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08 February 2024 | Story Lunga Luthuli | Photo SUPPLIED
Student Campus Tour
The UFS Division of Student Affairs is helping first-time students get their bearings by offering campus tours on the Bloemfontein, South, and Qwaqwa campuses.

The University of the Free State’s (UFS’s) Division of Student Affairs is ready to welcome 2024’s first-time entering students (FTENS) for the new academic year with an engaging campus tour. 

These tours will take place on the Bloemfontein and South Campuses from 5 to 8 February starting at 12:00, and on the Qwaqwa Campus from 12 to 15 February, with one tour daily, from 14:00. Students must note that the 5 to 8 February schedule aligns with specific colleges each day, which means you should attend on the day specified below for students from your college.

The comprehensive tour route covers vital campus locations, including Protection Services, the Administration buildings, examination venues, Kovsie Health, Student Counselling and Development, Arts and Culture, Callie Human, HMS, Main Building, and many more. The itinerary helps students become familiar with significant facilities on the three UFS campuses.

The Division of Student Affairs aims to make the campus tours even more inclusive by allowing commuter students and late registrants to join a later group of tours, on 12 and 14 February on the Bloemfontein Campus.

Campus Tours

Tour guide

ROUTE: 


Main locations: 

Bloemfontein Campus:
Meet at the Kovsie Village (i.e. the tent next to the EXR registration venue)-> Protection Services (Stopping Point) -> George du Toit -> EXR -> Kovsie Health; SCD; Food Environment Office; Arts and Culture -> Callie Human -> HMS -> Main Building -> ECLA Lab -> Vishuis -> 24-hour study labs -> Stabilis -> Bridge (Bank; Van Schaik) -> FGG -> EBW -> Landbou; Visitors Gate-> Kopanong; Genmin Lectorium -> Computer Lab -> Mabaleng Auditorium -> Winkie Direko (Fundza Offices) -> Ned Education Building -> Modlec; Konica Minolta -> Library (organise in faculty).



South Campus Tour:

Dates: 6 and 8 February 2024
Time: 12:00 
Starting point: Amphitheatre (Outside the cafeteria)

Qwaqwa Campus Tour:

Date: 12 February 2024             
Time: 14:00 (Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences)
Assembly point: Amphitheatre

Date: 13 February 2024             
First time slot: 14:00 (Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences)
Assembly point: Amphitheatre

Date: 14 February 2024
First time slot: 14:00 (Faculty of Education)
Assembly point: Amphitheatre

Date: 15 February 2024             
First time slot: 14:00 (Faculty of the Humanities)
Assembly point: Amphitheatre

Qwaqwa Off Campus Tour

Date: 18 February 2024
Time: 08:00
Assembly point: Amphitheatre

To register for the campus tours, please click here

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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