Archive for the ‘Misc’ Category
by Amy on Apr 3rd, 2013
Howard Phillips, author of Plague, Pox and Pandemics: A Jacana Pocket History of Epidemics in South Africa, taught a UCT Summer School course on “Epidemics in South African History”.
The series of lectures looked at the causation and consequences of “five of the worst epidemics to strike South Africa over the last three hundred years: smallpox, the plague, Spanish influenza, polio and HIV/AIDS”.
Listen to the podcasts:
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by Amy on Mar 26th, 2013
One of the most profound effects of the digital revolution is the radical change it has had on the delivery of advertising, propelling it from traditional TV and print into a multifaceted, multimedia, multisensory experience.
And youth advertising is already way ahead in the future – this is often where the most exciting, progressive ideas and concepts get through and make it into production. It is a truly mind-blowing creative ‘arena’, where the message is often the medium and the medium changes so rapidly that only the very savvy can keep up.
Who really knows what can make a connection with the youth? This is an exploration of the lives of the free and the domain of the restless – a place where the true spirit of liberty and energy of the young bounce off every surface and run rings around anyone over the age of 24 – examining the art, images, words and concepts that are needed to convey messages successfully to a mass audience.
The Stuff You Can’t Bottle documents the journey through some of those ideas, examining the art, images, words and concepts that are needed to achieve effective communication; a journey replete with insight from many different talents and legends in the advertising industry and beyond.
About the Author
King Adz is an author and creative/director who specialises in the creation and documentation of Youth Culture. He has travelled constantly for the last 15 years examining global youth talent and sub-cultures and been lucky enough to work with some of the most influential and interesting people around.
He roams the globe to touch, taste and experience what’s happening on the ground, documenting his findings in book projects like The Urban Cookbook (Creative Recipes for the Graffiti Generation) and Street Knowledge (An A to Z of Urban Culture). Whether he’s going underground in Tel Aviv or discovering new sounds in Rwanda, Adz uses his little black book and unwavering honesty to expose the biggest players and break-out names in the world of creativity, street culture, food, travel and beyond.
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by Amy on Mar 15th, 2013
New from Jacana, The Concentration Camps of the Anglo-Boer War: A Social History by Elizabeth van Heyningen:
This is the first general history of the concentration camps of the Anglo-Boer or South African War in over fifty years, and the first to use in depth the very rich and extensive official documents in South African and British archives. It provides a fresh perspective on a topic that has understandably aroused huge emotions because of the great numbers of Afrikaners, especially women and children, who died in the camps.
This fascinating social history overturns many of the previously held assumptions and conclusions on all sides, and is sure to stimulate debate. Rather than viewing the camps simply as the product of the scorched-earth policies of the war, the author sets them in the larger context of colonialism at the end of the 19th century, arguing that British views on poverty, poor relief and the management of colonial societies all shaped their administration.
The book also attempts to explain why the camps were so badly administered in the first place, and why reform was so slow, suggesting that divided responsibility, ignorance, political opportunism and a failure to understand the needs of such institutions all played their part.
Since the original research arose from a project on the medical history of the camps, funded by the Wellcome Trust, there is a particularly strong focus on health and medicine, looking not only at the causes of mortality in the camps, but at the ideas which shaped the culture of the doctors and nurses ministering to the Boers.
The author has also used material derived from a database of the camp registers to argue, somewhat controversially, that the camp inmates were primarily landless bywoners, rather members of the middle classes, as people like Emily Hobhouse implied, and that the rather numerous men in the camps were young and able-bodied rather than the old men suggested in the conventional literature.
“A masterly exercise in the writing of social history, extremely well-informed, utilising all the recent research” – Professor Iain Smith, formerly of the University of Warwick
About the author
Dr Elizabeth van Heyningen taught in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town for many years. Her main research interests are the history of Cape Town, the social history of medicine and the history of colonial women. Previous publications include a two-volume social history of Cape Town (with N. Worden and V. Bickford-Smith) and a history of the Cape medical profession in the nineteenth century (with H. Deacon and H. Phillips).
