New Research Chairs for Wits
- By Wits University
The National Research Foundation (NRF) has announced three new research chairs which will be hosted by Wits University under the South African Research Chairs Initiative (SARChI), funded by the Department of Science Technology and administered by the NRF.
The Research Chair in Critical Diversity Studies will be taken up by Professor Melissa Steyn of the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies (WiCDS). The WiCDS aims to build capacity to meet the challenges of diverse societies, especially in post-apartheid South Africa.
Steyn said that the chair’s aims were to theorise contextually grounded understandings of diversity, difference and otherness, as these become salient through the current operations of power; to research how these dynamics are “at work” empirically in specific sites and locations; and to develop knowledge and materials that address South African needs.
The second new chair, the Research Chair in Mobility and the Politics of Difference, will be taken up by Professor Loren Landau of the African Centre for Migration and Society (ACMS) at Wits, one of Africa’s leading scholarly institutions for research and teaching on human mobility.
Landau said that the chair would build on the work that the ACMS had been doing for the last decade, which is to understand how migration in all its forms is reshaping politics and societies across Africa.
“We proposed the chair about three years ago. The impetus was that while people have studied migration, most of the work has been done from an economic or public health perspective – very little has linked the movements of people to politics. As we’ve seen from xenophobic attacks against immigrants or hostility towards people from other provinces, migrations – whether local or international – can’t be separated from politics,” he said.
Landau is a political scientist by training, but he has been working at the ACMS – an interdisciplinary institute – for over a decade. “This chair will draw on the insights of political science, sociology, human geography and other disciplines,” he said.
Finally, the Centre for Health Policy (CHP) has appointed Professor John Eyles, an eminent international research scientist as the Chair for Health Policy and Systems Research. The research portfolio associated with this chair will focus on universal access (also referred to as universal coverage) to quality care for all South Africans. This is necessary to strengthen the public health system’s ability to use resources effectively and efficiently, while increasing the production of skilled health workers.
Eyles is world-renowned in the field of health systems and policy research, and will strengthen the field in South Africa as the Department of Health embarks on a major health systems reform program to boost the country’s health outcomes which fall below international targets in some areas. Read more.
In addition to the three new chairs, the NRF has announced that an existing chair, the Research Chair in Bioinformatics of African Populations, based within the University’s Sydney Brenner Institute for Molecular Bioscience, will be filled by its first incumbent, Michèle Ramsay, a professor in the Division of Human Genetics at the National Health Laboratory Service and Wits.
Meanwhile, Professor Thokozani Majozi of the School of Chemical and Metallurgical Engineering has taken up the Research Chair in Sustainable Process Engineering. To read more about Majozi, click here.