RE.SEARCH 6: Open

This is the sixth edition of RE.SEARCH, the University of Pretoria’s (UP) research magazine.

Click on the cover below to open the landing page and then click on the cover again to open the edition. You can also browse our previous editions on the magazine's page.

In this edition, all nine UP faculties as well as our business school are represented. The UK’s Financial Times once again acknowledged the University’s Gordon Institute of Business Science as Africa’s top-ranked business school for executive education. UP is also the only South African university that has a Faculty of Veterinary Science.

While we are proud to stand among the world’s best universities, we also pride ourselves on living up to our motto; “make today matter”. With this simple declaration, we have set our sights on changing the world for the better and creating the positive future that we would like to see through the value of the actions we take today.

That is why this edition of RE.SEARCH is particularly special, as each article demonstrates the impact that UP is making – how we are opening the doors to the future world that we want to see manifest. For far too long, the world of academia has been centred on Western notions of scholarship and classical Greco-Roman formulations around thought processes – yet the actual idea of a university was conceived in Africa.

The world’s first university was conceptualised and opened by Fatima Al-Fihri as early as the ninth century. Not only was the University of al-Qarawiyyin opened by a woman, but it still stands today in Morocco. Some of the world’s greatest thinkers and scholars have come through their doors, such as the philosopher Maimonides, the poet Ibn Arabi and Ibn Khaldun, who pioneered the social sciences. We are playing our part in building upon this long line of intellectual rigour.

The pages of this publication are just a taste of what is on offer in terms of research at UP. Our approach has long been one of finding African solutions to local and global concerns, while focusing not only on the sustainability of the solutions we provide but on the impact of them on the communities around us.

We believe in scholarship with a sense of ubuntu: by sharing our resources and collaborating with one another across and beyond disciplines, we hope to bridge the academic divide and create holistic knowledge and solutions. In so doing, we aspire to create a bedrock of quality education to open the doors of learning in order to build the next generation of researchers, not only in South Africa, but through a concerted pan-African approach.

UP espouses values of openness in terms of transparency and accountability, but the scientific project itself has to be open to new ideas and working together to translate insights into impact and theory into solutions.

As you peruse these pages you are transported into the insightful world of research and get a clearer view of how UP is working to open up the world in so many ways.