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by Amy on Mar 14th, 2013
Bishop Paul Verryn knew he had a problem when xenophobic violence erupted in South Africa in May 2008 and the threat of it spreading to Central Methodist Church in downtown Johannesburg became very real. Already there were over a thousand migrants living in the church, most of them having fled across the Zimbabwe border in search of a life beyond poverty and political oppression. Every square inch was occupied – at night men, women and children squeezed into makeshift sleeping places, on and beneath pews in the sanctuary and the chapel, and on every step of the staircases, on landings and in hallways. On the sidewalk outside the building, hundreds more lay head to toe under threadbare blankets.
Christa Kuljian’s Sanctuary: How an Inner-city Church Spilled onto a Sidewalk is based on how the Central Methodist Church in downtown Johannesburg and its controversial Bishop Paul Verryn came to offer refuge to people who had nowhere else to turn. Many ask, how did a place of worship turn into a shelter for thousands of refugees? Where did they come from? Why are they still there? Seeking to answer such questions, Kuljian fluently combines many elements: interviews with members of the refugee community and residents of the Church, and key figures like the head of Central Methodist, who has often been at the centre of the storm; historical material on the church and its role in the city since the early years; and an understanding of urban dynamics, migrancy, and South African and southern African politics.
Kuljian takes readers on a historic journey of how Central Methodist became a visible reminder of so many of the challenges facing Johannesburg and South Africa – poverty, migration, xenophobia, policing, inner-city housing and shelter, the vulnerable position of women and children, and the gap between rich and poor.
A complex, compelling book that grapples with some of South Africa’s most urgent social problems as they are refracted through one appalling, frustrating, inspiring place; “The story will always be told of how people came to Central Methodist and there was a place for them.”
About the author
Christa Kuljian is a freelance writer, who holds a BA from Harvard (1984), a Master in Public Affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton (1989), and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of the Witwatersrand (2007), focusing on narrative non-fiction. As director of the C. S. Mott Foundation in South Africa from 1992–2003, she was in a position to support the work of scores of organisations in the fields of legal rights and of women’s development, encouraging community participation in South Africa’s new democracy and strengthening the non-profit sector. In 2010, she was awarded the Ruth First Fellowship at Wits Journalism and gave the Ruth First Memorial Lecture on the refugee crisis at the Central Methodist Church in Johannesburg, which led to her writing her Sanctuary, her first book.
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by Amy on Feb 18th, 2013
Wars in the 21st century are wars against the earth: against natural resources like water, soil, forests, minerals, seeds. The global corporate economy based on the idea of limitless growth has become a war economy and the means it uses are instruments of war. Trade wars. Water wars. Food wars.
In a compelling and rigorously documented exposition, Shiva demolishes the myths propagated by corporate globalisation in its pursuit of profit and power by demonstrating its flawed assumptions and devastating fallouts.
Corporate control violates all ethical and ecological limits. It promotes technologies of production based on genetic engineering, geo-engineering and toxins; industrial development that entails the forcible appropriation of land, rivers, mountains; agribusinesses that deplete nature’s diversity; land-grab in Africa, Asia, South America. Exploitation of this order incurs the kind of ecological and economic debt that is unsustainable, unbailable and unbearable.
Making Peace with the Earth outlines how a paradigm shift to earth-centred politics and economics is our only chance of survival; and how collective resistance to corporate exploitation can open the way to a new environmentalism of interdependence and earth democracy.
About the author
Vandana Shiva is an Indian philosopher, environmental activist, author and eco feminist. Shiva, currently based in Delhi, has authored more than 20 books. She is one of the leaders and board members of the International Forum on Globalization (along with Jerry Mander, Edward Goldsmith, Ralph Nader, Jeremy Rifkin, et al.) and a figure of the global solidarity movement known as the alter-globalization movement. She has argued for the wisdom of many traditional practices, as is evident from her interview in the book Vedic Ecology (by Ranchor Prime) that draws upon India’s Vedic heritage. She is a member of the scientific committee of the Fundacion IDEAS, Spain’s Socialist Party’s think tank. She is also a member of the International Organization for a Participatory Society. She was awarded the Right Livelihood Award in 1993. Past publications include Soil Not Oil (2008) and Staying Alive (2010).
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by Amy on Feb 11th, 2013
Sarah Wild, author of Searching African Skies: The Square Kilometre Array and South Africa’s quest to hear the songs of the stars, has written an opinion piece for Business Day about the need for South African science to brand itself and market its research.
