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UFS wins top awards at the 2024 Mace Excellence Awards

05 December 2024 | Story Dr Cindé Greyling | Photo Kaleidoscope

MACE Winners 2024 — From left to right: Burneline Kaars (Head: Employee Wellness and Organisational Development), Dr WP Wahl (Student Life Director), Linda Greyling (Senior Officer: Special Projects, Student Recruitment Services), Gerben Van Niekerk (Senior Officer: Kovsie Support Services), Malia Maranyane (Senior Officer: Undergraduate Marketing, Student Recruitment Services), Nomonde Mbadi (Student Recruitment Services Director), and Susan Van Jaarsveld (Senior Director: Human Resources).

On 28 November 2024, the University of the Free State (UFS) did it again – reigned as champions at the annual Marketing, Advancement and Communication in Education (MACE) Excellence Awards and walking away with two of the top awards: the MACE Award for Outstanding Research and the Severus Cerff Award for Consistent Excellence.

KovsieX was named the overall winner of the MACE Award for Outstanding Research. This award is made to the entry with the highest score in research, clearly demonstrating how research has supported the strategic objectives of the institution and the project. KovsieX is a multiplatform approach designed to leverage the strengths of diverse media channels. This digitalisation aligns with Vision 130, leveraging emerging technologies to enhance teaching and learning quality and efficiency of non-academic support structures and systems.

The UFS’ entries were of such high quality that the university won the sought-after Severus Cerff Award for Consistent Excellence. This award is based on the number of entries entered by an institution and the number and level of those entries winning awards. The award is therefore made to the institution with the highest success ratio.

Furthermore, the UFS Matriculant of the Year event received a Silver Award – entries scoring 5.75 or higher earn a Silver Award, placing this event among some of the top achievers in the events category. Three UFS entries received Gold Awards and were the winners in their respective categories: KovsieChat (Digital Channels), 2024 Women’s Day Breakfast (Events), and KovsieX (Stakeholder Engagement Campaigns). This is a magnificent achievement for the UFS.

"Winning a MACE award at this early stage is proof that KovsieX is not just meeting national standards – it’s setting them. If we can achieve this level of excellence now, imagine how we’ll compete on the global stage when the project is fully realised,” says Gerben van Niekerk, Student Media Manager.

Lacea Loader, Senior Director: Communication and Marketing and Coordinator of the MACE Excellence Awards, explained that a record number of entries were received for the Excellence Awards this year. “We are ecstatic about the direction of communication at the UFS and that the university has been able to maintain the quality of its entries in recent years,” says Loader.

The MACE Excellence Awards takes place annually as part of the MACE National Conference, recognising and celebrating excellence and the achievements of specialists and practitioners in marketing, advancement, and communication in the higher-education sector. This year, the Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT) hosted the conference from 27 to 28 November 2024.

In 2023, the UFS won 11 awards, including the Chairperson’s Award of Excellence.

News Archive

Dying of consumption: Studying ‘othering’ and resistance in pop culture

2014-10-31

The Centre for Africa Studies (CAS) at the UFS – under the project leadership of Prof Heidi Hudson (CAS Director) – conceptualised an interdisciplinary research project on representations of otherness and resistance.

This is in collaboration with UFS departments such as the Odeion School of Music, the Department of Drama and Theatre Arts, the Department of Fine Arts, the Jonathan Edwards Centre Africa and the Department of Afrikaans and Dutch, German and French.

In this project, Dr Stephanie Cawood from CAS leads a sub-project on the dynamics of pop culture and consumerism. Her research unpacks and critiques pop culture representations of othering and resistance by engaging with the othering rhetoric of conspicuous consumption as well as the subversive rhetoric or culture jamming at play in various South African youth subcultures.

Consumerism has become the institutional system in which we live our daily lives. Pop culture is the result when multinational corporations take aspects of culture and turn it into commodities with high market value. In pop culture and its manifestation, consumption, marketers and savvy advertising executives have realised long ago that othering and resistance are powerful tools to artificially create empty spaces in people’s lives that can only be filled through consuming.

“The scary thing is in my opinion that everyone has become a market segment, including very young children,” says Dr Cawood.

In his 1934 book, The Theory of the Leisure Class (TLC), Thorstein Veblen coined the term conspicuous consumption to describe the conduct of the nouveau riche. He contended that when people manage to meet their basic human requirements, any additional accumulation of wealth will no longer relate to function, but will be spent on ostentatious displays of conspicuous consumption or waste. Conspicuous consumption has evolved into invidious consumption where consumption is a mark of one’s superior social status and particularly aimed at provoking envy. The whole point is unashamed one-upmanship.

“Think of the izikhotane or skothane cultural phenomenon where young people engage in ritualised and ostentatious consumerist waste for social prestige. This is an excellent example of invidious consumption.

“Instead of striving to become good citizens, we have become good consumers and none are more vulnerable than our youth irrespective of cultural and ethnic differences”.

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