This symposium will be held on 20 September 2021 in Stellenbosch. The symposium aims to signpost Stellenbosch University's transformation commitments, its local community entanglements, and the challenges and potentials of providing equitable educational access to various student publics with diverse class, race, gender, sex, linguistic, cultural, and geographic backgrounds.
The symposium would aim to establish an organic academic conversation about SU's transformation commitments with specific reference to the communities around Stellenbosch and a deep connection to the interwoven and entangled histories of the area. Special attention would be paid to inter-generational dynamics, slave backgrounds of these communities, the Coloured rural communities, black and refugee communities and farmworker communities.
What is paramount is to develop awareness and discourse about language as part of a more extensive set of debates that involve many aspects that determine student access and success at SU. The symposium would work with the essentialist framings around language, race and culture. It would move the debate to a more robust platform of inclusiveness. Such a perspective would lay the ground for ongoing work on articulations of student access and success.
This symposium, which will draw panellists and participants from across SU and other universities, will address the realities faced by SU as it strives to fulfil its commitment to ensuring that transformation and social impact are strategic drivers of its vision.
The programme will comprise presentations, panel discussions and spaces for the frank exchange of ideas. Professor Premesh Lalu of the Centre for Humanities Research at UWC will present the keynote address. His address Unlearning Apartheid- the grammar of the university in techno-rational times. This will be followed by two extensive panel discussions – 1) SU’s educational access engagements with local communities and 2) SU’s engagements with its multi-lingual publics. The final session will be presentations by Professors Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela (SARChI Chair in Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma at SU) and Christi van der Westhuizen (CANRAD at NMU) on the university’s engagement with local community publics.
The symposium is an opportunity for SU to establish a dynamic academic discussion about the University’s transformation commitments, focusing on the communities around Stellenbosch and the interwoven social, economic, political and policy dimensions and entangled histories that bind them together.
In particular, discussion will emphasise the need to develop an awareness and discourse about language as part of a larger set of debates surrounding the determination of student access and success at SU. Reframing of language, race, and culture is critical for a university
committed to inclusiveness and endeavours to serve all communities in its surrounding localities and beyond.
The symposium is hybrid - participants can elect to attend in person at STIAS or online. There is limited capacity for in-person attendees as all COVID health and safety protocols will be strictly adhered to at all times. For further information, please contact Prof Aslam Fataar- afataar@sun.ac.za. Click here to RSVP: http://ow.ly/aAoP50Gabth
