Union. Their visit to South Africa is significant as 2018 marks 70 years since the declaration of the state of Israel and the catastrophic activities it took to consolidate its territorial control. The tour will include private engagements, interviews and lectures in Johannesburg and Cape Town.
The Wits School of Education hosts a lecture by Professor Karl Maton from the University of Sydney.
Maton is the Director of the Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) Centre for Knowledge-Building at the University of Sydney
Education brings together different knowledges and diverse students in a large number of possible combinations. Cracking the codes of success at any particular level, discipline, kind of assignment, etc. is a tough task for which some students are better prepared by their backgrounds than others. LCT reveals the organising principles of the diverse knowledge practices in which students must become adept to succeed. The lecture will demonstrate how teaching can use ideas from LCT to empower students by revealing the bases for achievement in different subject areas.
The Wits School of Governance (WSG) will host this talk.
Presentations will be made by Chris Rutledge (mining project officer with ActionAid South Africa); Makoma Lakalakala (a climate/energy project officer with Earthlife Africa) and Patrick Bond (Professor of Political Economy at the WSG).
In the wake of the African Mining Indaba, there is renewed confidence in the extractive industries, boosted by a 10% price rise since 2015's catastrophic crash. Several resource-rich countries in the region (South Africa, Zimbabwe and Angola) are changing political leadership from prior regimes considered highly corrupt. Yet these industries remain inadequately regulated, especially in terms of 'Resource Curse' complaints from civil society. As tough questions now arise about the net economic benefits of mining, in addition to many other grassroots and labour grievances, a rethink of the governance of mining is more urgent than ever.
The Steve Biko Centre for Bioethics will host this talk during the Ethics Alive Week.
Speakers include:
Professor Roy Thomas (Chief Executive, Kidney Wales Foundation) on Playing God in Organ Donation
Dr Shoyab Wadee (Nephrologist, Wits University and Donald Gordon Medical Centre) on Presumed Consent and Organ Shortage
Professor Magda Slabbert (Professor of Law, Department of Jurisprudence, University of South Africa) on Presumed Consent with Routine Referral
Professor Saraladevi Naicker (Chairperson - Ministerial Advisory Committee on Unrelated Organ Transplant) on Improving Kidney Transplant Rates in South Africa - Increasing Living Kidney Donation by Paired Exchanges and Donor Chains
The Centre for Applied Legal Studies hosts the launch of their third and final report in their Social and Labour Plan (SLP) Project.
The first two reports uncovered systemic problems in the existing SLP system that prevent it from achieving its objectives of transforming the mining sector and ensuring development for mine-affected communities. The report seeks to address these problems through proposing alternative and more community-driven models while also proposing immediate measures to improve the existing SLP system. The ongoing process of amending minerals policy and legislation coupled with challenges to the existing system by communities and workers mean that it is an opportune moment to discuss more people-centred alternatives.
Dance and Culture: Conversation with Vincent Mantsoe and Gregory Maqoma facilitated by Warren Nebe
This conversation aims to explore the contradictory circumstances of arts and culture in South Africa through the concerns and criticisms of the dance industry; asking: How do we create more space, access and resources for the retention and sustainability of this important art form?
Date: 7 March 2018
Time:12:00 – 13:30
Dance: Local and global: Conversation with Moya Michael and Steven Cohen facilitated by Nodumiso Msimanga: Dance: Local and global
Questioning the space for development and practice of the profession, both locally and abroad, this conversation considers the exodus of South African performers to places where their work appears better valued and more opportunities to grow and sustain their careers are afforded. It asks: What does this mean for the enhancement of the discipline from a local perspective?
Date: 9 March 2018
Time:12:00 – 13:30
Dance as activism: Conversation with Gerard Bester and Alan Parker facilitated by Lireko Qhobela: Dance as activism
Looking at the increasing value being placed on site-specific, participatory performance and experiential, experimental and innovative work with communities and across disciplines; this conversation considers the benefits and challenges of developing dance in alternative spaces. Reflecting on existing and emerging performance art, it raises questions around the value of alternative approaches and spaces for dance in our context, asking: What opportunities do such methods of creative expression and artistic excellence offer for continued and sustainable development in the sector?
Date: 10 March 2018
Time:12:00 – 13:30
Dance in contemporary society: Conversation with Robyn Orlin and Fana Tshabalala facilitated by Kwanele Thusi
This conversation explores new histories that are being shaped through the innovative integration of dance, multimedia, education, and community based performance. It asks whether the South African dance industry has fully recognised and considered the opportunity of interdisciplinary collaboration for the enhancement of perspectives and expressions of local and international issues of relevance in society.
Date: 12 March 2018
Time:12:00 – 13:30
Dance industry and festivals: Conversation with Musa Hlatshwayo and Louise Coetzer facilitated by Dr Ricardo Peach
This conversation intends to reflect on and review the position, sustainability and future of performing arts festivals such as the Dance Umbrella, which has run annually for the past thirty years in South Africa. With the increasingly challenging economic climate, indiscriminate political agenda and the growth of a globalised culture, the lack of local support for festivals of this nature is increasingly concerning. Considering this reality, this conversation questions the significance and contribution of the festival to South Africa’s dance industry, society and national policy drivers; and the implication of current realities for the continued advancement of and investment in the dance industry.
Professor Vishnu Padayachee from the School of Economic and Business Sciences will present this seminar
This seminar, hosted by the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies at Wits is based on a paper which aims to set out some key alternative macroeconomic policy ideas for further debate and research in the context of the multi-disciplinary approach of the Wits Inequality Project. Padayachee will ask what kind of macroeconomic policy interventions will be essential for growth and employment generation and to a successful struggle against rising income and wealth inequality in South Africa, and elsewhere. His assertion is that unless we have a supportive macroeconomic framework, many other economic and social policy interventions for addressing growth and inequality will likely fail to gain much traction or purchase for budgetary and related reasons.
Philip Steyn from ABSA will present this Actuarial Sciences seminar.
Mathematical statistics and applied mathematics dominated industry, drive insights into various problem statements to enable business strategy and decision making across many sectors in the economy. Techniques associated with statistical sciences have been the go-to skill to enable complex problem solving.
Metrics derived using statistical techniques have specifically enabled the financial sector to perform risk measurement and to support sophisticated risk management. The advent of big data created hype around roles aligned to new domains that do not fully align to traditional sciences and techniques.
The data scientist role is often viewed as a modern role that is overtaking statistical science’s roles and is linked to buzzwords like deep learning, artificial intelligence and data mining. The velocity of data is increasing, systems and processes are more integrated than before, data quality is problematic and modern data management approaches are more agile than before. This talk will briefly introduce key concepts and definitions to discuss how modern statisticians should leverage new technology, approaches and capabilities to thrive in business.
The Centre for Sustainability in Mining and Industry (CSMI) and Action Aid South Africa will host Professor Gavin Hilson to present this seminar.
Hilson is the Chair of Sustainability in Business at the University of Surrey in the United Kingdom. He is the leading global authority on the environmental and social impacts of the artisanal and small-scale mining sector. He has published over 100 journal articles, book chapters and reports on the subject. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Extractive Industries and Society Journal. His presentation will provide ASM lessons and best practices from an international experience.
Origins Centre in collaboration with the Wits Gender Equity Office host the launch of the book If I Stay Right Here by Chwayita Ngamlana.
The story follows the characters of a lesbian couple, Shay and Sip, who are very different in class, style, character and education. Shay is a journalism student working part time as an intern on a site that has no clear sense of direction. Sip is an unemployed varsity drop out and ex-gang member.
Their vastly different lives make it challenging for them to be the kind of couple they so desperately want to be. Unable to get untangled from the web they’ve created, Shay and Sip use money, other people and sex to fix things, but is this enough?
The Centre for Indian Studies (CISA) will host a talk by Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Professor of English Literature at King’s College London.
In this talk, she will use a range of archival sources to probe this long-standing explication of the connection produced through creolised social dance as ‘electricity’, while comparing it to another, equally persistent metaphor for explicating that connection, ‘contagion’.
Matthew Elan Smith, Co-founder of Pineapple will present this actuarial sciences seminar.
Born out of a global innovation competition, the Pineapple team are readying to launch their insurance offering which aims to completely overhaul the traditional insurance model. Their model revolves around transparency, technology and affinity to increase the value a policyholder yields from their short-term insurance purchase - a figure that is currently estimated at around R36 for each R100.
The founders of Pineapple have backgrounds in actuarial, software development, auditing and law. They will speak about entrepreneurship in the insurance space - touching on their journey, learning and challenges as an insurtech company in South Africa
Wits University Press will launch the book of Professor Vishwas Satgar’s book.
Titiled, The climate crisis: South African and global democratic eco-socialist alternative, this book reminds us that fossil fuel corporations, petro states and ruling elites are the key forces deepening the climate crisis. Only systemic change, led from below, holds out the hope for a safe and sturdy future. Discussants: Makoma Lekalakala, Zwelinzima Vavi and Ferrial Adam.
Wits Alumni Relations hosts a discussion with alumna Lauren Segal, the author of Cancer: A Love Story.
Segal has survived four cancer diagnoses. She emerged from this terrifying journey having learnt more about the power of love and community, about courage and hope, and about writing as healing. Historian, researcher, author, film maker, museum curator – as well as wife, mother, daughter, friend –Segal has always been attentive to the stories and needs of other people. And even after her own ordeal, she still feels a calling to connect and to give, by sharing her experience.
Professor Felix Maringe will present this seminar during the Wits School of Education Research Weekend.
Postgraduate research supervision is at the heart of the knowledge production project of universities. However, significant weaknesses characterise the supervision enterprise. Based on research conducted in both African and European countries and on personal experience as both a supervisor and supervisee, the presentation explores the meanings of ‘doctorateness’, models of doctoral supervision, their strengths and weaknesses and ends with a range of strategic options for strengthening supervision at both institutional and national levels.
Njogu Morgan, post-doctoral researcher at the South African Research Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning will present this seminar.
This presentation bridges the gap in Johannesburg’s transportation history by providing an overview of everyday cycling in Johannesburg from the late 1880s, to 2016. It provides a trajectory of utility cycling in Johannesburg through five interrelated lenses drawn from the cycling literature and transitions studies. Using this framework, it shows that while oft-cited transport determinants such as urban form, land use and allocations in traffic policy can shed light on the story of the bicycle in Johannesburg, alone they provide limited insights. To complete the narrative, more attention is paid to the changing social appraisal of bicycles and cars, activities of social movements, and nature of other transport alternatives within the changing social, economic and political context of South Africa.
To celebrate the launch of the Sibanye-Stillwater Digital Mining Laboratory (DigiMine), the Wits Mining Institute will host a seminar showcasing DigiMine’s rese
Keynotes will be presented by two of DigiMine’s key partners: the National University of Sciences and Technology in Pakistan, and Sibanye-Stillwater who will give their view of mine digitisation in the 21st century. Postgraduate research students and partner organisations will also present. Register online
The Wits Library will celebrate the annual South African Library Week.
The Library and Information Association of South Africa (LIASA) is celebrating South African Library Week from 16 –23 March 2018 with the theme Libraries: heart of the Community.
Speakers include Leyla Tavernaro-Haidarian, a media professional and communication specialist and Nomoya Mahlangu, author of No Chains Around My Feet: Running as a Metaphor for Life.
Lisa Österling, from Stockholm University will present this research seminar.
In this seminar, Österling presents an analysis of observation protocols from six universities insix countries: Sweden, South Africa, England, Rwanda, Singapore and Canada. The protocols convey a view of what is desired from teaching or from the teachers. The findings contain interesting and surprising similarities and differences.
The Journalism and Media Lab (JAMLAB) will host this panel discussion on the future of journalism.
The past 12 months have been extraordinary for the news industry, both in South Africa and the rest of the continent. In South Africa we saw the exposure of the 'Guptabots' and the leaking of the Gupta emails, the closure of the print edition of The Times, a new board and a strike at the SABC. Wits Journalism's State of the Newsroom Report for 2017 captures many of these events. The public role and the business of news and information organisations and professionals are being hacked. On one side there are Google and Facebook that are taking the majority of digital advertising and social media to increasingly dominate news distribution. On the other side is a growing and fluid range of factors - from commercial pseudo-news sites to highly organised AI supported campaigns - aiming to blur the lines between real and fake and in some cases to actively discredit and threaten journalists. The threat is clear - the undermining of the relationship between news organisations and their audiences.
Christa Kuljian, Research Associate at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, will present this talk.
Scientific research is often shaped by the prevailing social and political context at the time. This is especially true for the search for human origins. Kuljian recounts the colonial practice in Europe, the US and South Africa of collecting human skeletons and cataloguing them into racial types, in the hope that they would provide clues to human evolution. She sheds light on how, during apartheid, the concept of racial classification mirrored the way in which many scientists thought about race and human evolution. In more recent years, the field has been shaped by a more open and diverse approach. Kuljian examines current developments in the search for human origins, and uncovers stories that shed new light on the past.
The Golden Key Wits Chapter will host this Thinkers Symposium.
The symposium will focus on functionality of South Africa’s democracy. The country has in the last five years become increasingly knowledgeable on the various inner workings of democratic institutions such as parliament, the Office of the Public Protector and the Constitutional Court that has lifted the profile of these institutions and impacted the political landscape. The symposium will serve as a platform for dialogue on whether these institutions are doing enough to serve ordinary citizens. The Thinkers Symposium also seeks to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the South African democracy and hopes to encourage participants to further engage in conversations around democracy beyond the symposium.
The Wits School of Arts (WSOA), Film and TV Division will host a special screening of the film, Vaya, directed by Akin Omotoso.
The film weaves three separate plots in a gripping, edgy and deeply moving story about coming to the city and the struggles to survive in the metropolis. It is about strangers who never meet, until they share a moment when all their lives explode and change forever. A post screening discussion will be held with Omotoso and producer, Rethabile Mothobi, a former Wits student.
Professor Jackie Dugard from the Wits School of Law will present this seminar hosted by the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies.
During 2017, politicians from an increasingly embattled African National Congress (ANC) government began publicly calling for radical economic transformation. Such calls, however politically cynical and undefined, occur against the devastating reality of widening and persistently racialised socio-economic inequality. Among underlying determinants of inequality, one of the issues that has dominated socio-political discourse in recent years has been unequal access to property and especially land. This gave rise to the ANC's resolution in December 2017, as well as the resolution in the National Assembly in February 2018, regarding the expropriation of land without compensation. At the heart of public discussion over land has been contestation over Section 25 of the Constitution, the ‘property clause’, which is widely perceived to be an obstacle to transformation. Section 25’s Janus-like character has given rise to a schizophrenic public discourse in which, at the same time as there are calls to scrap Section 25, many poor people and communities are appealing to the government to speed up private property titling processes, and property owners are voicing anxiety about their rights. It is against this backdrop, and particularly in the context of the Constitution’s transformative objective to ‘improve the quality of life of all citizens’ and advance the ‘achievement of equality’, that there is a need to examine the extent to which Section 25 is an obstacle or engine for socio-economic transformation in South Africa.
The Steve Biko Centre for Bioethics will host this lecture by Dr Nancy Jecker.
The value of respect for individual autonomy occupies a privileged place in the United States and many other Western nations. Yet autonomy’s significance may be waning as populations around the globe become increasingly geriatric, dependent and vulnerable to cognitive and physical impairments. A more central value in later life is respect for dignity. This presentation discusses how to preserve dignity in old age in the face of threats including social isolation, functional decline and overly aggressive and futile medical treatment.
Drama for Life presents the 2018 South African Theatre Season.
Themed Future Roots: Young, gifted and Black, the South African Theatre Season seeks to spark and grow the creative and entrepreneurial capacity of the young independent artists. The Season’s structural focus enforces not only the creation and offering of a platform for young independent artists to perform but also offers workshops and conversations aimed at stimulating and probing the creative economy through a youth centred approach.
Professor Imraan Valodia, Dean of the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management will present his inaugural lecture.
In his inaugural lecture Valodia will reflect on the role of an economist in shaping policies aimed at reducing inequality. He will focus on three policy issues that have played some role in guiding ‘academic discussions’ to actual policy recommendations. These are the proposal for a National Minimum Wage in South Africa; the proposed amendments to the Competition Act; and finally, the proposal to increase the rate of VAT from 14% to 15%.
