The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, which also celebrates its 100th anniversary along with Stellenbosch University (SU) this year, will be hosting an evening of vigorous discussion involving staff, students and alumni on 23 October. The Arts and Social Sciences Centenary Discussions is part of the faculty's centenary activities to celebrate the impact it has made and continues to make on modern day South Africa.
The event will start at 17:30 at the entrance of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences building where guests will be treated to snacks and some music from students from the Music Department. Thereafter guests will proceed to Room 230 and adjacent lecture halls where the panel discussions will take place.
Guests can choose to attend one of the three parallel panel discussions focused on:
- Spectres of Racial Science: From Rehoboth in Colonial Namibia to Berlin, Stellenbosch and beyond
- Art as Protest and Social Change
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the future of jobs, ethics and machines taking over
Speakers for the Spectres of Racial Science panel will include Ms Vanessa Mpatlanyane, Ms Nomzamo Ntombela, Prof Steven Robins from the Sociology and Social Anthropology Department, Maties alumnus Dr Handri Walters, and Dr Rudi Buys, the Dean of Humanities at Cornerstone Institute.
Walters, who completed a PhD in the Sociology and Social Anthropology Department, found a human skull and instruments used to measure human hair and eye types in February 2013 in a case bearing Eugen Fischer's name after she had requested the case from the SU Museum. Fischer was a Nazi eugenicist of the 1930s. Robins is the author of Letters of Stone, from Nazi Germany to South Africa, a deeply personal and painful reflection of the true horror and extent of the Nazis' racial policies against Jews. His book made the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award for Non-Fiction shortlist in 2017. Read the full story here.
For the last few years, Buys has worked closely with institutions on transformation. In 2008, he was called in by the University of the Free State (UFS) as a reconciliation consultant following what is referred to as the Reitz incident at that institution. The Reitz incident involved four white males who had filmed black workers participating in what they called selection tests for residence placement. This involved workers eating food in which the students had allegedly urinated amongst others. Buys was later appointed as Dean of Students at UFS and authored the book, Brugbouers – Die Reitz-video en die pad na versoening. Read a review of his book here.
Mpatlanyane is currently a guest lecturer and teaching assistant in the Sociology and Social Anthropology Department at SU. In 2015 she completed a Masters' thesis titled New Activism after Apartheid: The Case of Open Stellenbosch which draws attention to the Stellenbosch-based student movement Open Stellenbosch over a two year period, as well as the 2015-2016 student protests more broadly.
Ntombela is a final-year student studying towards a BA in Humanities degree with majors in Anthropology and Sociology. She has been involved in student activism and leadership through various student-led movements and structures since her earlier days at SU. She was a former executive member of the BA Student Committee (BASC) and the former President of the Student Representative Council (SRC) at SU. Recently she was invited to Michigan State University to discuss the necessary role, challenges and the future of student activism in higher education institutions and how these forms of activism are necessary in unravelling the truths behind the democratic project in South Africa.
The panellists topic will address the establishment of eugenics as a global science in the 20th century, its roots in German South West Africa and eventually its impact on Stellenbosch University in later years and transformation at other institutions.
“Southern Africa was not removed from the development or application of eugenics as a science. German eugenics had roots in German South West Africa, from where it travelled to many parts of the world, including Stellenbosch University. This panel explores eugenics as a 'travelling science' but also reflects on broader questions concerning the legacies of the forms of knowledge and institutional culture produced at the university. It attempts to highlight the importance of reflective remembrance in the year of centenary celebrations at Stellenbosch. Such reflection on institutional histories poses important questions that might move us forward in our commitment to present-day transformation," write the panellists.
