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UFS students honoured at 2024 Women in Science Awards

23 August 2024 | Story André Damons | Photo Supplied

Thandokuhle Gama, Dr Glen Tylor and Anele Mthembu — Winners: Thandokuhle Gama (left) and Anele Mthembu (right), who were honoured with the DSI-Esther Mahlangu Master's Fellowship at the 2024 SAWiSA, with Dr Glen Taylor, Senior Director: Directorate Research Development (DRD), UFS.

Two postgraduate students from the University of the Free State (UFS) were honoured at this year’s Women in Science Awards (SAWiSA) hosted by the Department of Science and Innovation (DSI).

Thandokuhle Gama, a Master of Medical Science student with specialisation in Pharmacology, and Anele Mthembu, who is working on her master’s degree in Disaster Management in the Disaster Management Training and Education Centre for Africa (DIMTEC), are both recipients of the DSI-Esther Mahlangu Master's Fellowships.

This fellowship is awarded to women scientists and researchers who are pursuing their master’s or doctoral studies and already hold scholarships from the National Research Foundation or other DSI agencies. The fellowships for Gama and Mthembu are worth R75 000 each and can be used towards their tuition fees or to enhance academic programmes by covering the costs of attending conferences or specialised research materials and equipment required to complete their degrees.

Honouring Dr Esther Mahlangu

The prestigious 2024 SAWiSA, which honour the exceptional contributions of women to science, technology, engineering, mathematics and innovation (STEMI) in South Africa, took place on 15 August 2024 in Mbombela. The theme was “Transition towards an Innovation Economy: The Role of Women Leaders in STEM”.

This year, the awards honoured world-renowned artist, Dr Esther Mahlangu, by renaming this year's master's and doctoral fellowships the DSI-Esther Mahlangu Fellowships.

“I feel honoured and grateful for the recognition, although it's been difficult to process what it actually means. It has been an overwhelming experience. It came as a surprise, because when I applied, I was not sure what to expect because these are national awards with many other applicants,” says Gama.

She was nominated by Innocensia Mangoato, lecturer in the UFS Department of Pharmacology and a previous winner at the awards. Gama is doing research on medicinal plants that are used in traditional medicine to treat diabetes.

“Winning this award means that my work thus far is being recognised. It is all through God’s grace. I'm also grateful to everyone who has contributed towards my journey: my family, teachers, mentors and sponsors, and everyone else. It will allow me to continue to advance research in the field of diabetes treatment using traditional medicines or medicinal plants.”

Bettering lives

Mthembu, who was nominated by her mentor, Dr Tlou Daisy Raphela-Masuku, a lecturer at DIMTEC, says it is a fantastic feeling winning this award. “Before the awards, Dr Raphela-Masuku and I dreamt I could win the SAWiSA. But before then, I was surprised and grateful for being acknowledged by DSI as a finalist; I focused on being a DSI finalist, and that winning would be a bonus,” she says.

She continues: “It means a lot to me to win the DSI Master’s Fellowship, as it is a testimony of God’s grace in my life. It is the destiny for helpers God has placed in my life, including my mentor, supervisor, and the DIMTEC postgraduate school. We all won!”

Mthembu is working her master’s thesis on the integration of risk-informed development (RID) and nature-based solutions (NbS) into sustainable human settlements in eThekwini Municipality, KwaZulu-Natal.

“The overarching aim is to evaluate the integration of both these concepts into human settlements’ strategic planning to offer eThekwini Municipality innovative and ecosystem-based approaches to achieving sustainable and resilient human settlements and achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11 on building resilient cities.

“I hope to publish my findings and contextualise the enabling environments for RID (EE4RID) Framework in eThekwini Municipality so they can make risk-informed decisions on development and human settlements to achieve SDG 11,” explains Mthembu.

Gama says the aim with her research is to determine if these medicinal plants can treat diabetes by stimulating stem cells to differentiate and become insulin-producing cells. She hopes that through this research diabetes treatment can advance from a level where it is being continuously managed, to a level where we can cure the disease.

News Archive

Code-switching, tokenism and consumerism in print advertising

2014-10-27

Code-switching, linguistic tokenism and modern consumerism in contemporary South African print advertising. This is the current research focus of two lecturers from the Faculty of the Humanities at the UFS, Prof Angelique van Niekerk and Dr Thinus Conradie.

The act of switching between two or more languages is replete with socio-cultural meaning, and can be deployed to advance numerous communicative strategies, including attempts at signalling cultural familiarity and group affiliation (Chung 2006).

For advertising purposes, Fairclough’s (1989) seminal work on the ideological functions of language remark on the usefulness of code-switching as a means of fostering an advertiser-audience relationship that is conducive to persuasion. In advertising, code-switching is a valuable means with which a brand may be invested with a range of positive associations. In English-dominated media, these associations derive from pre-existing connotations that target audiences already hold for a particular (non-English) language. Where exclusivity and taste, for example, are associated with a particular European language (such as French), advertising may use this languages to invest the advertised brand with a sense of exclusivity and taste.

In addition, empirical experiments with sample audiences (in the field of consumer research) suggest that switching from English to the first language of the target audience, is liable to yield positive results in terms of purchase intentions (Bishop and Peterson 2011). This effect is enhanced under the influence of modern consumerism, in which consumption is linked to the performance of identity and ‘[b]rands are more than just products; they are statements of affiliation and belonging’ (Ngwenya 2011, 2; cf. Nuttall 2004; Jones 2013).

In South African print magazines, where the hegemony of English remains largely uncontested, incorporating components of indigenous languages and Afrikaans may similarly be exploited for commercial ends. Our analysis suggests that the most prevalent form of code-switching from English to indigenous South African languages represents what we have coded as linguistic tokenism. That is, in comparison with the more expansive use of both Afrikaans and foreign languages (such as French), code-switching is used in a more limited manner, and mainly to presuppose community and solidarity with first-language speakers of indigenous languages. In cases of English-to-Afrikaans code-switching, our findings echo the trends observed for languages such as French and German. That is, the language is exploited for pre-existing associations. However, in contrast with French (often associated with prestige) and German (often associated with technical precision), Afrikaans is used to invoke cultural stereotypes, notably a self-satirical celebration of Afrikaner backwardness and/or lack of refinement that is often interpolated with hyper-masculinity.

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