The Aeronautical Society of South Africa presents the 2018 John Weston Memorial lecture by Professor Beric Skews.
This event honours John Weston, a South African aeronautical engineer, pioneering aviator, farmer and soldier. In 1911 Weston founded the Aeronautical Society of South Africa (AESSA). Skews founded the only aeronautical engineering degree course in South Africa within the School of Mechanical, Industrial and Aeronautical Engineering. He is also the founder/director of the Flow Research Unit.
Flow Wellington brings her anticipated collection, GauTrained to the Wits Writing Centre (WWC).
This book is a retrospective journey of life in Johannesburg, looking at the dreams we are sold to the harsh realities one faces in order to make it in the big city. Wellington moved to Johannesburg in 2011 and discovered that all that glitters are definitely not gold. In her poems and stories, she takes us deep into the underbelly of Joburg and shows us how Gauteng eventually trains you in so many ways. Join the WWC for a discussion on migration, abuse, poverty and rising above adversity.
Dr Inger Fabris-Rotelli from the University of Pretoria will present this mathematical statistics seminar.
The LULU smoothers result in a decomposition of an image called the Discrete Pulse Transform. This decomposition is multi-scale and provides structure information of the image at every scale, useful information for various image processing applications. In this talk, Fabris-Rotelli will show two applications: one for smoothing of an image using the median and a texture modelling approach in spatial statistics.
Professor Scott Madry from the University of North Carolina will present this Geospatial Sciences seminar.
Historical data are becoming more widely seen as a source of valuable data for a wide variety of GIS analysis purposes and academic disciplines. This brief presentation will provide some lessons learned in several years of working with historical cartographic data in GIS. Several technical issues involving methods of georegistration will be addressed, including an improved method of registration developed by the author. Examples will be shown from several research projects, including our 30 year investigation in Burgundy, France.
SWOP, the Department Of Sociology and the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies will host the launch of a new book by Ching Kwan Lee.
China has recently emerged as one of Africa’s top business partners, aggressively pursuing its raw materials and establishing a mighty presence in the continent’s booming construction market. Among major foreign investors in Africa, China has stirred the most fear, hope, and controversy. For many, the specter of a Chinese neocolonial scramble is looming, while for others China is Africa’s best chance at economic renewal. Yet, global debates about China in Africa have been based more on rhetoric than on empirical evidence. Lee’s book is the first comparative ethnographic study that addresses the critical question: Is Chinese capital a different kind of capital?
The Society, Work and Development Institute and Wits University Press will host the launch of a book, Writing the ancestral river by Professor Jacklyn Cock.
This biography of a river shows how the ravages of the past are congealed in the present. The Kowie River runs through the center of what was known as ‘the Zuurveld’, the area between the Fish and Sundays rivers which was the crucible of settler colonialism. During 100 years of conflict the amaXhosa were dispossessed of their land and livelihoods, defeated and absorbed into the settler economy as a source of cheap labour. Today this pattern continues as most of the African population of the area still do not own the land on which they live, and are denied the resources necessary for a dignified and productive life. The area of the Zuurveld, now called Ndlambe Municipality is one of the poorest parts of South Africa.
Professor Martijn van den Heuvel from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam will present this talk
Using network science as a general framework to study the network architecture of nervous system connectivity, more and more studies have highlighted that human and animal brains display features of an efficient communication network. In this talk, Van den Heuvel will discuss potential general principles of wiring of connectome organisation. These principles are conserved across species and are argued to play a fundamental role in nervous system functioning. He will highlight findings that show that connectomes display an efficient communication structure with pronounced community organisation for specialised processing, together with global short communication relays and a central 'rich club core’. He will also discuss the evolutionary importance of the connectome, how the macroscale connectome may be related to the microanatomy of the brain, and how general themes of wiring may play a role in the aetiology of a wide range of psychiatric disorders.
Dr Alexandre Apsan Frediani, Senior Lecturer, University College London, will present this Faces of the City seminar.
This presentation discusses the book project titled: Cities for Human Development: A capability perspective to city-making. The book intends to establish links between literature on human development and capability approach with critical urban theory debates, exploring the interface between justice and urban development. An analytical framework drawing on Amartya Sen’s work is proposed in its introduction, and then each element of the framework is examined in the following chapters through the use of eight different case studies. The book focuses on civic-led practices of city-making, and explores their role in expanding the capabilities of marginalised urban dwellers. This seminar will introduce the book's objectives and structure, with a focus on the tensions and challenges the author is facing in addressing the book’s proposed objectives.
The Centre for Applied Legal Studies (CALS) will host this panel discussion.
New evidence shows that two European banks were at the centre of the apartheid era international arms money laundering machinery. For nearly two decades, Belgium’s Kredietbank and its subsidiary in Luxembourg were responsible for facilitating up to 70% of all illegal arms transactions that allowed the apartheid government to secretly buy weapons despite mandatory UN arms sanctions. These and other banks have never been held accountable for their role in supporting apartheid. In the face of this widespread impunity, is there any way to hold these financial giants to account? Open Secrets, in partnership with CALS, is taking the fight for accountability for historic economic crimes to the banks’ doorstep in Europe using international accountability frameworks. Speakers include Michael Marchant (Investigations and Advocacy Researcher at Open Secrets); Khuraisha Patel (Legal Researcher at Open Secrets) and Wandisa Phama (Head of Business and Human Rights at CALS)
The Wits City Institute ( WCI)and the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (CISA) hosts this honorary research fellow seminar by Melissa Myambo.
In 2008 and 2015, South Africa’s most deadly and violent xenophobic attacks erupted. Dozens of people were killed and thousands displaced. The dominant storyline in the media and the academy cast the figure of the migrant as the perpetual victim of xenophobia. There was not enough emphasis on nuancing that statement to indicate that it is not all migrants who run the risk of deadly xenophobia even if xenophobia is pervasive at all levels of South African society. Deadly attacks only took place in specific microspaces, or Cultural Time Zones (CTZs). Those living in the CTZ of the informal settlement were most vulnerable. Few migrants who live and work in economically privileged CTZs like the suburbs became victims of violence. In this seminar, Myambo will attempy to examine the relationship between (micro)space and migrant experience. Through an analysis of Jo’burg as a cluster of radically different CTZs where language, skin colour, race/ethnicity, education, socio-economic class etc. function in different ways to impact the migrant experience, Myambo will try to uncover the nuanced reasons why working-class migrants who work and live in socio-economically deprived CTZs may experience intense xenophobia whilst middle-class professionals, especially those from Western countries, often enjoy high levels of xenophilia.
Myambo is an Honorary Research Fellow at WCI and Visiting Researcher at CIS
The Wits City Institute will host this seminar by Jonathan Cane, postdoctoral fellow at the Institute.
This seminar is based on a draft chapter which intends to account for the unique rejection of high-rise housing solutions for poor black urbanites in South Africa in the mid-twentieth century. What was then called the ‘native housing problem’ was dealt with by extensive CIAM-type research into low-rise detached bungalows which resulted in the infamous 1951 design template that has proliferated across the country until this day. Whereas, internationally the mid-century high-rise block came to stand as low-income housing, including in other parts of southern Africa (Southern Rhodesia, for instance), in South African the ‘match-box’ house or NE51 continues to both over-determine ways of building and has lead to low-density low-rise planning and continued urban segregation. The chapter aims to (a) account for this historical anomaly and to place South Africa apartheid-era planning in world-historical context and to respond to histories of high-rise low-income planning internationally; and (b) to extend the discourse of verticality and to provide Southern postcolonial contributions to the debate.
Professor Herman Wasserman's new book about South Africa's new media presence against the backdrop of rapidly changing geopolitics will be launched.
The Department of Media Studies at Wits and UCT Press will the launch the book: Media, Geopolitics and Power – a view from the global South byProfessor Herman Wasserman (UCT). Wasserman will be in conversation with Thabo Leshilo.
A conversation with Suzanne Venter facilitated by Leane Meiring. Venter is a senior investigative journalist at Rapport and winner of the prestigious Taco Kuiper prize for investigative journalism. Her work in the weekly Sunday newspaper inevitably resulted in an official inquiry by the health ombudsman and pushed the plight of psychiatric patients onto the national agenda after being severely neglected by the government.
About the Drama for Life Arts in Conversation Series
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines mental health as “a state of well-being in which every individual realizes his or her own potential, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to her or his community” (WHO, 2014). This definition of health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” highlights the intersectional relationship between mental health and human rights (WHO, 2014). It stresses the need to further investigate the connection in the academic sphere, to actively promote national debate around the fact that a serious neglect of mental health is present despite the protective policies and legislative frameworks offered by our constitution and the Mental Health Care Act of 2002.
With at least 141 psychiatric patients dead after being moved from the Life Esidimeni (meaning place of dignity) facility to various NGOs in Gauteng, it is clear that as South Africans we are witnessing a humanitarian crisis brought on by serious human rights violations of vulnerable groups living with psychosocial disabilities. This human tragedy has been called ‘the greatest human rights violation committed by the state since the dawn of our democracy’. In order for the healing processes to take root, deepen and become transformative, our social relationships, systems and structures have to change” (Nebe, 2016: 3-4). Our psychosocial condition is one of dislocation, which regardless of race or class, comes out of a socially constructed reality, based on the betrayal of the human spirit…In order for us to bring about a genuine healing in South Africa, we have to re-think our professions in terms of mental healthcare (Vetten, 2005). Through these conversations “Drama for Life aims to bring down the imagined binary walls that exist between the personal and the political, the psychological and the sociological” (Nebe, 2016: 5).
A conversation with Coralie Trotter facilitated by Warren Nebe. This conversation looks at the socio-political influences at the points of intersection between mental health and human rights, and the psychological impact of such human rights violations.
About the Drama for Life Arts in Conversation Series
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines mental health as “a state of well-being in which every individual realizes his or her own potential, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to her or his community” (WHO, 2014). This definition of health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” highlights the intersectional relationship between mental health and human rights (WHO, 2014). It stresses the need to further investigate the connection in the academic sphere, to actively promote national debate around the fact that a serious neglect of mental health is present despite the protective policies and legislative frameworks offered by our constitution and the Mental Health Care Act of 2002.
With at least 141 psychiatric patients dead after being moved from the Life Esidimeni (meaning place of dignity) facility to various NGOs in Gauteng, it is clear that as South Africans we are witnessing a humanitarian crisis brought on by serious human rights violations of vulnerable groups living with psychosocial disabilities. This human tragedy has been called ‘the greatest human rights violation committed by the state since the dawn of our democracy’. In order for the healing processes to take root, deepen and become transformative, our social relationships, systems and structures have to change” (Nebe, 2016: 3-4). Our psychosocial condition is one of dislocation, which regardless of race or class, comes out of a socially constructed reality, based on the betrayal of the human spirit…In order for us to bring about a genuine healing in South Africa, we have to re-think our professions in terms of mental healthcare (Vetten, 2005). Through these conversations “Drama for Life aims to bring down the imagined binary walls that exist between the personal and the political, the psychological and the sociological” (Nebe, 2016: 5).
A conversation with the internationally acclaimed Gregory Maqoma facilitated by Refiloe Lepere. This conversation engages these artists, human rights activists and academics on their creative iterations and approaches to address mental health and human rights issues.
About the Drama for Life Arts in Conversation Series
The World Health Organization (WHO) defines mental health as “a state of well-being in which every individual realizes his or her own potential, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to her or his community” (WHO, 2014). This definition of health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” highlights the intersectional relationship between mental health and human rights (WHO, 2014). It stresses the need to further investigate the connection in the academic sphere, to actively promote national debate around the fact that a serious neglect of mental health is present despite the protective policies and legislative frameworks offered by our constitution and the Mental Health Care Act of 2002.
With at least 141 psychiatric patients dead after being moved from the Life Esidimeni (meaning place of dignity) facility to various NGOs in Gauteng, it is clear that as South Africans we are witnessing a humanitarian crisis brought on by serious human rights violations of vulnerable groups living with psychosocial disabilities. This human tragedy has been called ‘the greatest human rights violation committed by the state since the dawn of our democracy’. In order for the healing processes to take root, deepen and become transformative, our social relationships, systems and structures have to change” (Nebe, 2016: 3-4). Our psychosocial condition is one of dislocation, which regardless of race or class, comes out of a socially constructed reality, based on the betrayal of the human spirit…In order for us to bring about a genuine healing in South Africa, we have to re-think our professions in terms of mental healthcare (Vetten, 2005). Through these conversations “Drama for Life aims to bring down the imagined binary walls that exist between the personal and the political, the psychological and the sociological” (Nebe, 2016: 5).
This new book provides the first in-depth reference for understanding and treating patients of human albinism in Africa.
The Division of Human Genetics, the National Health Laboratory Service and School of Pathology and the Adler Museum invite you to the launch of Albinism in Africa: Historical, Geographic, Medical, Genetic, and Psychosocial Aspects edited by Professors Jennifer Kromberg and Prashiela Manga.
The Origins Centre hosts its Archaeology Activity Day for all interested in archaeology and our origins.
Spend time excavating with an archaeologist. Learn how the oldest paint was made, try your hand at some ‘ancient art’ or dabble in palaeontology with dinosaur bone puzzles. Stand a chance to win spot prizes.
Three DST-NRF Centres of Excellence at Wits jointly present this lecture by Professor Laura “mathgrrl” Taalman, US mathematician, blogger, designer/maker.
The CoE-MaSS, CoE-Palaeosciences and CoE-Strong Materials at Wits will host Taalman, known as [mathgrrl] on Thingiverse, who is simultaneously a prolific maker and a Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at James Madison University.
She is also the founder of JMU 3SPACE, the first general-education 3D-printing classroom in the US, founder of the JMU MakerLab in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, and a Faculty Associate with JMU Innovation Services, through which she creates and implements curriculum around 3D-printing and design.
As a self-professed “math geek,” Taalman’s 3D-printing projects are inspired and informed by mathematics. Her original makes include a 3D-printed snowflake generator that automatically designs unique snowflake models for 3D-printing, a pentagonal tessellation 3D-printed bracelet, and a 3D-printed “impossible screw” which could not be fabricated using anything but 3D-printing.
A seminar marking the establishment of an Open Access Data Centre for democracy research and the development of empirical social sciences in South Africa.
The Centre is located in the Transformation Research Unit (TRU) in the Department of Political Science, Stellenbosch University; and is sponsored by the Research and Innovation Support and Advancement (RISA) and the National Research Foundation (NRF).
Programme
Welcome: Prof. Z. Vilakazi: Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research and Postgraduate Affairs)
Introductions: Prof. U. van Beek: Director TRU
Presenters:
Prof.Hans-Dieter Klingemann, former Director Social Science Centre Berlin (WZB); President: University of Applied Sciences BAU International, Berlin.
Title of presentation: Studying support for democracy: On the interplay between an empirically-based research program and the effort to secure access to data
The talk will stress that efforts to share data usually originate in the process of analyzing and trying to understand a particular problem. In the case of TRU, this has been monitoring the quality of democracy as a key factor deciding the future persistence of a democratic form of government. The talk will emphasize that to be valid the monitoring of the quality of democracy must be empirically based, necessitating access to relevant data. Access to such data will enable assessments of South African developments continentally via the Afrobarometer, and globally via the Varieties of Democracy Project (V-DEM), the World Values Survey and many others.
Dr H.C. Ekkehard Mochmann, former Director: German Social Science Infrastructure Services (GESIS).
Title of presentation: The Dynamics of Sharing Research Data
The talk will stress the dynamics of sharing data for research. The presentation will sketch the history of sharing data and will give an overview of the data archive networks that have been developed globally. The talk will elaborate on the consideration for quality criteria as well as the issue of capacity building, including the virtue of data-labs for hands-on training. An assessment will be offered of currently existing global research infrastructures.
Background about the Centre
TheTransformation Research Unit (TRU) at Stellenbosch conducts comparative mixed methods research on democracy and democratic developmentsin a cross-cultural (African, Asian, Middle-Eastern, Latin-American and European) perspective. Four consecutive projects have been completed since 2000, when the programme was first established. The countries of interest include five younger democracies (South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, Chile and Poland) and two control cases (Sweden and Germany).
