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20 March 2019 | Story Xolisa Mnuwka | Photo Charl Devenish
Stagedoor Finals
Houses Vergeet-My-Nie and NJ van der Merwe won over the judges at the 2019 Stagedoor finals.

‘Vergeet van der Merwe’, a hybrid of female residences Vergeet-my-Nie and NJ van der Merwe, are the 2019 Stagedoor competition’s overall winners. The dynamic girl duo showed up and showed off during the 2019 Stagedoor finals in the Kopanong Auditorium on the UFS Bloemfontein Campus over the weekend.

The girls enthused the audience with a soul-filled sing-off and a relatable theatrical performance, which earned them both the audience’s and the judge’s best votes. Teams Welwitschia and Imperium (Welperium), and Outeniqua and Soetdoring (Outdoring), walked away with the second and third positions respectively, as each of the residences were recognised for team excellence and spirit when it came to creativity and overall acting in each of their performances.

The UFS Stagedoor competition is an annual event that employs first-years to take cognisance of the day-to-day societal issues and pressures that university students are faced with. In 2019, the event was for the first time entirely organised and ran by students for students.

The competition has over the years become a major highlight on UFS students’ arts and culture calendar and continues to be a platform of expression for residence and off-campus first-year students. Stagedoor performances are traditionally themed to tackle modern-day issues such as infrastructure and economic inequality, land reform, and education. However, this year’s competition engaged students in telling their stories without any restrictions, and still being able to effectively examine the pressures that come with varsity life, and many other issues that face South Africa, but more specifically the youth. The 2019 Stagedoor event was successfully coordinated and structured by UFS Bloemfontein Campus SRC: Arts and Culture, Patrick Chirilele, with help from Residence Committee (RC) Culture members.

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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