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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

The influence of load shedding on the evening timetable
2008-01-31

The load shedding that is being applied at present also has a certain influence on especially the evening module and venue timetable. As part of the contingency planning of the UFS, an alternative module and venue timetable has been compiled so that classes that cannot take place during evenings in the week as a result of load shedding can be accommodated on Fridays and Saturdays.

After consultation with students, lecturers will decide whether the alternative timetable will apply when load shedding does indeed occur or whether the alternative timetable will be a permanent arrangement.

The alternative evening module and venue timetable are as follows:

Classes that are presented in the timeslot 18:10 to 21:00 on Thursdays are alternatively accommodated in the same venues at the same times on a Friday. Double or more periods that commence at 17:00, but continue into the period of load shedding are also included in this alternative arrangement.

It is important to note that lecturers who present double periods that start at 14:10 and continue into the period of load shedding must make ad hoc arrangements should they wish to have their periods also included in the alternative timetable.

Classes that take place in the timeslot 20:10 to 22:00 on Wednesdays are alternatively accommodated in the timeslot 08:10 to 12:00 on Saturdays, in a few cases in different venues from those scheduled initially. Double or more periods that start at 18:10, but continue into the period of load shedding are also included in this alternative arrangement.

The venue changes for Wednesday periods that are accommodated on Saturdays are as follows:

  • BLG114 Practical 1 English (A) in the Biology Building 28 from 08:10 to 11:00
     
  • STK114 Practical 1 Afrikaans (D) in West Block 201 from 09:10 to 11:00
     
  • STK114 Practical 1 English (D) in West Block 202 from 09:10 to 11:00
     
  • ALM108 Lecture 1 English (G) in FGG169 from 09:10 to 11:00
     
  • EKN314 Lecture 2 English (A) in the Rindl Hall from 09:10 to 11:00
     
  • EFA112 Lecture 2 Afrikaans (A) in FGG377 from 10:10 to 11:00
     
  • EFK112 Lecture 2 Afrikaans (A) in FGG183 from 10:10 to 11:00
     
  • DLS112 Lecture 2 English (A) in FGG184 from 10:10 to 11:00
     
  • ALC108 Lecture 2 English (E) in the South Block 1 from 10:10 to 11:00
     
  • DLS112 Lecture 2 Afrikaans (A) in the FGG377 from 11:10 to 12:00
     
  • EFA112 Lecture 2 English (A) in FGG183 from 11:10 to 12:00
     
  • EFK112 Lecture 2 English (A) in FGG184 from 11:10 to 12:00
     
  • ELF112 Lecture 2 English (A) in FGG169 from 11:10 to 12:00
     
  • EKN214 Lecture 3 English (A) in Stabilis 4 from 11:10 to 12:00

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