In the course of the research programme it has become increasingly apparent that the abundance of relevant data is poorly utilised most probably due the absence of a central point for the collection, interpretation, analyses and exchange of data for the comparative study of democracy. This observation gave rise to the idea of creating an open access data centre in the form of an Intelligent Node.
The aim of the Intelligent Node is not to become yet another archive competing with existing data repositories, but rather to develop research capacity by helping African researchers and postgraduate students locate relevant data needed for their projects on democracy in particular - and in the Social Sciences in general.
The Intelligent Node will assist them with searching global repositories of existing archive networks, thus utilising the vast amount of already existing data. Since access to data alone will not rectify the present state of affairs, a concurrent training programme will be developed in the scarce skills area of data analyses.
Godfrey Harris, President of Harris/Ragan Management Group, a Los Angeles-based public policy consulting firm, will present a public lecture.
The firm was founded in 1968. Harris has also been involved in the politics of ivory and serves as the Principal Political Representative of the International Ivory Society and Managing Director of the Ivory Education Institute. He is a member of the Advisory Board of the International Wildlife Management Consortium.
Harris holds degrees from Stanford University and the University of California, Los Angeles and has had multiple listings in Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in the World.
Deception- the act of making someone believe something that is not true.
This annual interactive exhibition of live plants and animals attracts schools, young and old nature enthusiasts and novices.
Hosted by the School of Animal, Plant and Environmental Sciences and partners, the exhibition aims to develop an appreciation for nature and allows visitors to engage all their senses. The exhibition stands are manned by experts and practitioners keen to share the wonders of nature.
Find out what’s in the I am not what you think I am and the Find me if you can exhibition stands.
Don’t miss the weekend talks which range from alternative food sources to dealing with scorpion stings and protecting breeding birds. Renowned wildlife videographer, Kim Wolhuter will share how he connects with animals to produce his award-winning work.
Parktown Health Sciences Campus Len Miller Lecture Theatre, 9th Floor, Wits Medical School
Start time:
13:00
Enquiries:
School of Physiology
How fossil bones can infer metabolic status of extinct dinosaurs and our human ancestors.
This lecture will be presented by Professor Roger Seymour, University of Adelaide, and will show that the physical size of skeletons and the holes in bones that pass blood vessels can indicate the rate of blood flow and hence the metabolic rates of the organs that they supply.
Social justice and transformation: A curriculum for Africa
When:
Friday, 04 May 2018 - Friday, 04 May 2018
Where:
Start time:
13:00
Enquiries:
Wits School of Education
Panel discussion on transformation and decolonisation from the view African Indigenous knowledge.
The South African education system is undergoing fundamental change amid calls for decolonisation and transformation across the broad spectrum of society. But do we really know what these two terms entail? Join Mandaza Kandemwa, a traditional healer and inspirational speaker, and others, as they unpack and translate transformation and decolonisation from the point of view of African Indigenous knowledge.
Wits commemorates Africa Day 2018 early so that students and staff can participate in celebrating Africa's independence, freedom and liberation strife.
The Africa Day celebrations at Wits take place ahead of the annual May 25 activities which commemorate the establishment of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) on 25 May 1963. The OAU was later renamed the African Union.
This year's keynote address will be delivered by Professor Patrick Loch Otieno Lumumba, Kenyan scholar, pan-Africanist and advocate, on Friday, 4 May 2018, at 12:30. He will speak on the topic: Militarisation of democracy and democratic space: implication for higher educationand engage in a panel discussion entitled, Revisiting militarisation of democracy and democratic space: implication for higher educationat 14:00 with Wits academics Dr Dania Mupotsa and Dr Samuel Ravengai.
The Wits celebrations will conclude with an African Classics and Jazz Concert at 19:30 in the Great Hall. Nomthandazo Mkhize Solomon, a well-known figure in the South African classical music scene, will lead performers in this tribute to Mother Africa.
The Centre will be actively involved in providing digital access to Wits' intellectual, social, economic and creative activities.
The Wits Digitisation Centre will also provide digital accses to the incredible cultural and scientific heritage at Wits, so as to boost research opportunities and support teaching and learning.
The next Faces of the City seminar will be presented by Kecia Rust from the Centre for Affordable Housing Finance in Africa.
A fundamental principle of the housing asset is the ability to use it for trade - homeowners buy and sell property, investing their income and realizing equity while they address their changing housing needs over time. In this way, housing is much more than simply shelter. It is also a critical component of household wealth, and a focus of most households’ savings. South Africa has a vibrant residential property market, which in the past 23 years has developed to serve a growing proportion of our population. Although affordable properties comprise a substantial proportion of the residential property market, the incidence of informal sales, or the backlog in the transfer of government subsidized stock has meant that in some cases, the integrity of the title deed may have been compromised. While the extent of informal market transactions is, by nature, difficult to estimate, they are thought to be significant. The Centre for Affordable Housing Finance in Africa is in the process of setting up a Transaction Support Centre to facilitate the resale of houses in Khayelitsha, Cape Town. Rust will present on some of the transaction stories emerging from the establishment of the centre and some of the strategies used to address backlogs in the transaction process.
The Southern Centre for Inequality Studies will host Dr Ben Scully to present this seminar.
This talk draws on a chapter in a forthcoming volume on The Global Social Question. The chapter presents a history of the "social question" in South Africa, from the late-19th century to the present. The talk will focus on the post-Apartheid period. This is a period in which the dominance of neoliberal ideology has contradicted with a political and ideological imperative to expand access to social welfare for the previously excluded black majority, leading to a new, neoliberal-era response to the social question. While state-provided social protection has become increasingly important, gaps in the state's response, combined with failures in the labour market, have put pressure on households and other social connections, which highlight the continued relevance of the social question today.
Liv Tørres, Adjunct Professor at the Wits School of Governance and the Executive Director of the Nobel Peace Centre in Oslo, will present this seminar.
Social dialogue has developed furthest in the Nordic countries and is closely associated with the strength of the labour market partners and of the collective bargaining system. Consensus about the aim to build consensus is not enough to realise actual social dialogue. One also needs to respect each other, see the value of building each other’s strength and recognise that good decisions are sometimes or often built on all parties both giving and taking.
For more than two decades, South Africa has sought to address poverty and inequality with a wide range of initiatives, including the use of fiscal policy to support redistributive measures. This report is an analysis of South Africa’s progress in reducing poverty and inequality since 1994, with 2006 to 2015 as a reference period. Its aim is to understand the dynamics of poverty and inequality in the country, to identify the drivers of progress for the purpose of further policy actions in this area.
Christiaan Hattingh from MyBucks will present this mathematical statistics seminar.
Hattingh will talk about the MyBucks loan scoring engine Jessie, which is a real-time binary classifier allowing for automated credit approval of customers, running as a service in a production environment. In this talk Hattingh will discuss the underlying classifier algorithm, training and validation, and challenges regarding the real-time implementation.
The Wits School of Architecture and Planning will host this exhibition.
At the Wits School of Architecture and Planning recent cross disciplinary studies have revealed parallels between African indigenous knowledge systems (storytelling, myth and ritual) and the philosophy of embodied knowing. These discoveries have led to the development of a first year architecture design brief that attempts to explore and exploit the opportunities for an architecture of world making. In the Utopian Cosmos project, students used lived experience, embodiment and narrative (film and storytelling) as ways of engaging the subject and subjectivity of world making through architecture. Students were briefed in groups to create a community in which they develop social orders, rituals, cultures and values. From this they developed a cosmogenesis narrative for their community, a story of their beginnings and designed a place where this story can be told, modeled it and presented the narrative as a short animation. This was followed by a full size re-interpretation of their ritual space as a stage set for a performance at the Wits Amphitheatre.This project is a response to the underlying limitations of the objectivist paradigm to deal with the subjectivity of humanity and a changing world, and in this way responds to the call for a decolonised curriculum at institutions of higher learning.
The Faculty of Health Sciences, Perinatal HIV Research Unit will host Dr Tiffany Chenneville from the University of South Florida to present this lecture.
Dr Chenneville will describe the relevant ethical, legal, and practical implications associated with decisional capacity when treating or conducting research with minors, provide a framework for assessing the decisional capacity of minors in clinical and research settings; and present a model for balancing the autonomy rights of minors with their need for protection using information about decisional capacity. The importance of using this model in HIV research and treatment involving minors will be emphasised.
Chennevile is a Fulbright Specialist, Associate Professor and the Graduate Program Director in the Psychology Department at the University of South Florida.
The Steve Biko Centre for Bioethics will host Professor Richard Hain, a consultant and clinical lead in Paediatric Palliative in Wales to present this lecture.
A number of recent high profile cases globally have highlighted two strong but contradictory views of who should make decisions about medical treatment at the end of a child’s life. Some believe it is self-evidently the right of parents. Others consider the responsibility to be entirely that of the expert doctors. This talk will explore the origins of moral authority in decision making over children.
The Wits Media Studies Department will host this lunchtime research seminar with Dr Simidele Dosekun from University of Sussex.
'Eko for show' is a rhyming Nigerian expression that brands the city of Lagos - 'Eko,' in Yoruba - a showy and flamboyant place, its citizens given to spectacle, over-invested in appearances, competitively seeking to impress and indeed 'oppress' through visual and material display. This talk maps and surfaces the city in the postfeminist self-fashioning and self-representation of a set of elite Lagos women, showing how, including in its cosmopolitanism, a new transnational style of femininity makes particular local - Lagosian - sense. Dosekun is a lecturer in media and cultural studies at the University of Sussex. Her forthcoming monograph is on the fashioning of postfeminist subjectivities in Lagos.
The Wits Evolutionary Studies Institute and University of Bergen's SFF Centre for Early Sapiens Behaviour have collaborated on "Origins of Sapiens Behaviour".
The Evolutionary Studies Institute at Wits in collaboration with the SFF Centre for Early Sapiens Behaviour (SapienCE) at the University of Bergen, Norway, have developed an installation of an exhibition, Origins of Early Sapiens Behaviour.
Curated by Petro Keene, Craig Foster and Jos Thorne, the exhibition is on from 10 May to 31 August 2018 at the Spier Wine Farm, Stellenbosch, Western Cape, South Africa.
It is part of a broader museum exhibition and education programme to be established at the De Hoop Nature Reserve in 2019.
Origins of Early Sapiens Behaviour showcases 25 years of archaeological research in the southern Cape, undertaken by Professor Christopher Henshilwood and Dr Karen van Niekerk and their research team at Blombos Cave and Klipdrift Shelter.
Henshilwood is Distinguished Professor and South African NRF SARChI Chair in Modern Human Origins at the ESI at Wits. He is also director of a Research Council of Norway funded 10 year Centre of Excellence, the Centre for Early Sapiens Behaviour (SapienCE) at the University of Bergen, Norway.
Displays of the Origins of Early Sapiens Behaviour have been designed to explore key aspects of archaeological research linked to our human origins and innovations and they illustrate the rich archaeological record of the southern coast of South Africa.
Themes focus on and explore the concept of ‘we are all one’. This enables the viewer to engage with the knowledge that Homo sapiens originated from the continent of Africa and promotes an understanding of our common ancestry.
Daily life of Homo sapiens captured on film
Artefacts have been finely replicated and displayed to highlight the fascinating discoveries from the Blombos Cave and the Klipdrift Shelter sites. These comprise 16 display panels including four videos by the filmmaker, Craig Foster.
The videos illustrate the remarkable scientific work of archaeologists and recreate scenes of the daily activities of our early human ancestors, Homo sapiens, who lived in caves along the southern coast of South Africa over 160 000 years ago.
One of the many exciting finds presented is a 100 000-year-old ochre-processing toolkit from Blombos Cave. This find is evidence of the manufacture of red ochre-rich paint that was mixed and stored in the first known containers, abalone shells. The people living in the cave made beads out of tiny estuarine shells, engraved abstract designs on ochre and created intricate stone and bone points.
In the De Hoop Nature Reserve at Klipdrift Shelter, more than 100 deliberately engraved ostrich eggshell fragments were recovered in layers that date from 65 000 to 59 000 years ago. These artefacts provide evidence for early complex behaviour and the capacity for symbolic thought.
Origins of Early Sapiens Behavior showcases replicated engraved eggshell fragments and engraved ostrich egg water flasks as well as replicas of finely crafted stone tools. These are among the earliest remnants of hunting tools and evidence of a highly sophisticated and technologically minded people.
Current genetic evidence and a ‘people’s history’ is portrayed at the Origins of Early Sapiens Behaviour exhibition to educate learners and visitors about their past and instil a sense of pride in our common African origins. Thus, the experience of learning about our early ancestors is enhanced by the ‘power of place’ – by being situated within the very area in which they once thrived.
Steve Lerman, Emeritus Professor in Mathematics Education at London South Bank University will present this seminar.
This seminar will consider the experience of studying for a PhD from the student’s perspective, and how this enables supervisors to strengthen their supervision skills.
In this session, Lerman will use a recently published newspaper piece by a PhD student, called “10 Truths” to look at the experience of studying for a PhD from the student’s perspective. The short article will be circulated in advance.
There is a short article for pre-reading – be sure to request it in advance.
The Faculty of Health Sciences will host this Women’s Health Rights Seminar to commemorate the Albertina Sisulu centenary celebrations.
Speakers include Dr Lawrence Chauke, Assistant Head of School ( Cluster C), Clinical Medicine, Dr Salome Maswime (Obstetrician and Gynacologist), Professor Dame Tina Lavender from Manchester University UK and Ntsiki Sisulu-Singapi, Albertina Sisulu’s granddaughter. The panel will discuss topics on maternal deaths, respectful maternal care, cervical and breast cancer.
The Wits City Institute will host this roundtable in association with the African Centre for the Study of the United States at Wits.
The Just City Dialogues features Professor Toni Griffin (Harvard Graduate School of Design) in conversation with Dr Mpho Matsipa and Noëleen Murray (both Wits City Institute) and will be chaired by Professor Gilbert Khadiagala (African Centre for the Study of the United States, Wits University).
The South African Journal on Human Rights and the Centre for Applied Legal Studies at Wits will host this colloquium on land and property.
Panel discussions will include a wide range of topics from different disciplines including law and sociology. The main colloquium will be followed immediately by a facilitated conversation with Advocate Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, author of The Land is Ours and Stha Yeni, national co-ordinator of Tshintsha Amakhaya as well as a cocktail reception.
This conference will focus on wildlife conservation and environmental preservation.
On 7 June 2018 the Africa-China Reporting Project and partners Global Max Media Group,China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation,Nature Guardian Wildlife Conservation CentreandChina House have the honour to welcome H.E. Lin Songtian, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the People’s Republic of China to the Republic of South Africa, to convene with wildlife conservation leaders and Chinese community leaders for theAfrica-China Wildlife Conservation Conferenceat Wits University. Wildlife conservation leaders, social advocates and media professionals are all warmly invited to attend.
This event will focus on wildlife conservation and environmental preservation, aiming to build a platform for deeper dialogue and intervention between Chinese communities in Africa and wildlife conservation organisations.
With cooperation we can work together to resolve issues of habitat loss, human-wildlife conflicts, poaching and the illegal wildlife trade and help draw greater contributions to wildlife conservation in Africa. The conference will provide opportunities for the donation of supplements and materials for wildlife parks/conservancies across South Africa, and will address an urgent need for those in the conservation field who want to express their concerns or good intentions to reach out to Chinese communities.
The conference will address the following issues:
What kind of animals and plants need to be protected in Africa? What are the biggest problems in the field of wildlife conservation in Africa?
What can the Chinese communities do to improve wildlife conservation in Africa through Africa-China cooperation?
Wits University Press and the SWOP will launch the book, Organise or die? Democracy and leadership in South Africa’s National Union of Mineworkers.
The launch will include a panel discussion with Raphaël Botiveau, author of the book; Piet Matosa, National Union of Mineworkers president, Crispen Chinguno, Sol Plaatje University and Gavin Capps, Society, Work and Development Institute (SWOP). They will talk on the changing relationship between the Union leadership and the Union’s members.
