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Online panel discussion

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’?

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 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 Ulrike Kistner

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 Noor Nieftagodien

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 Kelly Gillespie

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 hosts first International Congress on Calvin Research in Africa

2010-08-31

Present at the Calvin Research Conference were, from the left: Dr Frank Ewerszumrode (OP), Faculty of Catholic Theology at the University of Mainz in Mainz, Germany; Prof. Dr Herman Selderhuis, President of the International Congress on Calvin Research; Prof. Dolf Britz, Director of the Jonathan Edwards Centre Africa at the UFS; and Ntabanyane Tseuoa, Masters student in the Jonathan Edwards Centre at the UFS.
Photo: Leonie Bolleurs

The first International Congress on Calvin Research in Africa was this week presented on the Main Campus of the University of the Free State (UFS) in Bloemfontein. This was the tenth Calvin Research Conference presented. The conference is presented every four years.

The theme of the congress was: Reconciliation in the Theology of Calvin. Presentations were made about, amongst others, Calvin’s viewpoint regarding slavery and social justice. There was also a discussion about the extraordinary interest to record the original Calvin texts in databases and to make it available to researchers worldwide.

According to Prof. Dolf Britz, Director of the Jonathan Edwards Centre at the UFS, the objective of the congress was to study original Calvin sources critically. “An important part of the congress’ work is to publish an important part of Calvin’s work in a comprehensive text critical edition. This process is already well advanced and includes a number of unknown texts,” said Prof. Britz.

With its research on Calvin, the UFS emphasises the study of original theological sources. “This approach makes the Faculty of Theology part of the UFS’s strategy towards internationalisation. This is also one of the reasons why the UFS was selected by Yale University in America as partner in the recent establishment of the Jonathan Edwards Centre Africa,” said Prof. Britz, whose brainchild it was to also include young upcoming researchers with the study of original sources and classical languages such as Latin.

The congress was attended by researchers and academics from across the world. Twenty young, emerging researchers formed part of this group that was invited by the UFS. According to Prof. Britz, these young researchers are the top achievers at their respective universities, such as the North-West University, Stellenbosch University, Mukanyo Theological College in the Pretoria area and the UFS.

At this event, attended by more than 70 world-renowned Calvin scholars from countries like, amongst others, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Finland, Switzerland, France, The Netherlands, America, Germany and Hungary; UFS academics like Prof. Eric de Boer, Extraordinary Professor in Classical and Reformed Theology and students like Rev. Ntabanyane Tseuoa from Lesotho, read and presented papers as well.

According to Prof. Britz this congress was a very good opportunity to introduce the UFS to the rest of the world.

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

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