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08 February 2019 | Story Thabo Kessah | Photo Thabo Kessah
Gateway 2019
From the left: Mookgo Mofokeng, Lethukuthula Nsibande, Siyalungelwa Ntombela, and Chulumanco Mazwi.
The two-week Gateway Orientation programme to introduce first-year students to campus and faculty life on the Qwaqwa Campus,  has been a resounding success – if the first-years’ comments are anything to go by.

“Amazing Race was for me the pinnacle of this programme, as it enabled me to get to know the campus much better. It was such a refreshing experience, despite my sore thighs that are still hurting. I also loved the Step Up for success initiative,” said Chulumanco Mazwi from Mthatha in the Eastern Cape. Chulumanco has enrolled for a BAdmin degree, which will “enable me to interact with people, particularly in the corporate world”.

From Paballong Village in Qwaqwa came a budding scientist, Mookgo Mofokeng. “The programme has afforded me the opportunity to interact with a number of students from different places such as KwaZulu-Natal, Eastern Cape, and Gauteng,” she said. “I have also learnt about the history of the campus that is very close to my heart,” said Mookgo. “This is the campus where I won the prize for my Eskom Expo for Young Scientists project, with my partner and I displaying our water-extracting project as learners from the Beacon Secondary School here in Qwaqwa. For more on this, please watch the environmental television programme 50/50 on SABC 2 on 17 February 2019.”

Coming from Newcastle in KwaZulu-Natal is ‘the future businessman in the computing sector’, Lethukuthula Nsibande. “The Gateway orientation programme was so much fun, as it enabled me to see teamwork as an integral part of our development as first-years. Considering that I want to pursue business in the interesting world of computers, I have seen that interacting with others is crucial,” said Lethukuthula, a BSc IT (Computer Science and Management) student.

From Johannesburg, Gauteng, comes Siyalungelwa Ntombela, a BEd (Intermediate Phase – Life Sills and Social Sciences) student who believes her studies will enable her to give back to her community. “I want to educate our future generations and make a difference. I found Gateway to be educational and entertaining. We have learnt a lot about university life and the campus in general. I now know about the services offered by the clinic, where the Mandela Hall is, and so on. Interacting and learning from our mentors was also one of the highlights,” she added.

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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