Stephen Lerman, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics Education, London South Bank University, will present this lecture.
The influences on governments for policy changes in schools range across many agencies, including the political party in power. When policies change, the sources of these influences are not always clear. In this lecture, Lerman will explore the sources and nature of those influences. He will identify the agents and agencies involved in educational activity as we examine the most recent changes in England and South Africa.
Sembene across Africa: A celebration across the continent in 28 countries
When:
Saturday, 09 June 2018 - Sunday, 10 June 2018
Where:
Off campus Soweto Theatre, cnr. Bolani Rd and Bolani Link, Jabulani (9 June 2018); Market Theatre Photo Workshop Auditorium, 138 Lillian Ngoyi Street, Newtown ( 10 June 2018)
The Galle Ceddo Projects in association with the Sembene Estate, the Wits School of Arts Film & TV Division and others will host this film screening.
Ousmane Sembene, son of a Senegalese fisherman, was kicked out of school. After working as a manual labourer for 15 years, Sembene became a novelist and filmmaker. Sembene dedicated his every moment to galvanizing and inspiring people, creating visionary, profound and subversive stories.
Sembene’s classic 1975 XALA, is one of the great works of political cinema, plus the award-winning documentary SEMBENE!. Sembene’s masterful satire follows a group of African leaders who pledge a new, equitable society, and then immediately follow the path of the money-grabbing, corrupt French businessmen who fleeced the country for decades. One of the African leaders celebrates his growing bank account with an elaborate wedding for his third wife (a teenager) but on the day of the wedding finds he's been hit with a curse, or xala, rendering him impotent. His path towards discovering the source of the curse echoes the nation’s arc of corruption and, perhaps someday, redemption.
SEMBENE! tells the unbelievable true story of the self-taught “father of African cinema,” who fought enormous odds to return African stories to Africa. SEMBENE! uses rare archival footage and more than 100 hours of exclusive materials to craft a true-life epic, as an ordinary man transforms himself into a fearless spokesperson for the marginalised.
This film screening is hosted by Galle Ceddo Projects in association with the Sembene Estate, the Wits School of Arts Film & TV Division, the Wits History Workshop and Reframing Africa.
A documentary screening in remembrance of Dr Martin Luther King.
The University of Johannesburg’s Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation (IPATC), in collaboration with the Wits African Centre for the Study of the United States (ACSUS), will host the screening of a documentary in remembrance of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.
Professor Adekeye Adebajo, Director, IPATC, and Professor Gilbert Khadiagala, Director, ACSUS, will lead a discussion after the screening of the documentary. Written and directed by Thomas Friedman, Dr Martin Luther King, Jr: A Historical Perspective offers a one-of-a-kind examination of King’s extraordinary life. Using rare and largely unseen footage and photographs, Friedman explores how King’s ideas, beliefs and methods evolved in the face of the rapidly changing climate of the Civil Rights Movement.
Drama for Life (DFL) and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) will host this symposium.
This second DFL-NTNU Symposium will offer a critical moment for delegates to engage with cutting-edge theorising and definitions, based on Drama for Life’s praxis in the discipline of Applied Drama and Theatre Studies.
Within the current post-democracy context, questions about the role of education, media, and the arts and culture have become burning issues. Applied Drama and Theatre praxis has historically held the mantle of an informed and engaged approach to social change, particularly within the South African context. The post-truth era has seen a rise in populism, nationalism and violence. This, coupled with on-going psycho-social trauma in the post-war context of South Africa, has challenged the assumption that Applied Drama and Theatre is ‘naturally’ a liberatory force. It is timely that we engage in a rigorous dialogue about Applied Drama and Theatre Studies and praxis from a theoretical, methodological and systemic point of view. It is a space begging for engagement. There is an urgent need to foster a training that is rooted in a human rights and social justice discourse, supported by people-centred arts-based approaches, and enhanced by partnerships that build meaningful relationships between academic, public and community arts spaces. The DFL-NTNU Symposium offers an opportunity for us to create a platform to begin this process.
Teachers, artists, students and researchers of Applied Drama and Theatre, who care about our societies and our human conditions, are invited to attend this 1-day symposium focused on the following questions:
How can we effectively use the arts, without compromising its aesthetic power, to bring about meaningful, sustainable social transformation and healing in post-democratic and post-war contexts?
What role can Applied Drama and Theatre play in seeking political inclusion that invites a variety of viewpoints especially the stories of the unheard and unseen?
What are community arts practitioners doing to develop multimodal aesthetic understandings in the context of democratic agency?
What role can cultural leadership play in fostering effective, ethical and sustainable Applied Drama and Theatre projects?
How can we leverage university-society collaboration and strengthen existing relationships between academic partners and Applied Drama and Theatre partners in the field?
How can we together learn to be resilient in our Applied Drama and Theatre praxis, without compromising our humanity, as we engage with the enormous challenges of change in the 21st century?
This 2nd symposium forms part of the 'Democracy through Theatre' partnership project between Drama for Life, based at the University of Witwatersrand’s School of Arts, and the Department of Arts and Media Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. The project aims to strengthen applied drama and theatre collaborative projects, applied theatre postgraduate education and research through course development, and student and teacher exchange by jointly addressing a thematic focus of investigation: contemporary and crucial issues of global democracy with specific reference to Norway and South Africa. The 1st NTNU-DFL symposium was staged in Norway in November, 2017.
William Gumede, Associate Professor in the Wits School of Governance will deliver the 2018 Nadine Gordimer Lecture.
He is the Chairperson of the Democracy Works Foundation. During the apartheid era, he held leadership positions in student, trade union, and civic movements. Gumede is the author of South Africa in BRICS: Salvation or Ruination? and Restless Nation: Making Sense of Troubled Times. He also published the award winning and acclaimed children’s book, A Kite’s Flight.
The Wits Faculty of Health Sciences hosts the 17th Prestigious Research Lecture to be delivered by Professor Maryna Steyn and Dr Candice Hansmeyer.
This lecture will highlight the dilemma of human identification in a forensic setting, with particular focus on the vast numbers of unidentified decedents and missing persons in South Africa. Professor Steyn is Head of the School of Anatomical Sciences at Wits University and Dr Hansmeyer is a forensic pathologist at Wits.
The Wits Business School will host this panel discussion on Pan-Africanism.
Pan-Africanism is an age-old concept that has seen has generations of African leaders determined to forge solidarity among African states. The African Union’s Agenda 2063 (“The Africa We Want”) recommits to a prosperous and politically united continent based on sustainable development and inclusive growth.
From the ground-breaking ideals of Ghanian revolutionary Kwame Nkrumah to the “African Renaissance” immortalised by former President Thabo Mbeki to the ideals of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), what has happened to Pan-Africanism in 2018?
Please join Visiting Adjunct Professor at Wits Business SchoolDr Reuel Khoza and a panel of speakers as they grapple with these questions:
From Nkuruma to Ramaphosa: what happened?
Whatever happened to the African Renaissance?
NEPAD: Stillborn, or morphed?
Panelists:
Lynette Chen, CEO: the NEPAD Business Foundation
Dr Somadoda Fikeni, Leading public commentator and political analyst
William Gumede,Associate Professor, Wits School of Governance
Braamfontein Campus East Senate Room, 2nd Floor, Solomon Mahlangu House
Start time:
17:30
Enquiries:
lbarnard@csir.co.za
The story of how Wits alumnus Matthew Whalley founded an innovative South African drone company.
Whalley, CEO of Passerine Aircraft Corporation, will be presenting a talk on his exciting journey starting a unique South African drone manufacturing company.
Since graduating from Wits University with BSc (Aeronautical Engineering) and MSc (Engineering) (2015) degrees, Whalley founded Passerine Aircraft. In this talk he will share how funding through Y Combinator - a new model for funding early stage startups – helped the company to lift off, and most importantly, how he and his team of aviation experts are using advances in control systems and lessons from nature to create a jumping aircraft.
The Passerine Aircraft drones’ design is unique, with legs that propel the design into the air-modelled off the flight of a bird.
Interview
Wits Associate Lecturer in Aeronautical Engineering, Jyotika Singh, spoke to the 27-year-old Whalley about his journey:
JS: Why did you choose Wits for both degrees?
MW: Both my parents went to Wits and it was the only university offering Aeronautical Engineering as an undergraduate degree.
JS: Who are the people that inspire you the most and why?
MW: Kelly Johnson and Burt Rutan for not following convention in design, and my dad for his approach to solving problems. I also have a huge amount of respect for Nelson Mandela and people who are doing more than earning a living and are making the world a better place.
JS: What are your favourite aircraft?
The Spitfire Mk-IIb and the YF-12 (weaponised SR-71 Blackbird).
JS: When did you start your company, Passerine Aircraft?
MW: In October 2017.
JS: How did you come up with the name “Passerine” Aircraft?
MW: From birds. Perching birds.
JS: Where did you find inspiration for your company?
MW: Initially from partaking in the Flying Donkey Challenge at Wits. I saw that there was a need for a drone that wasn’t too big and was able to carry cargo, be able to do missions and be as easy to use as a quadcopter.
JS: What is novel about your aircraft?
MW: It has legs, a blown wing, ducted fans, powered deep stall landing and it is designed to carry a large tailored payload fraction on a small planform.
JS: What was your proudest moment?
MW: Getting into Y Combinator.
JS: Where do you see the company in the next 5 years?
MW: We want to be selling three types of drones into Africa, Europe and America and make a multi-million dollar turnover.
JS: What is your advice to aspiring aeronautical engineers?
MW: You have to be passionate about aircraft and make sure that you read up about what has been done already.
Be part of history this Mandela Day by joining hands with the Wits Citizenship and Community Outreach, which administers the Wits Food Bank.
Starting university was a dream come true for Talent Marange who spent years at home after completing matric.
When Marange passed her A-Levels (matric) in 2014 she already knew that she needed to start work immediately as her mother, the breadwinner, was no longer fit for domestic work or hawking due to arthritis. And so it was that the bright girl, born to a South African mother and Zimbabwean father found herself watching as her peers moved on with life while she juggled family responsibility and selling food to school children.
A lifeline came through her maternal aunt who invited her to return to South Africa where she was raised before her family moved to Zimbabwe at the age of 14 years.
Encouraged by her aunt, Marange applied for university admission and started a social work degree in 2017.
The family was already stretched financially and their generosity had to reach other relatives in similar condition, thus Marange was grateful for the opportunity to go to university with support from her aunt, and rotating around different family members for accommodation.
“In first year I had to learn to manage my hunger because I would leave home very early and only eat when I returned around five in the afternoon,” she says.
“When you are hungry it’s hard to concentrate and as a result you tire easily. All that you want to do when you get home is eat and this triggers sleep because you did not have energy the whole day,” says the now second year student.
Discovering that the University has a food programme to assist students enabled Marange to focus on her studies. She is one of about 800 students who receive a cooked lunch from the Wits Food Bank.
This she says was a life-saviour and changed her study pattern. A meal at Wits meant that she could stay longer on campus and use the library and other facilities instead of rushing home because of hunger pangs.
The Wits Food Bank, which was established in 2012, currently supports nearly 4000 students facing food insecurity and need help. Students not only receive hot meals but also monthly food packs which come in handy especially for self-funding students who do not receive an adequate allowances from family as well as students who are partially funded by the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS).
The Wits Food Bank, which is managed by the Wits Citizenship and Community Outreach programme (WCCO), relies on contributions from the public and private donors to help the many talented students who rely on these supplies.
The WCCO is embarking on a food collection drive this Mandela Day and is once again calling on the University community and the public at large to support its effort to bring dignity and promote student success. Donations of peanut butter, jam and soap are welcome. Individuals will place their items on a potrait of Madiba's face on the Library Lawns before the items are distributed by the Wits Food Bank.
Marange, who quietly observed her 23rd birthday on 19 June by helping a friend to prepare for an exam, believes that her challenges have been eased by the support from the Food Bank and her friends who share resources including toiletries – as it often happens amongst the friends.
She is also deeply moved by the kindness of strangers, whom she says “donate and have faith in strangers whom they are unlikely to ever meet”.
Her journey to attaining a qualification has provided many life-lessons. Lessons in and out of lecture theatres that cement her career choice. As a social worker, she wants to advocate for those disadvantaged and ensure that no one goes through the struggles she has faced.
To make regular and sustained monthly donations to the Wits Food Bank or other student support programmes, please contact the Wits Development and Fundraising Office.
The Adler Museum and the SASOP presents: The Exhibition of the German Association for Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics.
The Adler Museum in the Wits Faculty of Health Sciences and the South African Society of Psychiatrists (SASOP) co-host The Exhibition of the German Association for Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics.
Exhibition Dates: 9 July – 24 August 2018
This exhibition will be accompanied by the following events at the Adler Museum:
12 July – SASOP Programme on Human Rights for People living with Mental Illness
16 July – SASOP Colloquium Human Rights for People with Mental Health
18 July – Panel Discussion on the Life Esidimeni Experience: SASOP and Advocacy Partners
WBS hosts Robby Kojetin, Everest summiteer, author and one of the most entertaining and inspirational speakers on international stages today.
The Wits Business School (WBS) presents a talk by Kojetin, who will take us on a journey from the depths of despair, having lost everything after a climbing accident sentenced him to a wheelchair for almost a year, to the summit of Mount Everest.
This is a presentation not to be missed, crammed with practical insights and real world experience and told in a way that is as hilarious as it is hard- hitting.
The African Centre for the Study of the United States will host a vibrant debate on Africa-US and global issues under the presidencies of Mandela and Obama.
The debate will be held in celebration of the centennial birthday of Nelson Mandela and prior to the much anticipated Nelson Mandela annual lecture to be presented by former US President Barack Obama on 17 July 2018.
The discussion will feature speakers from the following organisations:
The Mandela Foundation
Department of International Relations and Cooperation
Institute for Global Dialogue
American media in South Africa
Wits Department of International Relations, and Journalism and Media Studies
Parktown Education Campus Tommy Motswai Seminar Room, Thembalethu Building (former old student union building upstairs seminar room at the REAL Centre and Deaf Studies offices
The Centre for Researching Education and Labour (REAL) will host Kathryn Joyce to deliver this talk.
The gap between research and practice is one of the most significant problems for evidence-based policy and practice in education. The challenge is how to get what works according to the ‘best’ educational research to work for educators in practice. Despite efforts to bridge the gap, primarily by more effective dissemination of ‘high quality’ research results, interventions that produce positive effects in studies often fail to be similarly effective in practice. I argue that this failure issues in part from a methodological problem. Currently, the research central to evidence-based policy and practice in the U.S. and U.K. focuses on randomised controlled trials (RCTs). These can support causal ascriptions but provide little basis for local effectiveness predictions – which are what matters to practice. In this talk, Joyce will argue that the hope to move from ascription to prediction by way of causal generalisation is unrealistic and will urge that research effort should be devoted directly to how to build better local effectiveness predictions. She will outline a variety of kinds of information that can make local predictions more reliable and more useful and call for the acceptance of a broader range of methods more geared to learning those kinds of information.
Professor Joel Quirk will deliver his inaugural lecture on ‘modern slavery’.
Calling something ‘slavery’ is a popular way of seeking to draw attention and investment to specific causes and issues. One recent example of this strategy is the category of ‘modern slavery’, which has unexpectedly emerged as a major source of popular fascination and political mobilisation since the mid-1990s. Over the years, numerous governments and activists have declared their intention to end slavery once and for all. However, there are a number of fundamental differences between transatlantic enslavement and ‘modern slavery’. In stark contrast to historical campaigns to end legal enslavement, which were firmly aimed at the profits and privileges of the rich and powerful, campaigns today rarely pose a direct threat to major political and economic interests, particularly in the Global North. Governments and corporations feel comfortable supporting campaigns against exceptional cases of ‘modern slavery’ – rather than broader campaigns for migrant, worker or women’s rights – because they selectively focus on deviant criminals and ‘bad apples’, thereby pushing larger global systems of exploitation, violence, discrimination and privilege into the background. High profile campaigns against ‘modern slavery' have secured support because they do not rock the boat. How much can a campaign realistically accomplish if it is popular because it doesn’t make waves?
