Latest News Archive

Please select Category, Year, and then Month to display items
Previous Archive
23 August 2021 | Story Evodia Mohonyane

Stand out in the global world of work by signing up for LinkedIn Learning now

Learning and growth at university (and in life) is a journey and a lifelong process. The University of the Free State is committed to your personal and professional development and is now proud to offer LinkedIn Learning to all Kovsie students, free of charge.

Why use LinkedIn Learning?

LinkedIn Learning lets you learn at your own pace. You can select courses relevant to your current or future interests in areas such as entrepreneurship, technology, and leadership. You can also pursue other passions — with courses on financial literacy, social media, even drawing and music theory, you will be able to grow and develop in the areas you care about, both within and outside your degree.

Sign up and start your journey to learning skills that will get you a step closer to enterprising your degree and standing out in a global world of work.

Getting started

You will receive an activation email from the UFS via LinkedIn Learning. Don’t delete it! You must activate your LinkedIn Learning account using this activation email. You will have the option to connect through your personal LinkedIn profile (recommended) or activate your account using your ufs4life email.
  • Once you’re in, browse around for your UFS recommended courses
  • Take a course, learn something new, and apply it in your day-to-day life

Help is available!

If you run into issues with logging in, contact us. For technical issues once you are up and running, you have the option to click for help throughout the system, with access to LinkedIn Learning's FAQs, as well as the ability to connect via email, live chat, or phone.

News Archive

Prof Helene Strauss delves into the emotion and politics of contemporary South African protest cultures
2014-12-22

Prof Helene Strauss from the University of the Free State’s (UFS) Department of English currently researches the relationship between emotion and politics in contemporary South African public and protest cultures.

The research foregrounds the complex set of concerns opened up by a study of intimacy, read as not simply a sign for emotional and sexual closeness, but more broadly as a complexly mediated site from which to observe the embodied, affective coordinates of various forms of control and contestation. Through the analysis of a range of cultural texts that, for instance, recompose moments of spectacular social upheaval through the lenses of everyday, embodied experience, this research considers what aesthetic responsibility might mean in both post-transitional South Africa and elsewhere.

One aspect of this research charts a gradual shift in South Africa from what is frequently referred to as the ‘liberation euphoria’ of the mid- to late 1990s – and the optimistic fantasies of a future South Africa that characterised dominant public discourse in the period immediately following the political transition – toward an emotional culture in which expressions of anger, disillusionment and disappointment seem to have become relatively widespread.

Prof Strauss asks, for instance, how these public feelings have been managed in the aftermath of events such as the Marikana massacre, and suggests that the affective and temporal dimensions of current attempts at containing perceived threats to financial and political stability on the part of South Africa’s business and political elite are key to understanding increasingly violent and repressive securitisation strategies.

Earlier this year, Prof Strauss presented papers on aspects of this research at two international conferences: (i) the Association for Cultural Studies conference in Tampere, Finland, where she was invited to be part of a ‘Spotlight Panel’ on the topic of African Cultural Studies, (ii) and at a conference at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, which she helped to co-organise.

An article based on some of this work has been published in the journal Safundi.

For more of Prof Strauss’s research published in journals, follow the links below:
http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rsaf20/current#.VAf88_mSxqU
http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/riij20/15/1#.VAf80vmSxqU
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/sub/journal/v4/n2/index.html

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