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31 July 2020
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Story Lacea Loader
As a public higher-education institution in South Africa with a responsibility to contribute to public discourse, the University of the Free State (UFS) will be presenting the 3rd UFS Thought-Leader Series in collaboration with Vrye Weekblad as part of the Vrystaat Literature Festival’s online initiative, VrySpraak-digitaal.
This year, higher-education institutions
globally are placed in the challenging context of COVID-19. Aware and grounded in the reality that the world will not return to the normality of pre-COVID-19, our responsibility as scholars still remains to contribute to public discourse and to offer
innovative solutions that will impact the lives of people nationally and globally in order to help them understand and adapt to a new world order.
Against this background and context, this year’s debates focus on ‘Post-COVID-19, Post-Crisis’,
with Health and Modelling, Politics, Economy, and Predictions for 2021 as the sub-themes. Placed in a COVID-19 context, and in lieu of the Vrystaat Arts Festival,
the series will be presented virtually in the form of one webinar per month during the period August 2020 to November 2020.
Date: 13 August 2020
Topic: Health
and Modelling
Time: 11:30-13:00
RSVP: Alicia Pienaar, pienaaran1@ufs.ac.za
Facilitator:
Max du Preez
Editor: Vrye Weekblad
Biography
Introduction and welcome:
Prof Francis Petersen
Rector and Vice-Chancellor, UFS
Panellists:
Prof Salim Abdool Karim
Director: Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (CAPRISA)
Chair: South African Ministerial Advisory Committee on COVID-19
Biography
Prof Glenda Gray
President and CEO: South African Medical Research Council (SAMRC)
Biography
Prof Felicity Burt
NRF-DST South African Research Chair in vector-borne and zoonotic pathogens research
Biography
Book on SA sign language and the local deaf community
2006-04-24
The Sign Language Division of the Department of Afro asiatic Studies, Sign Language and Language Practice at the University of the Free State (UFS) and the Belgian universities of Ghent and Brussels are in the process of writing a book on South African sign language and the South African deaf community. The book will consist of two parts: an ethnographic part on communication by deaf people in South Africa on the basis of life stories told by deaf people and a sketch grammar of South African sign language. At the same time the researchers are engaged in cross-linguistic grammatical research of South African sign language as compared to Flemish sign language.
Two Belgian academics are currently visiting the UFS to work on the book and on the cross-linguistic aspects. Here are from left to right Ms Emily Matabane (academic assistant from the UFS Sign Language Division), Prof Mieke Van Herreweghe (Ghent University), Prof Myriam Vermeerbergen (Vrije Universiteit van Brussel) and Mr Philemon Akach (senior lecturer at the UFS Sign Language Division and coordinator of the research project).