Campus Health and Wellness Centre on 011 717-9111/3
The Campus Health and Wellness Centre (CHWC) together with a group of medical students will host this health fair.
Free HIV testing and counselling; STI screening, and TB screening will be offered to staff and students on 19 July 2018 on Braamfontein Campus West and in Solomon Mahlangu House, Braamfontein Campus East on 20 and 21 July.
The African Centre for the Study of the United States will host a forum to analyse Barack Obama's Mandela Lecture.
Under the theme of the Mandela-Obama effect: Legacies and Soft power, the forum undertake a rapid and in-depth analysis and review of the events. The forum will focus on the following issues:
What are the key themes and the significance of Obama’s Nelson Mandela lecture?
What does the media coverage tell us about the representation of Obama and Mandela?
What does the Obama lecture and related events tell us about the legacies of both Obama and Mandela?
Which insights can we gain from the events are as relates to Africa-US and global relations?
To what extent do the Mandela centennial and the involvement of the Obama Foundation advance the concept of global Africa?
An impressive panel of speakers, experts on African, American and global dynamics has been put together to provide incisive, comprehensive and wide ranging perspectives on the theme.
The Wits Business School will host this panel discussion on whether Mandela was a saviour or a sell-out?
018 marks the centenary of the birth of Nelson Mandela. Often affectionately referred to as the ‘father of the nation’, the first democratically elected president of South Africa has been hailed around the globe as the greatest man of the 20th century.
But one man’s saviour is another man’s sell-out, and recent critics of the former activist and president raise this argument. Wits Business School invites you to a panel discussion that will tackle this contentious issue. The notable line up of speakers includes:
Essop Pahad: former struggle activist and ANC politician
Mavuso Msimang: chairman of Corruption Watch
Ronnie Kasrils: author, activist, former ANC-SACP leader, ex-government minister, MK commander
Sithembile Mbete: lecturer and political analyst
Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh: author, musician and activist
Zohra Ebrahim: former activist and director and chair of various organisations
The discussion will be facilitated by former struggle activist, British politician and Visiting Professor at WBS, Lord Peter Hain.Click here for speaker bios
A number of speaker books will be available to purchase at the event, including: - Mandela - His essential life by Peter Hain: R180, Jonathan Ball - Democracy and Delusion by Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh - A Simple Man - Kasrils and the Zuma Enigma by Ronnie Kasrils
Former Public Protector, Professor Thuli Madonsela will deliver the annual Albertina Sisulu Memorial Lecture hosted by the School of Therapeutic Sciences.
The late Ma Sisulu was a nurse, activist, and caring humanitarian who was an advocate for the vulnerable in society. The School of Therapeutic Sciences – which trains the most diverse range of health care professionals in the country, including nurses, physiotherapists, pharmacists and sports scientists – encourages its students to advance the values that Ma Sisulu embodied.
In celebration of Women’s Month 2018, Wits Business School will host four dynamic businesswomen for a panel discussion.
All four women are exceptional leaders in their fields with decades of experience between them in business, management, entrepreneurship and board membership. They will share their views on how to:
Make an impact and unlock your inner confidence
Navigate the boardroom and deal with cultural diversity
Build your personal reputation
Panellists include:
Janine Hills – Founder and CEO of Vuma Reputation Management Mpho Letlape – Executive Chairman of Lethushane (Pty) Ltd Totsie Memela – Chief of Strategy and Engagement Officer for Africa with Higher Education and Chairman of Memela Pratt & Associates Motshoanetsi Lefoka – Executive Director of thinking fusion AFRICA
Zai Khan, entrepreneur and sports anchor on Radio 2000, will facilitate the discussion.Click here for speaker bios
The School of Economics and Business Sciences will host Tendai Zawaira from the University of Pretoria to deliver a talk based on the above paper.
The marketisation hypothesis states that the growth of the service sector reduces gender inequality. This is because women have a comparative advantage in service jobs and consequently benefit more than men as the sector grows. In recent years, the African service sector has grown considerably; however, gender inequality on the continent is still relatively high. Using a new dataset on gender inequality and panel data analysis, the researchers study the relationship between service sector shares and gender inequality in 31 sub-Saharan African countries during the 1990-2014 period. Consistent with predictions of the hypothesis, service sector shares significantly reduce gender inequality and the results are robust after the inclusion of a wide range of controls. However, we find that this relationship is nonlinear, requiring that the size of the service sector reaches a threshold before we observe improvements in gender inequality.
The Global Labour University will host Carin Runciman from Casual Workers Advice Office and the University of Johannesburg to present this talk.
In 2015 the Labour Relations Act was amended to curtail the use of contract labour to work of a ‘genuinely temporary nature’ and ensure that labour broker workers become permanent after a period of three months. These new rights have been largely ignored by the traditional labour movement and in this absence community advice offices have begun to fill the gap. This presentation will document the work of the CWAO and the Simunye Workers Forum based in Germiston, Gauteng. The new rights have provided the impetus for precarious workers to organise and since 2015, CWAO has assisted over 10 000 workers to become permanent. The discussion will explore how workers have organised and what this may mean for the future of the labour movement.
The Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research and the Oceanic Humanities for the Global South Project at Wits will host this seminar by Simone Haysom.
The Indian Ocean seaboard plays a key role in the world's third largest heroin route out of Afghanistan -- yet until recently its mechanics and geography were poorly understood. Drawing on the Global Initiative against Transnational Crime's 'Heroin Coast' report, this talk provides an analysis of the how the trade has become embedded in political systems along the Indian Ocean coast, arguing that the 'governance' of the heroin trade mirrors the governance system of the country where it operates, and that the control of the trade both shapes and is shaped by local political dynamics. This argument draws on a trend we observe, across the continent, where sharp escalations in the prevalence of organised crime correlate to economic liberalisation and moves to multiparty democracy. In other words, organised crime thrives in democracies and is facilitated by economic growth. The talk also covers attempts to understand the 'impact' of illicit trade, including the public health impact of the drug trade (and the merits, or lack thereof, in the public health responses along the coast); the linkages between murder rates and the drug trade; and the other pressures that organised crime and corruption places on civil society.
Former mayor of Johannesburg and President of the South African Local Government Association, Parks Tau, will present this seminar.
Tau is a former mayor of the City of Johannesburg (2011-2016) where he drove the Corridors of Freedom project, a major City of Johannesburg spatial transformation project. The session will involve a public interview with Tau on the project by Professors Philip Harrison, SA Research Chair for Spatial Analysis and City Planning and Alison Todes, School of Architecture and Planning. It will also include a presentation by Tau on how far South Africa has come in localising the Sustainable Development Goals.
Tau is President of the South African Local Government Association, and of the world body, United Cities and Local Governments. He will present this special session as part of the Faces of the City seminar series.
The School of Economic and Business Sciences (SEBS) will host Professor Johan Fourie from Stellenbosch University to present this lecture.
Can wealth shocks have intergenerational health consequences? In this talk, Fourie will use the partial compensation slave owners received after the 1834 slave emancipation in the British Cape Colony to measure the intergenerational effects of a wealth loss on longevity. Because the share of partial compensation received was uncorrelated to wealth, we can interpret the results as having a causal influence. We find that a greater loss of slave wealth had a negative effect on the longevity of both the generation of slave owners that experienced the shock and their children, but not for grandchildren. We speculate on the mechanisms for this intergenerational persistence.
Professor Giampaolo Garzarelli from the School of Economic and Business Sciences at Wits will deliver this talk based on a paper.
The paper is a political economy study of state formation that answers the following question: When does internal exit stop being a theoretical (unlikely) scenario and concretely manifest? The hypothesis is that new state formation can occur through organisational split up given the concurrent presence of certain exogenous circumstances. Together, these circumstances help define the rational-choice problem faced, which endogenizes the size of the object being contested: population.
Lebogang Shilakoe and Sandile Zwane from Social Surveys will present this seminar in the Faces of the City series.
This talk addresses three key issues in the South African planning environment, particularly relating to areas classified as townships/peri-urban areas:
Are all townships the same?
How can planning be done in a way that generalises plans to ward and municipal level but still maintains and addresses the specificity of each community’s distinct needs and priorities?
Are townships static? How can we track changes in the township landscape?
The Community Tapestry is a spatially represented segmentation of communities based on their socio-economic standing, level of infrastructure and the extent of their diversity. This provides a refined understanding of the types of communities found in South Africa and the varied needs of their assorted populations. With the right application, this can enable the appropriate allocation of financial resources for greater impact.
The Wits Writing Centre is hosting the launch of uNjabulo by Siya Masuku.
This is a beautifully illustrated children’s book written in isiZulu about a little boy who is interested in the stars. It aims to foster a curiosity about astronomy and an isiZulu vocabulary for the solar system. Children of all ages particularly welcome.
The Wits Mine Health and Safety Research Group will host this seminar.
This seminar is an opportunity for researchers and postgraduate students from across Wits to share their research. The seminar is open to all Wits academics and postgraduates working in mine health and safety.
Professor Noor Nieftagodien from the School of Social Sciences will deliver his inaugural lecture.
The lecture will reflect on the ideas and practices that shaped Public History. Contrary to expectations, the moment of formal decolonisaton – the post-1994 era of democracy – did not lead to an embrace of the transformative impulses inherent in Public History. Instead, History came under pressure to support the production of ANC-centric narratives of the liberation struggle and to become institutionalized in the service of mega heritage projects. These objectives of the new ruling elite were always challenged and increasingly so as popular discontent gained momentum from the mid-2000s. It will finally be suggested that the Fees Must Fall movement powerfully and urgently placed on the agenda the need to rethink the role of public universities. Encapsulated in the demand for ‘decolonised education’, this movement further opened space to critically reflect on the relationship between the academy and publics. By reconnecting to its roots, Public History, undergirded by rigorous and principled intellectual work and a commitment to dialogical practices, can contribute to a revitalisation of the idea of a decolonised public university. In so doing, Public History can also be reimagined.
Alexandra Parker and Samkelisiwe Khanyile from the Gauteng City-Region Observatory will present this seminar in the Faces of the City series.
This seminar is based on a paper that uses photographs of graffiti to trace Maboneng’s development and locate graffiti within the precinct. The research shows the extent to which the Maboneng precinct is branded through urban aesthetics including graffiti. Through visual and spatial analysis, we show the ambiguities of defining both graffiti and place. The research demonstrates that graffiti has aesthetic value in the urban environment. This aesthetic value signifies the redevelopment of a neighbourhood, distinguishing the area at a local level but also signifying a global aesthetic and approach. Using the case study of Maboneng we also show that graffiti is leveraged in nurturing urban development, creative economies and tourism. Graffiti continues to contest the production and ownership of public space even as it becomes increasingly commodified in the urban environment.
This critical thinking forum will highlight the knowledge production on diverse sexual orientations and gender identity.
The Mail & Guardian in association with the Higher Education and Training Health, Wellness and Development Center (Heaids) at Wits University, Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action and Accountability International will host this critical thinking forum. The forum will focus on sexual orientation and gender identity, specifically the role of institutions of higher learning in addressing heteronormativity.
The discussion will also highlight the knowledge production on diverse sexual orientations and gender identity. There is increasing research into sexual orientation and gender identity in the higher education sector, yet sexually prejudice and homophobic attacks are equally on the rise.
Speakers include:
Ricki Kgositau, Executive Director, Accountability International
Dr Peace Kiguwa, Senior Lecturer, Wits University
Piwe Riri Pitsha, Student, Walter Sisulu University
Dr Ramneek Ahluwalia, Chief Executive Officer, Heaids
Buti Manamela, Deputy Minister of Higher Education and Training
Dr Gareth Roberts from the School of Economic and Business Sciences at Wits will present this talk based on a paper.
South Africa has some of the highest rates of crime in the world, and yet very little is known about the causal determinants of crime in this country. In this paper Roberts exploits province-level variation in monthly price indices for food and beer and the counts of different types of crime, as well as proxies for the size of the population in the nine provinces. The researchers show that an increase in the nominal price of food relative to the overall consumer price index in South Africa leads to a contemporaneous increase in violent crime, robbery and property theft. In contrast, they find that an increase in the relative price of beer has the opposite effect on crime - particularly for crimes of a sexual nature. This is the first research that demonstrates how the prices of food and beer have an effect on crime in a developing-country context.
The Wits School of Arts Film and Television Division will host a preview screening of extracts from Farwell Ella Bella.
This isa screenplay written by Wits alumna, Lwazi Mvusi. The script that Mvusi wrote is now a R5-million film which she also directed. Farewell Ella Bella, will be release nationwide on 17 August 2018.
A discussion with Mvusi and actors Jay Anstey, Sello Maake ka-Ncube, Mary-Anne Barlow and Michelle Douglas will follow after the screening.
The film features Jay Anstey as Ella. For Ella, the death of her alcoholic father leaves her with nothing but debt and the bitter memory of a complicated past. When she ropes her godfather, Neo (Sello Maake ka-Ncube), in to take her father’s ashes back to her childhood home in Johannesburg, they go on a journey of forgiveness and redemption.
This path-breaking book explores the reasons behind the increasingly assertive politics of custom in many corners of Africa.
The Wits Institute for Economic and Social Research (WiSER) together with Wits University Press and the Harvard University Center for African Studies will host the launch of the book, The Politics of Custom: Chiefship, Capital and the State in Contemporary Africa, edited by John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff. The launch will be followed by a discussion:
Chair and opening comments: Professor Achille Mbembe
Speakers: Rogers Orock, Mbongiseni Buthelezi and Dineo Skosana
Respondents: John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff
This path-breaking volume explores the reasons behind the increasingly assertive politics of custom in many corners of Africa. Chiefs come in countless guises – from university professors through cosmopolitan businessmen to subsistence farmers – but, whatever else they do, they are a critical key to understanding the tenacious hold that ‘traditional’ authority enjoys in the late modern world. Together the contributors explore this counterintuitive chapter in Africa’s history and, in so doing, place it within the broader world-making processes of the 21st Century.
The Centre for Learning on Evaluation and Results – Anglophone Africa (CLEAR-AA) will host this expert panel seminar.
The seminar seeks to critically discuss decolonisation of the African evaluation curriculum within the broader debate of the indigenisation of evaluation practice on the African continent. This is in light of the growing demand to incorporate African methods, culture and indigenous knowledge into curriculum of both graduate and non-graduate courses. In contributing to the “decolonial” discourse, CLEAR-AA will gather renowned scholars to deliberate on the decolonisation of curriculum, with a particular focus on monitoring and evaluation curriculum.
Panelists include: Professor Bagele Chilisa, University Of Botswana; Adeline Sibanda, The African Evaluation Association; Dr Nombeko Mbava, University of Cape Town; Dr Kambidima Wotela, Wits School of Governance.
The Wits Transformation and Employment Equity Office and ACTIVATE Wits will host the annual Wits Pride in association with other partners.
Themed Not On My Watch, Wits Pride 2018 calls on members of the University community and those beyond to challenge instances of discrimination against LGBTIAQ+ people.
People who identify as LGBTIAQ+ often face multiple forms of intersecting oppressions and feel safe unsafe. Wits Pride offers safe spaces to discuss intersections of violence, access information on sexual orientations and gender identities, find community in social events and celebrate the immense value LGBTIAQ+ people offer to the University community.
This year’s programme is outlined as follows:
Monday, 20 August 2018
A queer wedding at the Piazza from 13:00 to 14:00
A dialogue on toxic masculinities in queer communities followed by a mixer from 17:00 to 20:00 in SH5, Solomon Mahlangu House, Braamfontein Campus East
Tuesday, 21 August 2018
A film screening from 13:00 to 14:00 in SH5, Solomon Mahlangu House, Braamfontein Campus East
Research in context: Exploring gender from 17:00 to 20:00 in the Disability Rights Unit, Solomon Mahlangu House
Wednesday, 22 August 2018
A public lecture on kinship in queer spaces from 13:00 to 14:00 in RS8 (CB8) in Robert Sobukwe Building
TRANScending Boundaries (dialogue) from 17:00 to 20:00 at the Wits School of Public Health
Karaoke at the Ratz Bar after 20:00
Thursday, 23 August 2018
A youth forum from 16:00 to 17:00 at University Corner (UC7), Braamfontein Campus East
A rainbow graduation ceremony from 17:00 to 20:00 in the Concourse, Solomon Mahlangu House, Braamfontein Campus East
Friday, 24 August 2018
Wits Pride march starting at the Great Hall stairs. The march will at 13:15 to 14:00
A performance of uMalume from 14:00 to 17:00 at University Corner (UC17), Braamfontein Campus East
An afterparty starting at 20:00
Saturday, 25 August 2018
A Drawing Marathon in the Disability Rights Unit boardroom, Solomon Mahlangu House, Braamfontein Campus East
Throughout the week, daily information tents will be set up across campuses where staff and students will be able to get condoms, lube, information on safe sex, and discuss LGBTIAQ+ specific issues with trained Safe Zones@Wits allies.
