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25 November 2020

The UFS SRC Elections will be held from 01 to 04 December 2020 for the QwaQwa and South Campus. The Bloemfontein Campus SRC elections for the elective portfolios will be held in 2021. 

• The window for the nomination of candidates for the CSRC elective portfolios has closed and the final candidate list of candidates is now available on the election website.

• Candidates’ on the final list may therefore conduct their campaigns. Candidates’ campaigns must be within the prescripts of the UFS SRC Election Code of Conduct. 

• Nominations for ex-officio candidates have since closed. In this regard, the final list of candidates will be published on election website on 25 November 2020 

• Student Council Elections for the ex-officio portfolios will be held from 26 to 30 November 2020. To this effect, an invitation to respective student council meetings will be sent out via student emails. 

• Manifesto launches will take place via webinars between 25 and 30 November 2020. A detailed schedule will be made available via the election website.   

KDBS Consulting (Pty) Ltd has been appointed to oversee and manage the SRC elections 2020/2021 as the Independent Chief Elections Administrator. A website has been launched to provide up-to-date information regarding these elections and all processes related to it. The website address is https://www.ufs-srcelection.co.za.

For any queries related to the elections, you can email the Chief Election Administrator at info@ufs-srcelection.co.za  or you can call the election helpdesk at +27 0 800 061 052 toll-free.   

Please look out for election-specific notifications via SMS or your UFS4Life student emails.   

News Archive

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.

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