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27 March 2018 Photo Thabo Kessah
Afromontane Research Unit welcomes new Director
Newly-appointed Afromontane Research Unit Director, Dr Vincent Clark.

The newly-appointed Director of the Afromontane Research Unit (ARU) on the Qwaqwa Campus, Dr Vincent Clark, is a true believer in risk-taking as a way of improving one’s life.

“Taking risks grows one’s confidence and experience, and at the right time the right door will open,” he asserts.

Dr Clark has his foundation in Geography and Botany; in 1998, he graduated with a BSc degree majoring in these two subjects, and he also has an Honours degree (1999) in Geography and Environmental Management; both degrees were obtained at the University of Johannesburg (the then Rand Afrikaans University).
 
“Then in 2010, I graduated with a PhD in Phytogeography at Rhodes University.  My PhD was followed up by several postdoctoral fellowships from Rhodes University and one at the University of Zürich between 2010 and 2016. I was privileged to become a lead academic in Professor Nigel Barker’s Great Escarpment Biodiversity Research Programme,” said Dr Clark, who is currently enjoying a good read of John Hunt’s The Ascent of Everest and Spiritual Leadership by Henry and Richard Blackaby.

He envisions the ARU as the continental leader in African mountain research, with an immediate focus on the sustainable development of the Maloti-Drakensberg.
 
“My immediate plans for the ARU team are to grow a strong network of between 60 odd researchers and postgraduates, and to connect them with the regional mountain-research community. Short-term plans include fostering stronger ARU links with the Swiss mountain-research community, encouraging the Japan collaboration, and an ARU-hosted Regional Mountain Conference.”

 “Longer-term plans are to develop the ARU into the leading African mountain-research group and for the ARU to become a leading South-based agent informing the global mountain-research arena,” he added.

Dr Clark has very strong words for the academia. “Academia must always guard against becoming a community of ‘yes men’ for external political or social agendas. As academics, we have a duty to discover and present the truth, regardless of how unpopular that might be. We are in serious danger of losing our academic mandate when we simply become a rubber stamp for untested politically-correct assumptions and agendas. If we ever needed bold academics to expose the plethora of ‘Emperors New Clothing’ currently on parade, it’s today.”

This family man and father of a one-year old son, loves the outdoor life. His hobbies include birding, hiking, swimming, surfing, and reading Louis L’Amour and Hammond Innes.

News Archive

In her inaugural lecture, Prof Helene Strauss explores symbols that reflect our history
2014-02-18

 

Prof Helene Strauss
The burning tyre – image of promise and disappointment
Photo: Stephen Collett

Prof Helene Strauss did not disappoint in her highly-anticipated inaugural lecture “The Spectacles of Promise and Disappointment: Political Emotion and Quotidian Aesthetics in Post-transitional South Africa”. She posed some very challenging ideas on the promises and disappointments that arouse from apartheid. Prof Strauss pointed to the fact that “… a promise must promise to be kept; that is, not to remain spiritual or abstract, but to produce events, new effective forms of action, practice, organisation, and so forth.”

She underscored the message of her lecture by making use of the image of a burning tyre – a symbol commonly associated with apartheid. This act of ‘necklacing’ is closely connected to the violence and protests of that era. Prof Strauss used this image to represent an array of social concerns: global mass protest, modernity and mobility, waste economies and waste management, environmental destruction, as well as poverty and resistance in varied formats.

Some of South Africa’s greatest artists have used the burning tyre in their work, particularlyBerni Searle and Zanele Muhloi. Not only does it trigger the shadow of the damaging past, but “more recently, it has come to figure also in the spectacles of promise and disappointment that have marked the country’s transitional and post-transitional periods,” Prof Strauss remarked.

Prof Strauss focuses her research on these symbolisms in our history because of “the questions that they raise about the emotional cultures produced in the aftermath of apartheid and for the unique contribution that they make to current debates on political and aesthetic activism.”Her passion for this subject comes from the “affective or emotional legacies of various forms of structural inequality, an interest that owes a sizeable debt to postcolonial, queer and feminist critical theory and creative work of the past hundred or so years.”

Prof Strauss accepted a position at the University of the Free Sate in 2011 and currently works in the Department of English. She is part of the Vice-Chancellor’s Prestige Scholars Programme and holds a PhD from the University of Western Ontario. Previously, she held the position of Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Canada, where she resided for 11 years.

Among the guests were Prof Jonathan Jansen, Profs Botes and Witthuhn, lecturers in the Department of English, members of the Faculty of the Humanities, students and some of Prof Strauss’ colleagues from Canada.

 

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