All members of the University community are invited to participate in the Wits Pride march, to encourage visibility of support for LGBTIAQ+ people.
2018 Fak’ugesi African Digital Innovation Festival
When:
Tuesday, 21 August 2018 - Saturday, 29 September 2018
Where:
Off campus Tshimologong Precinct, Wits Art Museum and the Point of Order in Braamfontein.
Start time:
9:00
Enquiries:
For more information on the 2018 Fak’ugesi African Digital Innovation Festival visit www.fakugesi.co.za.
'Tap your Afro Source Code' will explore how local culture can move and change the future of technology, and unpack the source code of our African identity.
The Fak’ugesi African Digital Innovation Festival, Tap Your Afro Source Code, has announced the line-up of its 2018 programme promising to yet again transform Johannesburg into a celebration of technology, creativity and innovation from across the African continent.
The full program of activities running from 18 August to 29 September 2018, Fak’ugesi will take place at Tshimologong Precinct sharing activities in 2018 with Wits Art Museum and the Point of Order.
About Fak’ugesi
Fak’ugesi - Joburg’s one and only African Digital Innovation Festival will take place in September 2018, with the theme ‘Tap your Africa Source Code’. The 2018 festival will focus on bringing to the table important African visions and futures, by tapping into the sources of African tradition and culture alongside technology, creativity and innovation. Explore how local culture can move and change the future of technology. What would you call a vernacular algorithm? What is algorithm in IsiZulu? In 2018 Fak’ugesi Festival calls on you to explore the algorithms, patterns and fractals of Africa! In digital art, music, games, VR, digital makers or the way you braid your hair.
Fak’ugesi, which means “Switch it on” or “add power” in urban Zulu, is focused on making young adults aware of digital innovation. It is an opportunity for young adults, with or without formal education, to learn or engage with tomorrow’s technology.
According to an Impact Report commissioned by the British Council ConnectZA- Fak’ugesi is believed to be the most important digital creativity festival in Africa.
About Wits University’s Tshimologong Digital Innovation Precinct
Setswana for “new beginnings”, Tshimologong is one of Johannesburg’s newest high-tech addresses in the vibrant inner-city district of Braamfontein, where the incubation of start-ups, the commercialisation of research and the development of high-level digital skills for students, working professionals and unemployed youths takes place. The Precinct was launched in September 2016 with strategic support from major companies including Microsoft, Cisco, TIA, Teraco, BCX, ACSA and MMI. Gauteng Province through its Department of E-Government and the City of Johannesburg have also provided significant support. The Precinct also houses the prestigious IBM Research’s Lab Africa – one of only 12 such facilities in the world. Website: www.tshimologong.joburg
Professor Dilip Menon from the Centre for Indian Studies will deliver this talk.
This talk addresses the question of what it means to think fluvially, even as we are faced with the prospect of not fire, but water, the next time. How does water affect thinking when one lives by the sea? Or does it? Or is it taken for granted, as in Borges’s remark that there are no camels in the Koran? Professor Dilip Menon from the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa will discuss the above and his current project which engages with the question of water, oceans and floods as central to the imagination of history and region.
Professors Glenda Gray and Billy Ramokgopa will deliver the Annual Steve Biko Bioethics Lecture.
Professor Gray, President of the South African Medical Research Council will address the canary in the mine. Professor Ramokgopa, Head of Division of Orthopedic Surgery and Clinical Head at Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital will respond on the Rescuing the Canary.
The Department of Speech-Language Pathology will host a research day for staff and postgraduate students to showcase their research interests.
The day is aimed at attracting any professional who want to find out about research aligned to speech-language-voice and swallowing disorders. If you are interested in pursuing postgraduate studies, this would be an ideal platform to get some insight and raise points for discussion.
Global Change Institute will host a lunch time talk with Professor Francois Engelbrecht.
Unprecedented heat-waves and mega-fires have characterised the Northern Hemisphere summer in 2018, and are thought by many to be the tell-tale signs of climate change. Climate models are the main tools used to objectively determine whether such events can be attributed to anthropogenic-induced climate change, and also to obtain projections of future global climate change.
Climate models are routed in the laws of physics, which when applied to the atmosphere and ocean result in a complex set of partial differential equations that can be solved numerically using high-performance computers. Developing and applying climate models thus yields a fascinating and intricate science that requires a multi-disciplinary research effort, involving numerical mathematics, high-performance computing, atmospheric chemistry and physics, oceanography, climatology and ecosystem dynamics.
This talk will provide a brief overview of the development of the first African-based climate model at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in South Africa. Moreover, the most detailed projections of future climate change obtained to date for South Africa, using the supercomputer of the Centre for High Performance Computing (CHPC), will be presented.
Wits University presents WATERSHED: Art, Science & Elemental Politics, a programme of exhibitions and academic symposia to provoke new thinking about water.
WATERSHED runs from 10-21 September at venues across Wits campuses, in Braam, and in Newtown. Click here for the full programme.
Water remains topical and the interdisciplinary approach of WATERSHED challenges the public to think about water in new ways. It includes interactive art installations, performances, engineering, humanities and science displays, and interdisciplinary scholarly panels:
There’s an artist from Colorado who digitized the sound of pollution in a river and turned it into an art installation
an engineering student from Mpumalanga researching a slow sand water filtration system for domestic use
An artist from India creatively interpreting acid mine drainage in Joburg’s gold mines, particularly in relation to the poor
An expert panel discussing how Joburg can avoid a “Day Zero”
Poster displays by students in Anthropology, Wits Business School, and Civil/Environmental Engineering researching water in Morocco, the rate of seed growth in relation to water, and tech innovations for urban water resilience.
Medical anthropologist and A-rated scientist, Professor Lenore Manderson conceptualized and directs WATERSHED.
Manderson is a Distinguished Professor of Public Health and Medical Anthropology in the School of Public Health at Wits, and a Visiting Distinguished Professor at the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society (IBES), Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA.
This talk will be delivered by Yvette Christiansë, a prominent poet, novelist and academic who has done more than most to put South African literature at sea.
Christiansë’s work has re-inserted slavery and the ocean into our literary awareness and she will be presenting her academic research on slavery and slave registers as part of the WATERSHED programme. Christiansë has published two collections of poetry and a novel, all concerned with themes of maritime slavery and its implication for South Africa. Her novel Unconfessed (2006) examines a slave from the Mozambique region, Silla who is imprisoned on Robben Island for killing her son. Her two collections of poetry Castaway (1999) and Imprendehora (2009) concern the intersection of slavery and indenture. After the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833, British naval squadrons in the Indian Ocean ‘freed’ slaves found on the vessels of French, Portuguese and Arab slave traders. These slaves were nominally liberated but where then consigned to work as indentured labourers. Christiansë explores the difficulty of reconstructing these double experiences of servitude. Born under apartheid, Christiansë emigrated with her family via Swaziland to Australia when she was 18. She lives in New York City where she works at Barnard College at Columbia University. Christiansë’s visit is sponsored by Oceanic Humanities for the Global South at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER).
The Wits Business School host this lecture by Dr Célestin Monga from the the African Development Bank.
Historical evidence shows that in all successful economies, the state has always played an important role in facilitating structural change and helping the private sector sustain it over time. Conversely, almost every government in the developing world has attempted, at some point, to play that facilitating role, but most have failed. What role should the state play in promoting economic growth? How should governments go about identifying those industries with latent competitive advantage in order to facilitate industrial upgrading and economic diversification?
Monga is Vice President for Economic Governance and Knowledge Management at the African Development Bank.
The 2018 Bernard Price Memorial Lecture will be presented by Professor Ian Craig.
His presentation will explain why automatic control is a hidden technology that modern society cannot live without. In order to do so, automatic control will be defined and explained using concepts that are accessible to a technologically literate audience. Automatic control is a pervasive technology prevalent in the production of almost all goods and services consumed by the modern consumer.
Professor Augustine Munagi will present his inaugural lecture.
Whenever a finite set of distinct objects splits into subsets in which only the size of each subset is of significance, the object of interest is a partition of the integer cardinality. The ramifications of this relationship between integer partitions and set partitions is ubiquitous in number theory and combinatorics, with applications in statistical mechanics, group representation theory, molecular chemistry and vertex colouring of planar graphs, to name just a few. This lecture will trace a selective path of recent discoveries under the two themes.
Professor Leketi Makalela will present this talk as part of the Speaking in Tongues series.
Makalela is the founding Director of the Hub for Multilingual Education and Literacies at Wits School of Education. He holds a prestigious title as Distinguished Visiting Professor at the City University of New York. His latest book is Shifting Lenses: Multilanguaging, education and decolonisation in the global South.
The Wits community is invited to attend the launch of the Mexican Studies Centre.
The Ambassador of Mexico in South Africa, representatives from Latin America and leaders from our partner institution, the National Autonomus University of Mexico (UNAM) will be present. UNAM is the largest university in Latin America and ranked amongst the best 100 universities worldwide.
The Mexican Studies Centre at Wits aims to promote academic and cultural exchange between the two universities and is key to the internationalisation of higher education.
The Centre for Deaf Studies will celebrate 20 years of research excellence in Deaf Education.
The prgramme is as follows:
Welcome by Master of Ceremonies / Host - Prof. Tawana Kupe
SASL signing choir - You raise me up
Reflections on 20 years
Address by World Federation of the Deaf President - Colin Allen
Lifetime Achievement Award - Father Cyril Axelrod - DeafBlind world leader (born and raised in SA, now living in the UK due to total lack of services and support for DeafBlind ppl in SA)
Art Award - 1st Place- Marnitz Steyn
Words of Congratulations, which will include among others:
Prof Alys Young, University of Manchester
Philip Dobson, DeafBlind SA
WASLI - World Association of Sign Language Interpreters
Vice Chancellor- Prof Adam Habib
SASL signing choir – The Rains of Africa
Official Opening of the New Wits Centre for Deaf Studies – Examplar of “Deaf Space”
The Wits History Workshop and IFAS-Research will host this one-day colloquium.
The colloquium seeks reflect on the present and historical significance of the recently restored Rivonia Trial sound archive, as part of the opening and study of the apartheid archives in South Africa. The colloquium will offer a comparative reach into the experiences of colonial and repressive regimes in other parts of the continent. New perspectives on liberation movements and emancipatory politics, and the issue of legal archives both as historical records and heritage, will be at the centre of the panel discussions.
The Mandela Institute in partnership with the Water Research Commission will host this lecture by Len Abrams.
He was the former advisor to the late Minister Kader Asmal. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the signature into law of the National Water Act. A radical departure from its 1956 predecessor, the Act was celebrated as one of the most progressive and visionary pieces of water legislation worldwide. Translating such a game-changing law into reality was never going to be easy. While there are many successes to celebrate, the intervening 20 years of implementation have proved to be more challenging than ever imagined. This lecture seeks to reflect on the vision and values that drove the drafting of the National Water Act, along with its sibling, the 1997 Water Services Act.
The School of Construction Economics and Management will host this debate in partnership with Sitsabo Project Managers.
This forum will discuss major interventions that the South African government has put in place to stimulate economic growth in the local government sphere. The Economic Forum is an international discussion platform that seeks to engage the world’s best thinkers in robust economic dialogue to analyse and understand the complexities of economic growth. The discussions provide a global platform for in-depth economic debates with leading academics, industry professionals, investors and policy makers.
Minister of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs, Dr Zweli Mkhize will deliver the keynote address. Other speakers include:
Zanele Serame - Chief Quantity Surveyor at Gauteng Department of Infrastructure Development
Eric Manchidi - former President at the South African Council for the Project and Construction Management Professions
Mashilo Pitjeng - Chairperson at South African Institute of Black Property Practitioners (SAIBPP) Policy and Advisory Committee.
This event is hosted by the Africa-China Reporting Project, the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa and the African Centre for the Study of the United States.
Against the background of the 73rd session of the UN General Assembly (UNGA 73), the Africa-China Reporting Project, together with the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa and the African Centre for the Study of the United States at Wits, will host an Open Forum on the UN from an essentially African perspective. The objectives of the Open Forum include an assessment of the positions taken by China, India and the United States on any number of issues in the past but with sharper focus on UNGA 73, and a key question is whether the interests of these global powers are in agreement with or diverge from Africa’s interests. Full programme.
The Africa-China Reporting Project at Wits will host this annual gathering of journalists and reporters discussing Africa-China investigation.
This year the event includes the Africa-China Photo Exhibition in the Atrium, moderated by photographer and architect Justin Hui and featuring exhibition winner, Liu Yuyang along with the images of 12 other photographers. The forum will also feature eight investigative journalists discussing their ongoing Africa-China investigations; authors Mukuka Chipanta (A Casualty of Power, 2016) and Kimon de Greef (Poacher. Confessions from the Abalone Underworld, 2018); filmmaker Christiane Badgley (Guangzhou Dream Factory); China House Founder and Manager Huang Hongxiang; and Project Research Associate Wu Yu-Shan on the Project’s major lessons and experiences over the last decade. Full programme.
The Evolutionary Studies Institute at Wits with partners will host a lecture series in celebration of Heritage Day, commemorated on 24 September.
The scientific relevance of the wealth of fossils from South Africa is internationally acknowledged. When thinking about the history of palaeosciences in South Africa, the names of famous scientists such as Robert Broom and Raymond Dart are often cited. However, little is known about the fossil discoveries that took place before the scientific era, particularly in pre-colonial times early European settlers as well as indigenous people were finding fossils well before science could account for the existence of the petrified remains of long gone animals and plants. They were often considered curiosities, and were included in their religious beliefs, rock arts or traditional medicine, or stories and legends (geomyths) were created to account for their existence.
This event seeks to raise awareness about the earliest fossil hunters of southern Africa among academics and students by presenting evidence of early fossil findings made by early European settlers and indigenous people. The archaeological record of fossil findings can be traced back to Early Homo sapiens in Africa (Morocco, 300 000 years ago) and early European settlers were trying to account for the existence of fossils some 200 years before Darwin published his theory of the Evolution of species. These lectures will also put the emphasis on the international relevance of South African palaeontological research. In this respect, three students will be presenting their current research projects and how their work is going to affect the future of South African palaeosciences. The lectures will summarise the past, present and future challenges of palaeosciences in South Africa.
Programme:
08:30 - 09:00: Meeting time, coffee
09:00 - 09:30: Welcome: Dr. Julien Benoit/ CoE in Palaeosciences / PAST
09:30 - 10:00: The relevance of the South African fossil record: where do we stand?
Professor Anusya Chinsamy-Turan (University of Cape Town)
10:00 - 10:30: First fossils discovered in South Africa between 1652-1850
Dr. Sharad Master (Wits University, Geosciences)
10:30 - 11:00: Tea break
11:00 - 11:30: Pre and early colonial fossil discoveries in the Cape Supergroup of South Africa
Dr Cameron Penn-Clarke (Iziko Museum, Cape Town – Wits, Evolutionary Studies Institute)
11:30 - 12:00: Interest in Geological and Palaeontological curiosities by non-western societies of Southern Africa
Dr. Charles Helm (African Center For Coastal Palaeoscience)
12:00 - 12:30: The future of Palaeosciences in South Africa
Aviwe Matiwane (PhD student, Rhodes University), Kimberleigh Tommy (Centre of Excellence in Palaeosciences), and
IONS South Africa 2 will shed light on the latest research and work being done in the field of optics and photonics.
