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20 December 2020
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Story Thabo Kessah
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Photo Thabo Kessah
Mbuyiselwa Moloi with student volunteers, Keamogetswe Mooketsi (presenter), Tshumelo Phaladi (producer), and Siphamandla Shabangu (SRC member – Social Justice and Universal Access).
The month of October 2020 marked the first anniversary of the Qwaqwa Campus online student radio, Q-Lit. “It has been a rocky road of sleepless nights, tears, and a lot of challenges. However, we have grown from strength to strength. We have made dreams of ordinary students possible. We have influenced change and inspired students to tap into their talents and potential,” said an elated station manager, Mbuyiselwa Moloi.
The station came in handy during the worst lockdown period of the COVID-19 pandemic when it bridged the communication gap between students and the university to integrate teaching and learning into the programming to ensure that no student was left behind. “With all of the regulations and online learning, Q-Lit had to be reinvented. While it was not an easy journey, we have grown more than ever before. Our August 2020 report shows that we have pulled in more than 1 600 listeners, even amid the learning, unlearning, and relearning processes. It was during this month that we also ran a series highlighting strategic offices led by women on campus as part of our Women’s Month celebration,” Mbuyiselwa revealed.
Looking to the future, the station hopes to obtain a full broadcasting licence from the regulatory body, the Independent Communication Authority of South Africa (ICASA), soon.
Visiting Professor, Piet Bracke, Speaks on Public Mental Health
2015-02-20
Piet Bracke |
Professor in the Department of Sociology at the Ghent University in Belgium, Piet Bracke, recently visited the UFS to speak about his research on the Public mental health and comparative health research: between social theory and psychiatric epidemiology.
At the public lecture on Monday 16 February, Bracke stated that part of the sociological attention to mental health and well-being was rooted in the 19th century's romanticists' discontent with self and society. The classical and contemporary social theorists' views on the disconnection between culture and the ‘real’ self resembles the more recent evolutionary psychological assumptions about the maladaptation of psychobiological mechanisms to contemporary societal arrangements.
In contrast to these perspectives, contemporary psychiatric epidemiological research has a strongly underdeveloped conception about the nexus between society and population mental health. Both perspectives, the social-theory-and-societal-discontent approach and the biomedical psychiatric epidemiological approach, have drawbacks. Starting from the pitfalls of the aforementioned perspectives, they have been exploring the challenges posed by the development of a macro-sociology of population mental health.
Recently, this research domain has received renewed attention of scholars inside as well as outside sociology. The rise of multi-country, multilevel datasets containing health-related information, as well as the growing attention on the fundamental social causes of health and illness, and the focus on population as opposed to individual health, has contributed to the revival of comparative public mental health research. Based on findings from their recent research, they have illustrated how taking the context into account is vital when exploring the social roots of mental health and illness. In addition, they have demonstrated how they can liberate a few so-called ‘control variables’ in risk factor epidemiology – e.g. gender, education, and age – from their suppressed status by linking them to core concepts of sociology. With their research, they hope to further the development of a macro-sociology of public mental health.