Wild commented that “Our science system is doing great work, but taxpayers, young people and the private sector have little idea of the opportunities available in science and technology” and said that this could be rectified through marketing:
SA needs to start branding its science and research. While SA’s development budget is very small, with little money to spare, it is becoming increasingly important to advertise what higher education and research councils are doing. Our science system is doing great work, but taxpayers, young people and the private sector have little idea of the opportunities available in science and technology.
Late last year, the Department of Science and Technology allocated an additional R800m to human capital development, which went unreported in most newspapers.
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- Searching African Skies: The Square Kilometre Array and South Africa’s quest to hear the songs of the stars by Sarah Wild
EAN: 9781431404728
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by Amy on Feb 1st, 2013
Samantha Page, editor of O Magazine and of From Me to Me: Letters to My 16½-year-old Self, has shared her top three books.
Page chose Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, The Light Between Oceans by ML Stedman and The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen:
The Help, by Kathryn Stockett:
Reading it proved to be as much a hotbed of emotion as Mississippi in the 1960s (the time period in which the novel is set). Aibileen’s chant to her young charge, which I say to my son and myself so often, sums up the real message of this book: “You is kind. You is smart. You is important.” Those words are reason enough to celebrate this novel.
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by Amy on Jan 15th, 2013
Sarah Wild, author of Searching African Skies: The Square Kilometre Array and South Africa’s quest to hear the songs of the stars, has written about the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project and the huge amount of work that needs to be done now that the bidding phase is over.
Wild talks about the community’s expectations in Carnarvon, the site of the SKA, that the project will help to uplift them. She points out that, “A scientific bureaucracy — essentially what the SKA is at the moment — cannot assume the role of the government and provide infrastructure and deliver services”. However, the community has already benefited in some ways with computer labs being set up and science and maths teachers coming to local schools.
She points out that there will be a long wait before there is visible progress, with phase one only set to be completed in 2019.
The problem with a huge scientific project such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is that once the site decision has been made and the “competition” part is over, the balloons and streamers are packed away, and the PR machine grinds to a halt, the scientists and engineers are left to knuckle down to the rather daunting task of figuring out how this never-before-attempted project is supposed to work.
Unfortunately, scientists picking away at problems is not the stuff of headlines and it is difficult to retain the public’s interest, and manage the Northern Cape communities’ expectations.
Book details
- Searching African Skies: The Square Kilometre Array and South Africa’s quest to hear the songs of the stars by Sarah Wild
EAN: 9781431404728
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by Amy on Dec 14th, 2012
Women24 have published an excerpt from 50 Flippen Brilliant South Africans by Alexander Parker and Tim Richman.
In this extract Parker and Richman explain why they have chosen to include JM Coetzee as one of their “flippen brilliant South Africans”. They start out by saying that people who have never read any of his work may think that “he’s dreary, boring and dead serious” but go on to say that the reason Coetzee is included in the list (and the reason why he’s won a Nobel) is “because he writes bloody well.”
If you’ve never read a book by John Maxwell Coetzee, South Africa’s most recent winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, chances are you think he’s dreary, boring and dead serious.
And in the unlikely event that you ever bumped into him at a social event, you’d no doubt think the same. After all, the man is famous for writing bleak Kafkaesque allegories and being impossibly antisocial at dinner parties.
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by Amy on Dec 12th, 2012
Professor Howard Phillips, author of Plague, Pox and Pandemics: A Jacana Pocket History of Epidemics in South Africa, will be teaching a course titled “Epidemics in South African History” as part of the University of Cape Town’s Summer School programme.
The course will look at the causes and consequences of the five worst epidemics in South Africa dating back 300 years, from the smallpox epidemic in 1713 to HIV/Aids. It will be held from Monday 28 January to Friday 1 February at The Centre for Open Learning and will cost R350. UCT staff members pay R175 and students can attend for the reduced rate of R88.
Event Details
- Date: Monday, 28 January to Friday 1 January 2013
- Time: Starts 9:15 AM
- Venue: The Centre for Open Learning,
Kramer Building,
Cross Campus Road,
Middle Campus,
UCT | Map
- Cover charge: R350 (UCT staff pay R175, students R88)
- Register: Download the registration form as a PDF or Word document
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