Dear Humanities Colleagues

Welcome back and everything of the best for the new academic year! 

Faculty Achievements!

• Emma Ruttkamp-Bloem (Philosophy): 
  • chaired the ad hoc expert group that drafted the UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of AI – this is the first global AI ethics policy in the world
  • was elected as rapporteur of the UNESCO Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology
  • was included in the 2022 Hundred Brilliant Women in AI Ethics

• Renata Mosca and Esedra Kruger (Speech-Language Pathology & Audiology) won the Department of Education Innovation’s 2021 Community Engagement Award for their module which provides communication pathology services through the Clinic for High Risk Babies (CHRIB)
• Ian MacQueen (Historical and Heritage Studies) was asked to judge the Global Undergraduate Awards
• Theo van Wyk (School of the Arts) was appointed as organist for the memorial service of the late Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu held in St Mary the Virgin Anglican Cathedral in Johannesburg

• Ziyanda Majombozi (Anthropology and Archaeology) was awarded a PhD in Anthropology from the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand

Appearances on Media Platforms

• Henning Melber (Political Sciences) published the article Why reconciliation agreement between Germany and Namibia has hit the buffers in The Conversation
• Maggi Loubser (School of the Arts) was interviewed on RSG about Pewterware of the Oranjemund shipwreck
• Keolebogile Mbebe (Philosophy) published the article Why impatience was a key facet of Tutu’s life story on News24
• Alf Nilsen (Sociology) was interviewed about Hindu nationalist hate crimes against Christians in India on SAfm
• Mark Wegerif (Anthropology and Archaeology) was part of a panel discussion on food security and informal traders hosted the South African Informal Traders Alliance’s StraightTalk programme
• Yanga Malotana (Political Sciences) published the opinion piece Political will needed to fix literacy levels, affected by the pandemic on News24 and was interviewed on eNCA about how to fix South Africa’s education system

Presentations and Publications on Academic Platforms

• Antoinette Lombard (Social Work & Criminology) and Andre Viviers published the article Rethinking social work’s role in a rapidly changing world in ResearchFeatures
• Alf Nilsen (Sociology) co-authored a chapter on Hindu Nationalist Statecraft and Modi’s Authoritarian Populism in the Routledge Handbook on Autocratization in South Asia

• Emma Ruttkamp-Bloem (Philosophy):
  • was invited to contribute to the 2021 International Workshop on Cross-cultural Cooperation in AI and Ethics organised by the International Research Center for AI Ethics and Governance, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge, the Center for AI Governance, Tsinghua University and the AI for SDGs Cooperation Network
  • presented the keynote speech at the second International Conference on the Ethics of the Intelligent Society organised by the Korea Communications Commission and the Korea Information Society Development Institute
  • presented at the Connect AI Master Class organised by the Centre of Business Excellence of the School of Economics and Business at the University of Ljubljana (CBE SEB LU) and the UNESCO International Artificial Intelligence Research Centre (IRCAI) established by the Jozef Stefan Institute (IJS)
  • published the chapter Re-imagining Current AI Ethics Policy Debates: A View from the Philosophy of Technology in SACAIR 2021, Communications in Computer Information Science  
• Jimmy Pieterse (Anthropology & Archaeology) and Ilana van Wyk published the book Nationalism, Politics and Anthropology: A Tale of Two South Africans
• Alida Green (Historical & Heritage Studies) published the chapter Similar steps, different venues: the making of segregated dancing worlds in South Africa, 1910-1939 in Worlds of social dancing: Dance floor encounters and the global rise of couple, c. 1910-1940
• Eddie Michel (Historical & Heritage Studies) published the article ‘You Haven’t Been Too Horrible to Us Recently’: Lyndon Johnson and Apartheid South Africa in Diplomacy and Statecraft
• Edwin Smith (Historical & Heritage Studies) Education and the public good: Foregrounding education in history in Yesterday & Today

• Rebecca Hodes (CSA&G) published: 
  • co-edited the monograph Adolescents living with HIV in South Africa
  • the article Blurred lines: Treading the staggered path between ‘research’ and ‘social intervention’ in a study about youth in South Africa in Health and Social Development: International Perspectives on Participatory Research
  • co-authored the report entitled Community-led monitoring in Indonesia, Uganda, Ukraine and Vietnam: Assessing the Impact of COVID-19 on People Living with HIV
  • presented Covid vaccine hesitancy among students at the University of Pretoria at the Imagined Future Conference X1
• Sharon Sibanda, Tharina Guse and Shingairai  Chigeza (Psychology) published the article Psychic Wounds of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder camouflaged under the uniform of an SANDF soldier inPsychology in Society
• Victoria-Ann Verkerk (Historical & Heritage Studies) presented the paper Virtual Reality: A Simple Substitute or New Niche? at the 2022 ENTER eConference

Scheduled Events

• The ATLAS Africa online conference ‘Falling back in love with tourism – An African affair’ hosted by the Department of Historical and Heritage Studies, will take place on the 14 February 2022. Click here to register
• The webinar Why African universities need to study the US will be held on 17 February 2022 at 18:00. Click here to register

My congratulations to all our colleagues! 

The next NewsClips will be published on 18 February 2022. We are using a new data capture form, so please remember to log the details of your publications, appearances, and events here or via this link https://forms.gle/UU7wbFqDkGhv5FaN9.