UCT Inaugural Lectures for August 2024

Dear colleagues and students

As we continue to celebrate the promotion of our academics to full professorship – the highest academic rank – I am delighted to announce the five lectures that will be held in August 2024 as part of the UCT Inaugural Lecture series.

South Africa celebrates Women’s Month in August, and it’s a fitting coincidence that four of the inaugural lectures will be delivered by our esteemed women academics – Professors Carolyn McKinney, Catherine Orrell, Sa’diyya Shaikh and Ameeta Jaga – on 14, 22, 23 and 29 August 2024 respectively. The fifth lecture scheduled for this month will be delivered by Professor Dizu Plaatjies on 28 August. All of these colleagues are among our academics who have made invaluable contributions to academia.

Professor Carolyn McKinney (Faculty of Humanities)

Titled “How are we failing our children? Language and exclusion in schooling”, Professor McKinney’s lecture will be held on Wednesday, 14 August 2024 in the Neville Alexander Building on lower campus at 17:30 SAST.

How is it possible that the most valuable resource a child brings to school, their language, is consistently ignored and recast as a problem? This disturbing question has driven Professor McKinney’s research over the last 20 years. Contributing to international research in critical applied and sociolinguistics, her research shows how colonial and racialised beliefs about language and literacy, or language ideologies, fuel the deficit positioning of multilingual and African language-speaking children. 

Drawing on fieldwork conducted in both well and under-resourced schools, Professor McKinney will demonstrate linguistic discrimination and exclusion. She will contrast this with research on ‘illegitimate’ and informal but productive use of bi/multilingualism by children and teachers, which inspires hope for the possibility of inclusive learning. She will end her lecture with an urgent call to our new Minister of Basic Education not to ignore language and literacy, which are essential and basic infrastructure for successful learning, and to implement mother-tongue-based bilingual education.

Professor McKinney is a professor of language education in the School of Education and a stream leader in applied language and literacy studies. Her research and teaching focus on language in education policy, language and literacy ideologies, and the use of languaging-for-learning in multilingual education contexts of the Global South.

She has led a number of ethnographic-style school-based research projects in these areas. Her publications include the books Language and Power in Post-Colonial Schooling: Ideologies in Practice (2017, Routledge) and Decoloniality, Language and Literacy: Conversations with Teacher Educators (2022, co-edited with Pam Christie, Multilingual Matters). She is the lead editor of the second edition of The Routledge Handbook of Multilingualism (2024) and a founding member of the bua-lit language and literacy collective advocating for the use of African languages and multilingualism in education.

• RSVP for the lecture by Professor McKinney.

Professor Catherine Orrell (Faculty of Health Sciences)

Professor Orrell will deliver her inaugural lecture titled “Toward effective HIV treatment in South Africa – injustice, clinical pharmacology and adherence” on Thursday, 22 August 2024. The lecture will be held in Lecture Theatre 2, Groote Schuur Hospital.

A sense of injustice spurred Professor Orrell's interest in HIV from the early 90s: from the time of Aids denialism when the only treatment access was through small clinical trials; to today, when through ongoing global inequity, people with HIV in Africa are again being denied new formulations.

In her inaugural lecture, Professor Orrell will discuss her experience and involvement as a clinical pharmacologist in the development of new antiretroviral treatments and treatment strategies over the past 20 years, as well as her fascination with adherence: why people do or do not take their life-saving daily medication.

Professor Orrell is an HIV clinician, clinical pharmacologist, and clinical trial specialist. Since 2004, she has been a principal investigator on more than 20 antiretroviral clinical trials, including a range of efficacy, toxicity, pharmacokinetic, drug interaction and dosing studies. She has in-depth experience conducting research in state-of-the-art research facilities at UCT, community settings and primary healthcare clinic environments.

She leads a clinical research site in Gugulethu, the Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation Centre for Adherence and Therapeutics. The site is currently conducting clinical trials of novel methods to monitor and improve antiretroviral therapy adherence and is exploring the use of long-acting antiretroviral therapy in adolescents and young people living with HIV.

• RSVP for the lecture by Professor Orrell.

Professor Sa’diyya Shaikh (Faculty of Humanities)

Professor Shaikh’s lecture will take place on Friday, 23 August 2024 in Mafeje Room, Bremner Building, on lower campus at 17:30 SAST. It will address the topic “Radical Critical Fidelity: Barzakhi Journeys in Islamic Feminism”.

Committed to gender and social justice, Islamic feminism expands the ethical and intellectual archive within Muslim communities. In her lecture, Professor Shaikh will trace key sources, epistemological concerns and theoretical explorations that have influenced her scholarship in Islamic feminism over the last two decades. Embracing metaphors of journeying and in-betweenness (the barzakh), she theorises Islamic feminism as a friendship with/in tradition characterised by a stance of ‘radical critical fidelity’.

