Latest News Archive

Please select Category, Year, and then Month to display items
Categories
UFS News Media Release Research
Years
2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024
Months
January February March April May June July August September October November December
Previous Archive
10 October 2018 | Story UFS | Photo Moeketsi Mogotsi
International Cultural Diversity Festival builds bridges
Global cuisines galore at the International Cultural Diversity Festival

Photo Gallery

Celebrating our heritage allows us to learn about each other's cultures and traditions, and it is an activity that brings people together. "Heritage is an important element of our everyday lives that constantly reminds us of who we are and how far we have come," says Bonolo Makhalemele, International Cultural Diversity Festival organising team leader.

Cultivating intercultural connectivity

The Bloemfontein Campus was a hive of festivities as the community received cultural education from all over the world while being serenaded with diverse music, indulging in delicious cuisines, and dressed in ethic regalia at the festival hosted by the University of the Free State's (UFS) Office for International Affairs. Reinforcing unity and diversity formed the foundation of the theme: Building bridges in heritage - Connecting local and international cultures. Although it was a first for the UFS, the festival is an annual highlight on many countries' calendars, with the university intending to follow suit.

Makhalemele firmly believes that even in our uniqueness, there are immense similarities which we share and can celebrate. "Not only do we build bridges in celebrating our heritage, but we foster reconciliation, promote unity in diversity, and breathe life as well as meaning into our identities through the whole process." 

African artistic fashion

Busisiwe Ntsele, representing the House of Diva (HOD) which manufactures tailor-made Africa-inspired clothes for ladies of all sizes, manned one of the stalls at the festival. "We call it the House of Diva because it gives you the magical feeling of being an African woman," she said. Ntsele also shared the story of her cultural background, being born to South African parents as a child of the diaspora in the Kingdom of the Swati and growing up to marry a partner from Lesotho.

The Cultural Festival proved to be a successful infusion of food, fashion, dance, music, as well as arts and crafts from countries such as Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Kenya, Swaziland, Cameroon, Kenya, Namibia, Malawi, Tanzania, Spain, Uganda, Argentina, Ghana, Ethiopia, China, Nigeria, Cuba, Bangladesh, India, Taiwan, Netherlands, Germany, the United States of America, Libya, Congo, Botswana, Mozambique, Ireland, Israel, Ivory Coast, Korea, France, Sudan, Angola, New Zealand, and Afghanistan.

Students, staff members, and the community had the opportunity to become interculturally competent, which is an essential skill within a transforming environment such as the university. 



News Archive

Prof Helene Strauss delves into the emotion and politics of contemporary South African protest cultures
2014-12-22

Prof Helene Strauss from the University of the Free State’s (UFS) Department of English currently researches the relationship between emotion and politics in contemporary South African public and protest cultures.

The research foregrounds the complex set of concerns opened up by a study of intimacy, read as not simply a sign for emotional and sexual closeness, but more broadly as a complexly mediated site from which to observe the embodied, affective coordinates of various forms of control and contestation. Through the analysis of a range of cultural texts that, for instance, recompose moments of spectacular social upheaval through the lenses of everyday, embodied experience, this research considers what aesthetic responsibility might mean in both post-transitional South Africa and elsewhere.

One aspect of this research charts a gradual shift in South Africa from what is frequently referred to as the ‘liberation euphoria’ of the mid- to late 1990s – and the optimistic fantasies of a future South Africa that characterised dominant public discourse in the period immediately following the political transition – toward an emotional culture in which expressions of anger, disillusionment and disappointment seem to have become relatively widespread.

Prof Strauss asks, for instance, how these public feelings have been managed in the aftermath of events such as the Marikana massacre, and suggests that the affective and temporal dimensions of current attempts at containing perceived threats to financial and political stability on the part of South Africa’s business and political elite are key to understanding increasingly violent and repressive securitisation strategies.

Earlier this year, Prof Strauss presented papers on aspects of this research at two international conferences: (i) the Association for Cultural Studies conference in Tampere, Finland, where she was invited to be part of a ‘Spotlight Panel’ on the topic of African Cultural Studies, (ii) and at a conference at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, which she helped to co-organise.

An article based on some of this work has been published in the journal Safundi.

For more of Prof Strauss’s research published in journals, follow the links below:
http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rsaf20/current#.VAf88_mSxqU
http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/riij20/15/1#.VAf80vmSxqU
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/sub/journal/v4/n2/index.html

We use cookies to make interactions with our websites and services easy and meaningful. To better understand how they are used, read more about the UFS cookie policy. By continuing to use this site you are giving us your consent to do this.

Accept