IONS South Africa 2018 Conference (IONS South Africa 2) is a week-long optics (the study of light) conference taking place for the second time in South Africa and the third time in Africa. The conference is taking place from 7 to 12 October 2018 at La’Wiida lodge – 40kms from the Johannesburg International Airport.
Hosted by the Wits Optics Student Chapter, based in the Structured Light Lab in the School of Physics at the University of the Witwatersrand, the conference is particularly of interest to postgraduate students and researchers working in the field of optics and photonics.
The International OSA Network of Students (IONS) is a programme from The Optical Society (OSA) – the world’s leading champion for optics and photonics – that encourages student chapter members to organise and manage regional meetings on technical and profession development content as well as networking with peers and luminaries. It also affords students a platform to present their research and network on both an academic and social level.
IONS South Africa 2 will include topics such as laser development, biophotonics, structured light, quantum metrology and quantum control, and additive manufacturing.
Experience Science, Engineering and Technology at Wits
Wits University and the CSIR Optics Student Chapter will also offer a special day for grade 11 learners to experience the science of light on Wednesday, 10 October 2018, between 09:00 and 12:00 in Solomon Mahlangu House, Braamfontein Campus East.
From ensuring sunny days, to expanding our knowledge of the cosmos (universe), to powering technologies that improve our lives, the science of light is ever-present in our daily human lives.
Presentations and/or demonstrations in following science fields will be showcased:
GALA will be hosting an information session where you can learn more about related resources available to the Wits community.
The Gay and Lesbian Memory in Action (GALA) – a centre situated at Wits University for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex and Queer (LGBTIQ) history, culture and education in southern Africa – will be hosting an information session where you can learn more about related resources available to the Wits community, particularly academic staff and postgraduate students. GALA will present an overview of their archive collections, and share some of the treasures that can be found in our approximately 200 collections, and illustrate the many academic disciplines that the materials span, including: history, geography, gender studies, literature, art, theatre, film, sociology, journalism, anthropology and law.
This “empirical study of urban youth in Johannesburg” will be presented during a seminar by Dr Maradona Gatara.
Hosted by the Centre for Researching Education and Labour (REAL), the seminar will elaborate on the study that seeks to better understand how mobile technologies can help scale-up youth workforce development, and investigates the evidence of the impact of mobile technologies for youth workforce development.
The Steve Biko Centre for Bioethics hosts this Faculty Lecture to be presented by A. Kayum Ahmed.
The right to health is intrinsically connected to the right to life and human dignity since these rights are essentially about life and death. However, while the rights to life and human dignity are listed as non-derogable rights in the South African Constitution, the right to health is limited by available state resources and subject to progressive realisation. This limitation on the right to health in both international and South African law, allows states to justify their failure to fully implement this right and gives rise to the idea of human rights as sovereignty—the appropriation of human rights discourses by states to construct a self-serving narrative that entrenches sovereign power and legitimizes state failure using the language of human rights and progressive realization. Using sovereignty as a framework for analysis, the myth of progressive realisation in relation to the right to health can be more fully deconstructed and debunked.
Ahmed, Division Director for Access to Medicines & Accountability in the Public Health Program at the Open Society Foundations in New York.
The 15th annual Ruth First Memorial Lecture will be presented by Ruth First Fellow, Niren Tolsi.
He will speak on Fire and media: Towards a new South African journalism. The lecture is hosted by the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, Professor Ruksana Osman, the South African National Editors’ Forum and Wits Journalism. This year’s respondents will be: Mathlatse Gallens (Chair, Sanef); Bongani Siqoko (Editor, Sunday Times), Khadija Patel (Editor, Mail & Guardian). This year’s event is being held on the eve of Media Freedom Day, marking the clampdown on newspapers by the apartheid state on 19 October 1977.
The 14th annual African Investigative Journalism Conference (AIJC2018), Africa’s premier gathering of investigative journalists.
This year the conference presents more than 70 speakers in 60 different sessions, including winners of the Pulitzer, Taco Kuiper and Global Shining Light awards.
Participants will come from at least 36 countries. Keynote speakers include Pulitzer Prize-winner Clare Baldwin (for her work on the Philippine drug war); Head of Channel 4 News Ben Pears (who oversaw the Cambridge Analytica sting); Anas Anas (the Ghanaian undercover specialist); Ethiopian blogger Befeqadu Hailu Techie; and former South African Public Protector, Advocate Thuli Madonsela.
Other highlights include:
the people behind #GuptaLeaks, West Africa Leaks and DubaiLeaks explaining how they did it
the sharpest new digital and online tools for investigators
cutting edge data journalism and digital skills
a television workshop by the head of Channel 4 News, Ben de Pears
a half-day workshop on media sustainability, with case studies from around the world on what is working
a Master class in Following the Money - how to investigate financial fraud and corruption
a focus on how journalists should keep themselves and their work safe and secure
the best exposés from the best journalists talking about how they broke these stories
The Africa-China Reporting Project will host this dialogue with Professor Adam Habib and H.E. Ambassador of China in South Africa Lin Songtian.
Official South Africa-China diplomatic relations commenced on 1 January 1998 and this year the two countries are celebrating 20 years of diplomatic relations. This dialogue, which commemorates this milestone, will explore the trajectory of past engagements, current dynamics and anticipated developments in the future. It will focus on geo-strategic considerations in the context of BRICS, FOCAC, and implementation of the African Union’s Agenda 2063, as well as South Africa’s engagement with China in the fields of higher education, research and science. Full programme.
Professor Tracy-Lynn Humby from the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management will deliver her inaugural lecture.
Under a post-extractivist model of development, poverty would be a thing of the past and rights would be conceded to nature. Under the current dominant model of predatory extractivism, mining promises poverty alleviation and manageable impacts but contributes to highly unequal development and the erosion of the commons. Multiple pro- and dissenting mining discourses presently frame contribution and cost in a manner that makes common ground appear elusive. In her lecture, Humby asks: How should a post-extractivist mining discourse present contribution and cost; and would it facilitate a common political agenda?
Judith Inggs, Professor of Translation at Wits University, will deliver her inaugural lecture.
Dystopian fiction for young adults in South Africa has increased in both quality and quantity in recent years, and is able to hold its own against globally celebrated trilogies such as Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games or Veronica Roth’s Divergent. While young adult literature often reflects changes taking place in society as the protagonists negotiate a sense of identity and position of power within the institutions of their society, in dystopian literature the young protagonists take a leading role in opposing and subverting the totalitarian societies that have emerged. This lecture highlights recent works by South African authors and seeks to situate them in both a local and global political and historical perspective. The focus is on the portrayal of female protagonists and questions whether writers are promoting the active agency of young women as empowered citizens or whether they are inadvertently reinforcing the traditional role of females as nurturers, ultimately dependent on their male counterparts.
The DST-NRF Centre of Excellence in Human Development will host this conference.
The conference will delve into the complexity of the relationship between the state and the family in supporting the development of children so that they can thrive as South African adults. More information.
Speakers include:
Professor Leila Patel, Director of the Centre for Social Development in Africa at the University of Johannesburg
Professor Linda Richter, Distinguished Professor at Wits and an internationally recognised scholar on early childhood development
Professor Imraan Valodia, Dean of the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management at Wits University
Professor Sarah Mosoetsa, Chief Executive Officer of the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Professor Dori Posel, Helen Suzman Chair in Political Economics at Wits University
Professor Servaas van den Berg, South African Research Chair in Social Policy at Stellenbosch
Professor Shanaaz Mathews, Director of the Children's Institute at University of Cape Town
Professor Shane Norris, Director of the MRC/Wits Developmental Pathways for Health Research Unit
Former President, Kgalema Motlanthe will deliver the 2018 Nobel Inspired Peace Lecture.
The lecture is hosted by the National Research Foundation in partnership with the Swedish Embassy and Wits University, in honour of Nobel Peace laureate, Nelson Mandela. Mandela was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 for his efforts in achieveing a peaceful transition from apartheid to democracy.
Professor Kevin Nell from the University of Johannesburg will deliver a talk based on a paper, Conditional Divergence in the Post-1989 Globalisation Period.
The paper shows that conditional convergence in per capita income, as a robust empirical regularity across countries, may have dissipated in the post-1989 globalisation era. There is evidence of conditional divergence over the period 1990-2016, with growth-reducing structural change emanating from greater trade openness and a slower rate of technology catch-up in developing countries identified as potential explanations. The results further show that conditional divergence can only be ceased subject to some initial, quality-adjusted level of educational attainment. One implication of conditional divergence is that the growth accelerations observed in many developing economies since the late-1990s may not be sustainable.
The Africa-China Reporting Project will host this film screening.
Immigration, globalisation, Chinese factories and African dreams. Guangzhou Dream Factory is a documentary film that weaves stories of Africans chasing alluring, yet elusive, “Made in China” dreams into a compelling critique of 21st Century global capitalism. Featuring a cast of men and women from Cameroon, Kenya, Nigeria and Uganda, Guangzhou Dream Factory provides a rare glimpse of African aspirations in an age of endless outsourcing. A question and answer will follow after the film screening.
Wits University will launch the first University parkrun in South Africa.
The 5km parkrun will commence from parking area adjacent to the Wits Club on the Braamfontein Campus West. The parkrun is planned to take place every Saturday, starting and finishing from the same location.
All Witsies, prospective students and friends of Wits are encouraged to join in the fun event. The Wits parkrun is an initiative to promote a healthy living. It will provide a unique opportunity for the Wits family to engage and make new friends.
This will be first ever parkrun in South Africa that will be held on a University campus. Should people wish to enjoy a drink, coffee and or a bite to eat after the run, the Wits Club will be open to support the extended socialising opportunity.
Officially, parkrun was started by Paul Sinton-Hewitt in 2004 In Bushy Park London. Bruce Fordyce (a Wits alumnus and honorary doctorate) was invited by Paul to bring the parkrun concept to South Africa in 2011. There are now more than 900 000 people registered for parkrun in South Africa (more than 5 000 000 worldwide) and nearly 50 000 who complete one of 172 parkruns in South Africa (more than 1600 globally). It is always 5km run or walk, always at the same time (8am for the Wits parkrun), always free, every Saturday. Each event is run by a team of volunteers who receive no financial remuneration for the joy of bringing parkrun to their community. Everyone is welcome; from walkers who stroll round in over an hour to hardened athletes who may finish in 15 minutes. The parkrun is not a race, so you only compete against yourself. More information: http://www.parkrun.co.za/
Isizulu Sami Nawe is authored by Fikile Khuboni, an academic in the division of Languages, Literacies and Literatures at the Wits School of Education.
She teaches isiZulu to mother tongue and non-mother tongue speakers. She also teaches methodology courses in the BEd programme. She has written a number of isiZulu readers for the intermediate phase and have also authored language books for senior phase.
The Oceanic Humanities, the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research will host the launch of the book, Buying Time by Thomas Mcdow.
In Buying Time, the author synthesises Indian Ocean, Middle Eastern, and East African studies as well as economic and social history to explain how, in the nineteenth century, credit, mobility, and kinship together knit a vast interconnected Indian Ocean region. That vibrant and enormously influential swath extended from the desert fringes of Arabia to Zanzibar and the Swahili Coast and on to the Congo River watershed.
The School of Clinical Medicine in the Faculty of Health Sciences will host this panel discussion.
Panellists include:
Professor Robert Morrell, Director: Next Generation Professoriate, Centre for Extra Mural Studies on Achieving career progression – interventions leading to success
Dr Thenjiwe Hlongwane-Gukuta, Consultant Anaesthesiologist on Challenges faced by young Wits academics in achieving career progression, and opportunities and/or interventions that led to success
Professor Billy Ramokgopa, Academic Head, Division of Orthopaedic Surgery on How to achieve academic career success as a senior clinician
Professor Zeblon Vilakazi, Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research and Postgraduate Affairs at Wits on How research and other scholarly activities can be nurtured in challenging environments
The Wits History Workshop and the Wits School of Arts Film & Television Division will host this two-day event.
Following on from last year's successful Reframing Africa this year’s four major themes are conceived as exercises in thinking about the question of restructuring the self as part of a decolonising project using the archive as a resource.
Examining the cinema archive to understand Africans’ encounters with modernity and their roles in shaping it
Africans as agents of their own destinies. Attempts by African filmmakers to reclaim and reconstitute African subjectivities on their own historical and cultural terms.
How do we reclaim the archive even if it was not made with us in mind? Exploring the ways African filmmakers have or are repurposing the archive.
Reclaiming the archive for transformed pedagogies. The development of courses/or post-graduate degrees in film preservation practices at African universities. Integrating archive studies into the curriculum of film and media programmes as well as disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
20 OCTOBER
14:00 - 14:30 - Coffee & Registration
14:30 - 14:40 - Welcome
14:40 - 15:50 - On the Coming of the Time of the Untimely: Towards the Emergence of Film - Archival Studies in Africa by Aboubakar Sanogo. Chair: Pervaiz Khan
15:50 - 17:00 - The Journey Through The Lens of The Photojournalist Nkululeko Khumalo Recollection of The Past by Vincent Moloi
Chair: Palesa Shongwe
16:00 - 17.45 - Reception
17:45- 20: 00 - Soleil O’ by Med Hondo – Screening. "One of the most compelling films I have ever seen! Med Hondo is no ordinary storyteller" Saer Maty Ba
21 OCTOBER
10:00 -10:20 - Coffee
10:20 - 12:05 - Invisible Cartographies: Inscriptions of archival practice in African multimedia arts by Reece Auguiste,
The Second Limitation: the archive, voyeurism and the problematic “black figure” by Jacob Cloete,
Towards a Partial Biography of Ken Gampu by Litheko Modisane. Chair :Cynthia Kros
12:05 - 12:20 - Break
12:20 -13.30 - Propaganda Turned On Itself by Catherine Meyburgh, The Archive of the Conscious byKhalid Shamis
Chair: Palesa Shongwe
13:30 - 14:30 - Lunch
14:30 - 15:45 - Remembering Popular Culture by Zandile Tisani; Some thoughts on detemporalisation and value in the moving-image archive by Francois Verster. Chair: Dylan Valley
The Wits History Workshop and Wits School of Arts Film & Television Division will host this seminar on West African cinema with Dr Aboubakar Sanogo.
This seminar will look at the work of four major filmmakers from West Africa who have contributed tremendously to cinema, to our understanding of Africa and to the image of Africa around the world as mediated through the cinema. Dr Sanogo from Carleton University will review the films of: Ousmane Sembene -Guelwaar (1992), Med Hondo - West Indies (1979), Idrissa Ouedraogo-Yaaba (1989) and Abderrahmane Sissako-Life on Earth(1998).
The Wits History Workshop and the Wits School of Arts Film & Television Division will host this seminar and screening of the documentary, Twylight City.
This seminar hosted with Professor Recce Auguiste ,will present the historical, theoretical and philosophical evolution of the essay film and will explore why many filmmakers have embraced this form of practice as a means of privileging the personal voice in moving image culture.
Professor Charis Harley from the School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics will present her inaugural lecture.
Scientific achievement and the development of economic success has been the focus of universities, to varying degrees, since their first inception. More specifically, the research engendered by these academic institutions has been a part of humanity’s attempts to seek truth. From this purpose followed certain intellectual and moral obligations, such as the continual support and sanctioning of debates around the merits of past and current ideas, and the development of those minds eager to attain knowledge. However, as society’s norms and values have altered, so too have the pressures faced by universities, and the academics therein. Having transformed at the behest of so many, at times opposing forces, we should re-evaluate what we define our purpose to be, and how we aim to achieve it. Simplistically, are academics losing relevance? Are we still perceived as part of the intellectual elite of our era? Do we still hold with high regard the pursuit of knowledge, and aim to produce individuals who will contribute to society? Or have the pressures we face led to our consensual participation in a race for popularity, ultimate group righteousness, and hence continual intellectual comfort?
Professor Lynne Schepartz from the School of Anatomical Sciences will deliver her inaugural lecture.
Drawing on her experience with health inequalities in prehistoric populations, Professor Schepartz presents how she pursues similar questions regarding the impact of gender and social roles on health in contemporary African societies. Her research employs a multidisciplinary perspective, incorporating data on dental growth and development, oral health and biocultural anthropology.
