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12 December 2019 | Story Rulanzen Martin | Photo Johan Roux
Dionne
Dr Dionne van Reenen received her PhD during the December Graduation Ceremonies at the UFS

Very seldom in modern history do we try to critically think about how our bodies and even more those of women are presented in modern popular culture. Through her PhD research project, Dionne van Reenen attempts to critically analyse ideological formations of the body in performance and its discursive distribution in the consumption of contemporary popular media, adding to existing literature and research on the topic.

Her dissertation is titled Performing the Erotic: (Re)presenting the Body in Popular Culture.

Van Reenen, a senior researcher at the Unit for Institutional Change and Social Justice at the University of the Free State (UFS), received her PhD qualification specialising in English on Wednesday 11 December 2019 during the final ceremony of the December Graduation.

Van Reenen has extensive experience in all areas of education. Her work at the Unit for Institutional Change and Social Justice is interdisciplinary, involving both everyday and institutional politics. She also holds a Master’s degree in Philosophy, which she obtained in 2013 from the UFS. In 2016, she chaired the UFS Language Policy Review Committee and established the Gender and Sexual Equity Office, which formulated the Sexual Harassment, Misconduct, and Violence Policy at the UFS. 

Changing of social constructs in media consumption

“My study focuses on performative framings of social constructs of gender, race, and class (along with size, age, and ability) in the ordering processes of society,” she says.  These performative framings in are in turn sustained by the (re)presentation of eroticised bodies in popular visual media in the 21st century. “These framings and orderings are critiqued as nothing new, but simply entertainment product that is trading in ideologies and stereotypes that have long been in sociocultural circulation, and they affect how people think, speak and act.” 

The study also shows that the dynamics of ‘virtuality’ and ‘visuality’ in the digital age are altering traditional demarcations of space, place, time, and community, and have paved the way for formations of global cultures that are, at the same time, informative, expedient, empowering, homogenising, prescriptive, and imperialising.

Whilst the #MeToo movement focused more on gender-based violence, gender inequality, and sexual violence, which are big social issues and do not exist in isolation, Van Reenen used her critical philosophical training to understand how, in the current era, the dominant discourse on representations of the body, particularly marginalised bodies, has been constructed at the popular level. 

With every PhD research dissertation the candidate’s main aim is to add new knowledge to a discipline. For Van Reenen, it is important that her research can contribute to a change in social and cultural constructs by re-imagining the (re)presentations of the body in popular media.

News Archive

University publishes its Integrated Report
2013-08-23

23 August 2013

The university is proud to have published an integrated report in line with the King III requirements on corporate governance. The university is one of the first universities – if not the first – in South Africa to do so. The UFS sees integrated reporting as a public process through which we report to all our stakeholders, using evidence-based data, on the achievements and challenges of a public university.

Our first Integrated Report reviews the overall performance, non-financial and financial, of the UFS for the 2012 academic year. It is the first report of its kind delivered to stakeholders and guided by the King III framework which recommends integrated, sustainable performance that is reported in a way that enables stakeholders to make an informed assessment of an institution.

The Integrated Report notes that the conditions under which higher education institutions operate have become more demanding in the last two decades and there is a growing need for universities to be more explicit and transparent about the manner in which their core functions (teaching, research and public duty), as well as its administrative operations, are defined by and support good governance, sustainability and corporate citizenship.

The university welcomes this opportunity to present in public an integrated account of itself. In particular, the UFS sees this report as an opportunity to align more strongly its financial and non-financial reporting in pursuit of organisational sustainability and social transformation in South Africa.

Prof Jonathan Jansen, Vice-Chancellor and Rector, notes in the report that in the past four years the university has made significant progress in respect of its two foundational commitments, the Academic Project and the Human Project.

There are now more students entering the university who satisfy the higher requirements set for admission. “This will improve the throughput and graduation rates of incoming students, ensuring their personal success and satisfaction with higher education.” The establishment of a state-of-the-art Postgraduate School, for example, is expected to increase the number, quality and success rates of postgraduate students.

The research output has increased steadily and the contribution of the new Senior Professors project, as well as the five research clusters, have helped to improve the quality of research and the spread of postgraduate recruitment beyond South Africa.

On transformation, the Vice-Chancellor observes that “We have made significant progress in building inclusive, democratic and embracing campus cultures which affirm the value and dignity of all students and staff. With the steady increase of black students in a majority black campus, our goal remains to retain our diversity in a university that serves as an experiment in teaching students to live and learn and love together.”

Financial sustainability is a major commitment and the UFS has not only maintained its record of unqualified audits, but has steadily built a culture of risk management and performance evaluation throughout the system. Internal auditing is a strong instrument in our arsenal to secure financial and operational compliance in every department of the university.

“What integrates the systems and functions of the university is the alignment of everything we do with our two pillars, the Academic and Human Projects, built on a solid foundation of professional support services as described in the Strategic Plan adopted in 2012. In the process of preparing the Integrated Report we discovered how much still needs to be done to align the still disparate and independent activities of the three campuses, seven faculties and more than 100 departments of this large university,” according to the Vice-Chancellor.

The report is available at: http://www.ufs.ac.za/content.aspx?id=184.

 

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