Professor Shaikh is a professor of religious studies at UCT. She specialises in the study of Islam, gender ethics, and feminist theory, with a special interest in Sufism. Her study of Islam began with an abiding interest in existential questions as well as a commitment to social justice – much of her work is animated by an interest and curiosity about the relationship between the realms of the spiritual and the political. 

Professor Shaikh is the director of the Centre for Contemporary Islam at UCT. She has held research fellowships at Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin: Institute for Advanced Study (2016-2017) and at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies (2020); and was a Fulbright PhD scholar. She is involved in a number of socially engaged networks and is a scholar-activist invested in ways to promote gender justice and social transformation.

• RSVP for the lecture by Professor Shaikh.

Professor Mzikantu Zungula Dizu Plaatjies (Faculty of Humanities)

On Wednesday, 28 August 2024, Professor Plaatjies will present his lecture titled “My Journey”. The lecture will be held in the Baxter Concert Hall at The Baxter Theatre at 17:30 SAST.

Professor Plaatjies has been instrumental in a resurgence of musical bow appreciation through his teachings at UCT and other institutions. He is not only a master bow player but also a master bow maker whose innovative musical spirit has led him to create some very interesting instruments. Although he grew up in ‘urban times’, his journey into the art of the bow started ‘at the knee of his rural Mpondo mothers and aunts’. This journey has taken him far away from these early formative interactions. However, the impact of their artistry and wisdom on him has not waned. It has provided sustenance and solace throughout his career as performer, instrument builder, educator and mentor.

Professor Plaatjies heads African Music Performance at the South African College of Music at UCT. He is one of South Africa’s leading traditional artists and cultural historians of African music. He is the founder and leader of the music group Ibuyambo and the founder and former leader of South Africa’s globally celebrated traditional group, Amampondo, who recorded and toured locally and internationally in the 1980s and 90s.

Professor Plaatjies, the son of a traditional healer, had an upbringing in Lusikisiki, a rural part of Mpondoland in the Eastern Cape, which immersed him in Mpondo culture and traditions. His ability to revive, revamp and communicate old cultural practices and teaching methods has led to countless teaching and performance engagements locally and abroad. This year marks his 32nd anniversary as a member of the UCT staff, and it is also the year he will retire from the institution.

• RSVP for the lecture by Professor Plaatjies.

Professor Ameeta Jaga (Faculty of Commerce)

Professor Jaga will deliver her inaugural lecture – the fifth in the month of August – on Thursday, 29 August 2024. Titled “Balancing acts: Mothering, womanhood and employment”, it will be held in Lecture Theatre LC2A, Level 2, Leslie Commerce Building on upper campus at 17:00 SAST.

Professor Jaga is a professor of organisational psychology in the School of Management Studies in the Faculty of Commerce and a non-resident fellow at Harvard University's Hutchins Centre for African and African American Research. Her research adopts a Southern and decolonial approach to address the geopolitics of knowledge production, focusing on gendered and social class analyses of work-family concerns, particularly among low-income mothers. Using feminist methodologies like photovoice, her participatory action research aims for epistemic justice, influencing workplace breastfeeding supports and policy improvements on care work by recognising and reducing ‘the Motherload’.

As an organisational psychologist navigating her own life as an Indian woman, mother, wife and academic, Professor Jaga has spent the past 15 years exploring the importance of context in shaping the work-life balance equation. For many, this balancing act is challenging, but especially for single, low-income mothers. Among the obstacles are a lack of supportive policies and their implementation, serious infrastructural shortcomings, and limited resources (in the family, community, and the state). The fact that, academically, theories and prescriptions from the Global North do not offer adequate help in understanding the problems means that suggestions built from them to improve the work-life interface are ineffectual. Northern, industrial, capitalist, and masculine norms influence the organisation of work despite often being inappropriate in settings in the Global South.

Initially, Professor Jaga’s work challenged the inadequacy of work-life balance frameworks in representing and conceptualising diverse women’s lives. For her, the #RhodesMustFall movement further highlighted epistemic injustices, exposing the invisibility of low-income women in work-family research. She has since engaged in various collaborative projects on mothering, women, and work. Her earlier efforts focused on improving workplace awareness and policies for pregnant and lactating women’s bodies in the workplace, through partnerships with trade unions and government.

Currently, under the concept “the Motherload”, she is collaborating with a transdisciplinary academic team, women’s rights organisations, government, and low-income mothers themselves to co-create sustainable pathways to enhance their economic security, safety, and wellbeing. In her inaugural lecture, she will share personal reflections and research insights on balancing mothering, womanhood and employment, advocating for a more inclusive and caring society.

• RSVP for the lecture by Professor Jaga.

I am looking forward to these lectures, and to having you as part of the audience as we celebrate the five colleagues and get to know more about their impactful work.

Sincerely

Professor Mosa Moshabela
Vice-Chancellor