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19 July 2018 Photo Supplied
AEVGI advances Next-Generation Sequencing in Africa
Prof George Armah, Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research, Ghana; Prof Carl Kirkwood, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, USA; Cornelius Hagenmeier, Director: Internationalisation, UFS; Prof Gert van Zyl, Dean: Health Sciences; Dr Martin Nyaga, Senior Lecturer in the NGS Unit; Prof Joyce Tsoka-Gwegweni, Vice-Dean: Health Sciences; Dr Glen Taylor, Senior Director: Research and Development; Prof Jeffrey Mphahlele, Vice-President, South African Medical Research Council.

The inaugural edition of the University of the Free State (UFS) Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) Data and Bioinformatics Workshop, hosted by the UFS-NGS Unit in the UFS Faculty of Health Sciences, marked a new beginning for the advancement of NGS in Africa under the auspices of the African Enteric Viruses Genome Initiative (AEVGI), which was recently funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The AEVGI will generate rotavirus genomes at the UFS-NGS Unit to investigate the long-term effects of the introduction of the monovalent RV1 vaccine in three African countries – Ghana, Malawi, and South Africa.

The workshop attracted over 90 participants from 15 national and international institutions, with organisations from seven different countries as well as company representatives attending the event. The workshop kicked off with a courtesy call to the Rector and Vice-Chancellor, Prof Francis Petersen, followed by a stakeholder meeting with the executive management of the UFS.

The funding was secured through an award to the principal investigator, Dr Martin Nyaga, and sub-awards to co-investigators, Dr Khuzwayo Jere, Dr Francis Dennis, and Dr Valentine Ndze. According to attendee evaluations of the workshop, the remarkable performance of the workshop instructors was outstanding. Through practical sessions, participants were equipped with knowledge on how to apply several tools of genetic data analysis, using the rotavirus genome as a model to construct and interpret different genomic datasets.

A total of 65 students attended the hands-on workshop, the majority of which were from South African higher-education institutions. The organisers are grateful to the sponsors, particularly to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the University of the Free State, for making the workshop a success. Whitehead Scientific and the South African Medical Research Council also played a major role in the success of the workshop. The local organising committee consisted of Dr Martin Nyaga (host, convener and chair), Dr Saheed Sabiu (secretary), and Mr Stephanus Riekert (principal ICT support).

News Archive

UFS hosts first ACS Institute held on African soil
2015-12-08



The first ever Association for Cultural Studies (ACS) Institute hosted on the African continent is taking place on the Bloemfontein Campus. At the event are, from the left: Prof Jonathan Jansen, Vice-Chancellor and Rector of the UFS; Prof Jean Comaroff, Alfred North Whitehead Professor of African and African-American Studies and Anthropology at Harvard University; Prof Helene Strauss, Chair of the Department of English at the UFS; and Prof Gil Rodman, Chair of the Association for Cultural Studies and Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota.
Photo: Johan Roux

The University of the Free State (UFS) is hosting the 2015 conference of the Association for Cultural Studies (ACS) Institute – the first time for this international event to take place on the African continent.

From 7 – 12 December 2015, some of the world’s leading scholars in cultural studies are taking part in the conference on the Bloemfontein Campus. The event has been organised by the UFS Department of English in collaboration with colleagues from other departments in the Faculty of the Humanities.

 The ACS is the foremost international association for scholars in cultural studies, and has been hosting the biennial Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference since 2006. In 2011, the ACS held its inaugural institute at the University of Ghent (Belgium), followed, in 2013, by one at the Alpen-Adria University Klagenfurt (Austria). As the 2015 meeting of the institute is the first to be held in Africa, the organisers aim at highlighting the contributions that scholars from our continent and other (post)colonial contexts have made to cultural studies, even as it engaged many of the long-standing theoretical concerns generated for the field by scholars from the Global North.

Themed ‘Precarious Futures’, the conference explores how cultural studies might assist in charting more equitable futures by reflecting critically on the cultural, economic, and political trajectories within which precariousness – a state increasingly anticipated for the planet – might be altered. Experts in a diversity of disciplines are sharing their perspectives in the form of seminars and lectures.

Keynote lectures are delivered by Prof Jean Comaroff (Harvard University), Prof John Erni (Hong Kong Baptist University), Dr Jo Littler (City University London), Dr Zethu Matebeni (University of Cape Town), and Prof Handel Kashope Wright (University of British Columbia).

In her opening lecture on Monday 7 December 2015, Prof Comaroff addressed the challenging relationship of law, detection, and sovereignty in contemporary African polities within the South African post-apartheid context.

Topics discussed include climate change; the archives of everyday life; cross-racial intimacies; ethnography; meritocracy; cultural studies and human rights; China and globalisation; gender, sexuality, and race; and governance, embodiment and the work of care.

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