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17 July 2024 | Story Prof Danie Brand

The University of the Free State, through its Free State Centre for Human Rights, is pleased to present an online panel discussion titled, The Gaza crisis: How should South African universities engage with ‘pressing and urgent injustices’?   


Click to view document Join the Panel Discussion

Following the killing of 1 143 people and the taking of 247 hostages by Hamas during an armed incursion in Israel on 7 October 2023, Israel mounted an invasion of the Gaza Strip. In the ensuing bombardment and ground offensive – which is continuing ten months after the Hamas attack – Israel armed forces have killed more than 38 000 people. Hamas’ killing and continued holding of hostages and Israel’s sustained offensive – described as an ‘unfolding genocide’ and a ‘massacre’ – confront universities with an enduring question: how to engage as institutions ‘with pressing and urgent injustices’?


Join us for an online panel discussion where pertinent questions emerging from the current crisis will be discussed. Should a university such as the University of the Free State formulate an institutional response to the Gaza crisis? If so, what form should it take? Is a statement, as has already emanated from several other South African universities, appropriate and sufficient? How to deal with current ties with Israeli universities, businesses, and individual academics? Can the UFS remain silent?

Event details
Date: Monday 22 July 2024
Time: 15:00-17:00
Venue: Ms Teams
Click to view documentClick here to RSVP before 22 July 2024. 
A Microsoft Teams link will be shared for the online event.

For South African universities, the Gaza crisis is a particularly apt lens through which to consider this question. Firstly, because Israel’s invasion of Gaza also manifested as a ‘scholasticide’: a large-scale destruction of schools, universities, and other places of learning in Gaza and the killing of Palestinian teachers and academics. Secondly, because of the strong historical and current links between South Africa, Palestine, and Israel: Israel’s past collaboration with the South African apartheid regime; the South African liberation movement’s enduring relationship with Palestinian liberation; and the many uncomfortable congruences between South Africa’s history of racially determined injustice and the current ethno-/racial social, political, and geographical segregation in Israel/Palestine.

Moderator

Prof Francis Petersen: Vice-Chancellor and Principal, UFS. 

 

Speakers
Prof Kistner has held teaching positions in Comparative Literature at Wits University, Modern European Languages at Unisa, and Philosophy at the University of Pretoria and is an extraordinary professor in the University of the Free State Department of Public Law. She is currently working on intersections between political philosophy, social theory, jurisprudence, and psychoanalytic theory.

Prof Nieftagodien is the NRF South African Research Chair in Local Histories and Present Realities and is the Head of the History Workshop at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he also lectures in the Department of History. He is the co-author – with Phil Bonner – of books on the history of Alexandra, Ekurhuleni, and Kathorus, and has also published books on the history of Orlando West and the Soweto uprising, and co-edited a book on the history of the ANC.

Prof Gillespie is a political and legal anthropologist with a research focus on abolition in South Africa, particularly concerned with the ways in which criminal legal processes become vectors for the continuation of apartheid relations. She joined the Department of Anthropology/Sociology at the University of the Western Cape in 2018, prior to which she worked for a decade at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). In 2008, she co-founded the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (JWTC), an experimental project tasked with recrafting the work of critical theory beyond the Global North. She writes and teaches about urbanism, violence, sexualities, race, and the praxis of social justice. 

News Archive

UFS receives exclusive copy of Pasture Science research volume
2010-04-22

 
From the left are: Dr Malcolm Hensley (Soil, Crop and Climate Sciences, UFS), Prof. Brian Roberts, Ms Cathy Giesekke (UFS Sasol Library) and Prof. Neil Heideman (Acting Dean: Natural and Agricultural Sciences, UFS).
Photo: Lize du Plessis


The University of the Free State (UFS) became the proud recipient of a copy of a Pasture Science research volume.

The 508-page volume was presented by Prof. Brian Roberts, an adjunct professor at the James Cook University in Cairns, Australia, to the UFS Sasol Library. It consists of 43 papers on his agricultural research work in the Free State from 1956 to 1975.

He said the Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences at the UFS had the power and expertise to lead the way in food security in South Africa and in building a sustainable society. He also stated that not enough people were taking food security seriously.

“Whatever else you regard as priority, none is more basic than support for the nation’s food producers,” he said.

The papers in the bound copy are arranged in two groups. The first section focuses on Pasture Management. “This series forms a useful overview of Pasture Science,” he said.

The section on Grassland Science covers all aspects of the maintenance, improvement and utilisation of veld and cultivated grasslands.

The second part is a series of publications arising from his fieldwork in the Free State, Eastern Cape and Lesotho.

“Having read with great interest the curriculum vitae of the Vice-Chancellor of the UFS, I felt a strong inclination to contribute somehow to the transformation process and the emerging future UFS,” said Prof Roberts.

Although he acknowledged that change could not happen overnight he was, however, positive that medium-term results could be achieved in that regard.

“One way of doing this is to focus staff and students’ attention on working towards a sustainable society, an on-going curriculum challenge which should, at an early date, replace the past preoccupation with race – an issue that has dogged progress for too long,” he said.

Prof. Roberts was a foundation lecturer in Pasture Science at the UFS 36 years ago before he left for Australia where he plays a fundamental role in land-use planning.

He is also recognised as the father of Landcare, an Australian partnership between the community, government and business to protect and repair the environment.

Media Release
Issued by: Mangaliso Radebe
Assistant Director: Media Liaison
Tel: 051 401 2828
Cell: 078 460 3320
E-mail: radebemt@ufs.ac.za  
21 April 2010
 

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