Dr Leslie van Rooi, the Senior Director: Social Impact and Transformation; Ms Greer Valley, Visual Arts alumnus, former Open Stellenbosch member, curator of Open Form and a PhD candidate at the School of Fine Arts at the University of Cape Town, and Ms Stephané Conradie, a lecturer in the Visual Arts Department at SU who was also a member of Open Stellenbosch and an organiser of artist interventions that took place during 2015; will focus on Art as Protest and Social Change. Van Rooi takes responsibility, amongst others, for coordinating visual redress at SU. In his portfolio he is also responsible for the SU Woordfees and the SU Museum.
“In 2015, The Rhodes Must Fall movement argued that calls to remove the statue of Cecil John Rhodes were symbolic of the need for, amongst other objectives, the decolonisation of the university curriculum, addressing the slow changes in staff and student composition in terms of race, gender and class and to attend to the university's exclusionary institutional culture," explains Conradie and Valley.
They add that a month after “the globally publicised lifting of the Rhodes statue from its perch, students at Stellenbosch University responded to calls for transformation and redress by forming the student activist group Open Stellenbosch".
“Although the emphasis on visual redress was not at the top of the group's agenda, pressure from the students resulted in the ceremonial removal of a bronze plaque dedicated to the former Apartheid National Party Prime Minister and Vice Chancellor of the university HF Verwoerd from the Accounting and Statistics building in May 2015."
From May 2015 until early 2016, Open Stellenbosch protested the lack of post-1994 institutional transformation at SU highlighting, amongst other things, the discriminatory ways in which the then official university language policy (2014) was implemented at the university.
“In Open Stellenbosch and during the #Feesmustfall student protests, art was used as a way to signify or allude to the misgivings students had with the university institution. Art was also used to not only challenge the perceptions the public and institution had about the student protests but it also became a vehicle through which students could say what was often too difficult to express in words. Art then acts as a vehicle to not just express but to resist, educate and understand difficult issues in moments of crisis," explain the two SU alumni.
“Art, particularly public art, has historically been used as a site or place where civic ideas are represented and also an environment in which people can gather to engage in discussion and critical reflection. This type of artistic knowledge can be linked with liberatory knowledge production in line with Freirean pedagogy for the emancipation of the oppressed."
“Art in this case must be devoid of this institutional ideological framework and focused more on the active role it can have in society. This means to move it away from the traditional notion of art in isolation to a more communicative discipline which engages the communities it is taking place in."
Speakers to participate in the third panel focused on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the future of jobs, ethics, and machines taking over will include Prof Bruce Watson, the Chair of the Information Science Department in the faculty; Mr Marc Tison, a Matie alumnus and Chief Operating Officer at Zing Holdings; and Dr Martin Berglund, a postdoctoral fellow at SU from Umeå University in Sweden.
“Advances in computational high-tech mean that roughly every 18 months we have twice as much computing power — a trends which has continued for five decades now and has given us the internet, ubiquitous computing, robotics, self-driving cars, and artificial intelligence (AI). Work on AI started almost 60 years ago, and experienced many false starts over the first five decades — moments at which we were “on the verge" of intelligent systems. This time it really is unfolding. AI holds tremendous opportunities for us to solve some of the world's problems, but simultaneously it has the potential to cause joblessness, social unease (at the least), and a wide variety of ethical problems. This panel will reflect on these issues and discuss them from a variety of standpoints," says Watson.
Watson is the co-director of the Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research, and co-founder and co-director of the distributed FASTAR Research Group. His is also a visiting professor in the Department of Computer Science at King's College London. With more than a dozen researchers, his combined research groups perform fundamental research in new algorithms and technologies. He has fortunate enough to work at a wide variety of high-tech companies (from Microsoft to Cisco to ASML), bringing to the world applied research in areas such as AI, Algorithms and their correctness, cybersecurity and warfare, and silicon chip design and optimisation. He holds two PhDs, one in computing science and engineering from Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, and another in computer science from the University of Pretoria.
Should you be interested in attending the event, please book a space with Ms Lynne Rippenaar-Moses at lynnr@sun.ac.za or Mr Marvin Koopman at marvin@sun.ac.za by 22 October. Spaces are limited.
