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
13 February 2019 | Story Leonie Bolleurs
UFS INST Three
From left; Shaun Redgard (captain), Chantelle Booysen, Dr Hendrik van Heerden (coach), and Edward Lee emerged as winners of the 2019 International Natural Sciences Tournament (INST).

A group of three students from the University of the Free State – Shaun Redgard (Department of Chemistry, Edward Lee (Department of Physics), and Chantelle Booysen (the Human Molecular Biology Unit, Department of Haematology and Cell Biology) – emerged as winners ofthe 2019 International Natural Sciences Tournament (INST).

– emerged as winners of the 2019 International Natural Sciences Tournament (INST).

The final stage was held at the Tallinn University of Technology (TalTech) in Tallinn, Estonia, from 1 to 5 February 2019.This was the 9th annual presentation of the tournament that was originally launched in Russia.

According to the organisers, the principal goal of the tournament is to teach young engineers and scientists to use their knowledge to solve real-world problems.

There were six participating teams in the final part of the tournament. Participants from South Africa and Russia had to solve a dozen difficult problems in the spheres of medicine, biology, physics, and chemistry.

This year, the organisers decided to add some tasks with a straightforward connection to daily human life.

Redgard, who was the captain of the team, along with Lee, Booysen, and their coach, Dr Hendrik van Heerden (from the UFS Department of Physics), attended the tournament for the very first time, but they showed a high-level game.  

The final debate was held between the students from South Africa and Russia. The team from South Africa was persistent, confident, and structured. According to the judges, the finalists solved all the problems in accordance with the tournament rules. “The students were creative and original in solving all of the tasks, and this led them to victory,” they said.

The panel of judges was composed of a mix of bright specialists from universities as well as industrial and consulting companies operating in Estonia, the United States, the Netherlands, Portugal, Latvia, and Russia.

The founder of the tournament, Dr Sergey Safonov from Russia, says about the competition: “Our mission is to bring real-world problem-solving skills to bright scientists around the globe. We believe that science is not just an interesting subject of study, but a real instrument of changing the surrounding world, creating new products, and solving environmental problems. We believe that there are a lot of talented students around the world who seek to find their place in science and industry”.

News Archive

Expert in Africa Studies debunks African middle class myth
2016-05-10

Description: Prof Henning Melber Tags: Prof Henning Melber

From left: Prof Heidi Hudson, Director of the Centre for Africa Studies (CAS), Joe Besigye from the Institute of Reconciliation and Social Justice, and Prof Henning Melber, Extraordinary Professor at the CAS and guest lecturer for the day.
Photo: Valentino Ndaba

Until recently, think tanks from North America, the African Development Bank, United Nations Development Plan, and global economists have defined the African middle class based purely on monetary arithmetic. One of the claims made in the past is that anyone with a consumption power of $2 per day constitutes the middle class. Following this, if poverty is defined as monetary income below $1.5 a day, it means that it takes just half a dollar to reach the threshold considered as African middle class.

Prof Henning Melber highlighted the disparities in the notion of a growing African middle class in a guest lecture titled A critical anatomy of the African middle class(es), hosted by our Centre for Africa Studies (CAS) at the University of the Free State on 4 May 2016. He is an Extraordinary Professor at the Centre, as well as Senior Adviser and Director Emeritus of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation in Sweden.

Prof Melber argued that it is misleading to consider only income when identifying the middle class. In his opinion, such views were advanced by promoters of the global neo-liberal project. “My suspicion is that those who promote the middle class  discourse in that way, based on such a low threshold, were desperate to look for the success story that testifies to Africa rising.”

Another pitfall of such a middle-class analysis is its ahistorical contextualisation. This economically-reduced notion of the class is a sheer distortion. Prof Melber advised analysts to take cognisance of factors, such as consumption patterns, lifestyle, and political affiliation, amongst others.

In his second lecture for the day, Prof Melber dealt withthe topic of: Namibia since independence: the limits to Liberation, painting the historical backdrop against which the country’s current government is consolidating its political hegemony. He highlighted examples of the limited transformation that has been achieved since Namibia’s independence in 1990.

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