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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

Prof Van den Oever gives students a different perspective
2016-05-06

Description: Prof Van den Oever gives students a different perspective Tags: Prof Van den Oever gives students a different perspective

Prof Annie van den Oever from the Netherlands presented a series of guest lectures on media technologies to students of the Film and Visual Media Programme at the University of the Free State (UFS). Here from left is Chris Vorster, lecturer in Drama and Theatre Arts, Prof Van den Oever, and Dr Pieter Venter, Senior lecturer at Drama and Theatre Arts.
Photo: Jóhann Thormählen

She played a part in conceptualising the Film and Visual Media Programme at the University of the Free State (UFS), and sees film from a perspective different from most young South Africans.

According to Chris Vorster, lecturer of the UFS BA Honours degree in Film and Visual Media, this is one of the reasons why Prof Annie van den Oever’s visit is of such great value. The actor, who is a lecturer in Drama and Theatre Arts, believes it is important to expose his students to influences outside their normal experience.

Prof Van den Oever, an extraordinary professor at the UFS since 2011, presented a series of guest lectures on media technologies from 11-14 April 2016 at the Audio Visual Studio on the Bloemfontein Campus. She is a senior researcher for Film at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, and an Associated Researcher for Film at Paris 1, Panthéon Sorbonne, in France.

Another milieu

“It is invaluable for students, in any field of study, to receive as many influences from the outside. Therefore, it is important to have someone here from another milieu and context. And academically, she is outstanding,” says Vorster.

Vorster’s students are also exposed to practical expertise from the industry in the country, not only academics.

Relationship with UFS

Prof Van den Oever says she usually visits the UFS twice a year. Her recent lecture series on media technologies was about the power of visual and film culture today, and how you can understand its powers. “Why strange effects work strongly and why the strange is inserted, because people respond strongly to them,” she says.

Prof van den Oever enjoys meeting new people, and often works with colleagues from the UFS on various projects. She also is full of praise for the management of the university. “It is great to work across cultures, and be part of a university in transition.”

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