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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

OSM students off to Canada and Belgium
2016-07-01

Description: 001 OSM Naledi Lux Tags: 001 OSM Naledi Lux
Naledi Dweba will have the opportunity to
take part in tutorials such as reed making
and instrument adjusting when attending
the Belgian Clarinet Academy.

Photo: Supplied

Although he is only a first-year student at the Odeion School of Music (OSM), he will learn from, and share his knowledge with, the best in the world. Tuhafeni Michael from the University of the Free State has been selected for an international choral music residency at the Kokopelli Choir Association in Edmonton, Canada during June-July 2016.

Michael and Naledi Dweba are two OSM students that will enhance their skills abroad. Dweba, one of Danré Strydom’s clarinet students, has received a scholarship to attend the 2016 Belgian Clarinet Academy in Ostend, Belgium from 6-12 July.

Guest speaker at celebrations


Apart from receiving extensive training as choral conductor, Michael will also serve as a guest speaker during the Kokopelli Choir Association 20th anniversary. He will teach choral music from his native Namibia.

After the residency, he is expected to serve as an ambassador for the Kokopelli Foundation in Southern Africa. Apart from sharing his skills, he will also assist in recruiting new talented students, and act as mentor to other aspiring choral conductors.

“I’m hoping to really learn from some of the best choral conductors of our times, as well as from fellow students attending the course,” says Michael.

Masterclasses in rest of Europe


Dweba’s scholarship provides a week-long, intensive immersion in clarinet. Individual students receive at least 3 intensive private lessons, and participate in clarinet ensembles, receive chamber music coaching, observe and perform in masterclasses. The main instructors of the event will be Robert Spring (Arizona State University), Eddy Vanoosthuyse (Brussels Philharmonic Orchestra), and Deborah Bish (Florida State University).

After the scholarship, he will attend masterclasses in Germany and the United Kingdom.


 

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