Robotics, data mining, and machine learning: Honours students to showcase their research projects in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics.
During this year’s Innovation Day, presented by the School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics (CSAM) in the Faculty of Science, some 40 honours students will be demonstrating their research output covering diverse domains such as:robotics, computer vision, data mining, data science, reinforcement learning, and machine learning in general.
Innovation Day is an opportunity for the 2018 CSAM Honours students in Computer Science and Big Data Analytics to communicate their research work in a public expo format through posters and demonstrations to academics and fellow students; and is specifically open to various company, corporate and industry representatives to explore possible solutions and innovative advances in their sectors.
A notable feature for of this year’s Innovation Day is a prototype from the ScilinX Studio – an initiative in the School of CSAM with a strategic objective of advancing operational capabilities of organisations in various sectors. The ScilinX Studio team, led by associate lecturer Phumlani Nhlanganiso Khoza, will be demonstrating an operational data analytics solution aimed to produce insights in: operational risk management, operational and business intelligence, and marketing. The central theme is the extraction of customer and operational insights from unstructured text data.
Drama for Life presents its 10th International Conference and Festival.
The festival showcases cutting edge research, performances, installations, dialogues, training and workshops; crafted to enhance and broaden the knowledge-base and experience of artists, arts therapists, cultural leaders and managers, arts educators, arts academics, researchers and arts activists. More information:www.dramaforlife.co.za
Professor Peter Kamerman from the School of Physiology in the Faculty of Health Sciences will present his inaugural lecture.
The past five years has seen a groundswell in the biomedical sciences for transparent analysis and open data. I will discuss some of the key forces that are driving this change in behaviour, and how technological advances are making it easier for 'old dogs' such as myself to learn (and teach my students) how to report data in an open and accessible way.
The School of Architecture and Planning will host the premiere screening of a short documentary film, Izithombe 2094.
The film is based on the PhD fieldwork of postdoctoral fellow, Alex Halligey. The 2015/2016 project was a year-long participatory public art engagement in Bertrams, Lorentzville and Judith's Paarl, culminating in a site-specific play called, Izithombe 2094. The play was modelled on the form of a walking tour, as fictional tour guide characters lead audience members through the suburbs, with performances happening along the way. The project aimed to use participatory theatre and performance processes to explore daily life in the area and this short film documents the making and performance of the final play.
This book is edited by Professor Loren Landau and Tanya Pampalone.
The narratives in this book, collected by researchers, journalists and writers, reflect the many facets of South Africa’s post-apartheid decades. They are the stories of South Africans, some Gauteng-born, others from neighbouring provinces, striving to realise the promises of democracy. They are also the stories of newcomers from neighbouring countries and from as far afield as Pakistan and Rwanda, seeking a secure future in those very promises.
The seminar will discuss various aspects of university language policy implementation and the practice, pros and cons of multilingual teaching and research.
Speakers include:
Prof. Mbulungeni Madiba (Associate Professor and Co-ordinator of the Multilingualism Education Project at the University of Cape Town)
Prof. Innocentia Mhlambi (Associate Professor of African Languages, School of Literature, Language and Media at the University of the Witwatersrand)
Prof. Leketi Makalela (Professor of Languages, Literacies and Literatures, Wits School of Education, and Director of the Hub for Multilingual Education and Literacies (HuMEL) Research and Development Centre)
Professor Geoffrey Candy from the Department of Surgery, School of Clinical Medicine in the Faculty of Health Sciences, will deliver his inaugural lecture.
Small’ comes in many guises: a molecule, a bacterium in the gut, elucidating the mechanism of a disease, an experimental animal, the interaction with a patient, supervising a post-graduate student or mentoring and advising the trainee specialist clinician/surgeon. Scientists working in Health Sciences must undertake translational research to be clinically relevant. Candy describes the challenges and highlights working as a biochemist and scientist working in the clinical field of surgery and clinical medicine.
The Centre for Researching Education and Labour (REAL) will host the launch of this book launch.
In the book the editors offer a timely collection of chapters approaching debates on economic and social change and employment within different types of economies. Considering questions of knowledge and curriculum, these works interrogate ways of thinking about relationships between different forms of work and education. The focus is both on the curriculum and the factors influencing and constraining what education can do to prepare for work, as well as how these factors shape and limit the role of educational preparation for work.
The Centre for Researching Education and Labour (REAL) will host a talk by Professor Peliwe Lolwana.
The talk explores the role of ICTs in providing access to skills development and support to self-employment initiatives for the unemployed and lowly employed youth. It presents some findings on the nature of ICT programmes that exist to provide access to skills development, and looks at the possibility of starting some pilots in skilling the youth using ICTs.
The Wits Business School (WBS) will host an information evening about the Management Advancement Programme (MAP).
MAP at Wits Business School accelerates students’ career in this ever-changing business environment. For over 35 years, the sought-after MAP has provided a platform for thousands of managers to advance their careers to senior level. Keeping pace with trends, WBS has updated and designed their MAP to reflect a changing global environment.
This colloquium will focus on the persistence of the past in the architecture and infrastructure of colonialism and apartheid.
In traversing the stubborn landscapes of colonialism and apartheid, we are confronted with the ambivalent ruins and seemingly innocuous buildings of this forgotten urban infrastructure. What we observe is the lingering presence of colonial history and architecture’s largely hidden yet pervasive everyday structures. Such conflicting spatial claims continue to raise a number of haunting questions. This colloquium to understand in what ways history and architecture could ameliorate, contest or subvert these protracted conditions in terms of social justice, land reclamation and urban rehabilitation. The postcolonial decades following the dismantling of oppressive regimes across the globe are to be examined in the light of contemporary communal and memorial projects, in which building ruins are being fought over and renegotiated as sites of remembrance.
This colloquium is hosted by the History Worskhop and the School of Architecture and Planning.
Liv Tørres, Adjunct Professor at the Wits School of Governance (WSG) and the Executive Director of the Nobel Peace Centre in Oslo will present this talk.
Sexual violence has been used in war throughout history and on all continents. Yet, it is only 10 years ago that the UN recognised sexual violence as a weapon of war. This year, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Peace Prize to Denis Mukwege from the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Yazidi woman Nadia Murad from northern Iraq for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict. Both laureates have, according to the Nobel Committee made a crucial contribution to focusing attention on, and combating, such war crimes. This talk will be about sexual violence as a weapon of war; the two laureates; the importance of the Peace Prize and the need to give more attention to sexual violence.
The Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (CISA) at Wits will host this seminar.
The seminar will be presented by Caio Simões de Araújo from CISA and Cláudia Gastrow from the University of Johannesburg.
On 10 November 2018, Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi inaugurated the much-anticipated Maputo-Katembe Bridge, a megaproject 10 years in the making and widely known as the longest suspension bridge in Africa. Result of heavy Chinese financing – with a public loan of 785 million USD – and comprehensive scientific cooperation, this bridge is perhaps paradigmatic of Chinese-funded infrastructural development in the Global South, in general, and in Africa, in particular. The Maputo-Katembe link is not, however, merely a monumental engineering project. It had also involved great economic change and restructuring of public finances, it carried with it the promises of urban renewal of Maputo and the development of southern Mozambique broadly. As many other megaprojects in the Global South, it produced environmental change, changed urban and rural landscapes and required the sacrifice of population removal. This panel will draw on the Maputo-Katembe example to open up a debate about the politics of infrastructure development and megaprojects in the Global South. We are particularly interested in debating and formulating a research agenda that is pertinent not only to Mozambique or southern Africa, but that speaks to the broader spectrum of Chinese-led major undertakings in architecture or engineering, urban or economic planning, agricultural development and mineral extraction, to name just a few of the most prominent areas.
Professor Robyn Lynne Van Zyl from the Department of Pharmacy and Pharmacology in the School of Therapeutic Sciences, will present her inaugural lecture.
Malaria remains a concern for all those living on the African continent. Attempts to elucidate critical pathways within this intriguing parasite, and to discover potential antimalarial compounds, have required commitment and resolve. This inaugural lecture will highlight some of the lessons learnt during the journey.
Professor David Tabb from the South African Tuberculosis Bioinformatics Initiative is the guest speaker at the 2018 MBRT Postgraduate Day.
This day showcases research by postgraduate students and postdoctoral fellows from the Faculties of Science and Health Sciences, working in the broad field of the molecular investigation of biological processes.
Dr. Frank Zhu, a Honeywell Universal Oil Products Senior Technology Fellow will present this seminar.
This seminar is hosted by the School of Chemical and Metallurgical Engineering, in conjunction with the NRF/DST Chair in Sustainable Process Engineering.
Dr Yogan Pillay, Deputy Director-General at the National Department of Health responsible for the HIV & AIDS, TB and Maternal, Child and Women’s Health programmes;
Professor Adrian Puren, Head of the Centre for HIV and STIs at the NICD and his area of interest is in virology and HIV specifically;
Dr Linda Ncube-Nkomo, Chief Executive Officer at LoveLife, responsible for ensuring stakeholders engage with issues affecting South African youth and for finding solutions to reduce HIV infection among young people.
Laura Lopez Gonzalez, Deputy Editor of the Mail & Guardian’s Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism will facilitate the discussion. Wear something red! HIV testing services will be available on the day.
The Division of Community Paediatrics together with the South African Child Health Priorities Association hosts this conference.
The conference will focus on current hot topics in the delivery of child health care and the promotion of children’s well-being.
Conference themes include primary health care re-engineering, improving dysfunctional health systems, health practitioner education and child health advocacy. More information.
Dr Adelphine Bonneau will deliver this public lecture
The Later Stone Age rock art of southern Africa is one of the best understood traditions of rock art in the world. In contrast, little is understood of how the paint itself was made or what it was made from, while the age of these paintings also remained mostly unknown, until now. As part of an international project, scientists used chemistry, geology and materials sciences to unveil some of San rock painting mysteries. In more than 40 sites in the Drakensberg and in Botswana, the secrets of the creation of paintings were revealed as well as their age. This talk will present those discoveries and introduce the science background behind them.
The Wits Health Consortium and the Primrose Sports Academy will host this soccer tournament.
The Wits Health Consortium together with Primrose Sports Academy have responded to a corporate social responsibility call aimed at developing, enriching and empowering Germiston-based youngsters between the ages of 13 and 17 through sport and wellness. You are cordially invited to support this great initiative, which is deeply embedded in the consortium’s strategy of giving back to various communities within which its employees and key stakeholders live and operate.
Dr Justin Pargeter will present this public lecture.
Humans have evolved a unique ‘technological niche’ comprising the ability for sophisticated object manipulation, modification, and the social reproduction of technological information.
The archaeological record provides a valuable source of evidence for tracing these processes, but interpretation of this evidence remains challenging and controversial. Justin will talk about his recent experimental study of Acheulean handaxe-making skill acquisition involving twenty-six naïve subjects and up to 90 hours training over several months, accompanied by a battery of psychometric, behavioural, and neuroimaging assessments in addition to extensive artifact analysis.
This makes it one of the largest, longest running, and most comprehensive stone tool learning experiments ever performed. Justin focusses on the fundamental problem of quantifying variation in knapping skill over the training period and across individuals. The results identify likely cognitive targets of selection acting on the efficiency or reliability of tool-making skill acquisition, quantify learning costs, highlight the likely importance of social support, motivation, persistence, and self-control in knapping skill acquisition, and establish methods for reliably reconstructing ancient learning processes from archaeological evidence. By better understanding the learning demands of particular Paleolithic technologies through studies like the current one, we can hope to gain insight into the evolutionary emergence of these critical cognitive and social pillars of the human technological niche.
Why opposing the man Trump wants as head of the World Bank might just work
- John Stremlau
The power dynamics in the World Bank have changed dramatically.
US President Donald Trump’s nomination of his Treasury Undersecretary David Malpass to become President of the World Bank Group and CEO of the World Bank should be seen more as an opportunity than a problem by African leaders and other major borrowers.
By one scenario the US could still secure a majority vote for their nominee, as they have in every Bank presidential election since the institution’s founding in 1944. But this shouldn’t be viewed as cast in stone given how threadbare previously staunch relationships have become, mainly due to Trump’s erratic behaviour. Even the US’s European allies, including Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, have shown a willingness to publicly criticise Trump and his policies in ways not heard since World War II.
Added to this are concerns about Trump’s misguided views – shared by Malpass – that multilateral institutions are hostile to US interests. As New York Council on Foreign Relations expert Stewart Patrick argues, Malpass’s appointment could undermine the Bank’s invaluable work around the globe.
So, could his nomination be blocked and how?
There are four reasons why opposing Trump’s nominee may be easier than it first appears.
Opposing Trump’s choice
The first reason is that Trump may not survive in office much longer. His polling numbers remain at historic lows. His legal problems continue to escalate and evident to voters. And with the Democrats now in control of the US House of Representatives, they have subpoena powers to investigate allegations of Trump’s illicit actions and conflicts of interest, adding to his political vulnerabilities.
Secondly, reforms in nominating and appointing Bank presidents in 2011 opened up the process for the first time in 2012. Then there were three finalists - Nigerian Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Columbian Jose Antonio Ocampo and US candidate Jim Yong Kim.
In the end Kim got the job on the back of then President Barack Obama’s nomination. It’s useful to note that both Kim and Obama enjoyed far more international support than Malpass and Trump today.
Thirdly, an important precedent was set last year when Trump’s candidate to head the Bank’s International Organisation for Migration was rejected by United Nations (UN) members. The main reason was that his anti-Muslim statements were judged antithetical to its policies of inclusion. It was an unprecedented rejection – the office had been led by Americans since the 1960s.
Rejecting Malpass would be a second victory for those who believe all senior world leadership posts should be decided on merit and more inclusive representation.
The last reason that there’s hope in rejecting Malpass is that the power dynamics in the bank have changed dramatically in the last nearly 80 years. The US has always justified its power to select the president on the grounds that it was the bank’s largest shareholder.
This was true when the bank began operations in the 1940s. Then the US held 35.07% among just 38 members. Today, the bank belongs to 193 countries and the US voting share is 15.98%.
Nevertheless, denying the US a voting majority is challenging. The president of the bank is selected by 25 directors, most representing regional groups. America’s traditional allies, UK, France, Germany and Japan control 18.48% and there is a long-running understanding that for their support of America’s candidates for the bank, the US will reciprocate by supporting a European to head the International Monetary Fund.
But this is no longer necessarily a fail-safe for America. Trump has tense relations with many US allies. And directors representing groups of African, Latin American and Asian countries may find majorities of their members willing to oppose the US.
Voting scenarios suggest blocking Malpass is politically possible. But, to pull it off would require positive, deliberative and inclusive action.
Nominations
The nominations period began on 7 February and close on 14 March. Malpass was the first entry, with Trump presumably hoping to discourage competition. With just weeks remaining, any member who wants to nominate one of their nationals should be encouraged to do so.
Names of potential candidates already raised in media reports include Donald Kaberuka of Rwanda, Sri Mulyani Indrawati of Indonesia. Others are 2012 finalists, Ocampo and Okonjo-Iweala. Others deserving consideration from Africa, Asia and Latin America might well be waiting in the wings.
The US is likely to argue that to ensure a smooth transition, a new president should be named prior to the 9-14 April 2019 annual meeting of World Bank members in Washington.
But this is no longer an issue. Under the 2011 reforms there is now an interim president, the highly regarded Kristalina Georgieva of Bulgaria. She is fully capable of managing the bank while all candidates are carefully vetted for their personal integrity and professional achievements.
The search for a new head of the bank should also allow for input from the many large national and international civil society organisations that are its vital partners.
A leader the World Bank needs
Malpass need not be denigrated, notwithstanding his negative views of multilateralism and lack of any positive agenda for the World Bank. What’s more important is that a consensus candidate is found who has the necessary skills and practical ideas for the bank to better support much needed programmes in Africa and other countries.
There are also huge infrastructure needs the bank can address. And it needs quick response capabilities to help countries cope with sudden natural disasters and pandemics.
If a search driven by these concerns succeeds, then bank supporters can thank Trump for unwittingly encouraging their efforts.
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about 800 students who receive a cooked lunch from the Wits Food Bank.
