20 FACULTY OF HUMANITIES ANNUAL REPORT 2021 highly productive postdocs (Kaur, van der Wiel, Mujere) and a visiting professor (Nugent) to the department; the most significant of which was Joseph Mujere’s appointment to work on a new externaly funded research project looking at The Politics and Materialities of Artisanal Base-metal (chrome) Mining, which brings in large amounts of VW funding from Germany, as well as funding a PhD student. A number of member of staff continue to work on grants received in previous years (Gastrow, Fontein), and other received new funding awards, including Healy’s 10, 000 GBP grant from the Antipode Foundation for research on Resistance to Extractivism in Xolobeni: An Ecofeminist perspective; and for Stadler’s project: ‘Vaccine Outreach Integrating Community Engagement & Science’, which is a collaboration between UJ anthropology (Stadler) and the University of Toronto (Peter Newman), funded by the Canadian Institute for Health Research. Funding has been granted for a survey on vaccine hesitancy (in Canada) and an extensive literature review. This project will be a prelude to a more comprehensive global research project that will include South Africa, Thailand, and Canada. Several of our postgraduate researchers have also received international funding for their research projects, including Thulani Baloyi, who received a scholarship from the Oppenheimer Memorial trust Fund for his MA research on the politics of dying at Braamfontein and Brixton cemeteries. Stadler’s success in publishing his monograph and attracting funding was matched by his successful promotion to full Professor later in the year. Stadler takes over from Fontein as HOD in January 2022. We continue to host an active collection of Research Associates, (having not renewed some previous, under-performing Research Associates) and we are very pleased that Paul Nugent has joined us from Edinburgh, as visiting professor. Nugent gave a memorable lecture on his research on the cape wine industry in the first semester and we are currently building plans to develop Mobility, Migration and Borderlands as a new area of thematic expertise in the department. We continue to develop a series of informal ‘research clusters’ that bring staff, postdocs and research students together to regularly discuss related research themes, such as the Death cluster, the Urban cluster and the Medical anthropology cluster. In 2022 we will further develop these as they have proved a useful way to encourage cross-departmental and external collaborations and to develop new research projects and funding proposals. In 2021 two staff members (Gastrow and Fontein) applied for NRF rating in 2021, and await the outcome, likely in December. Internationalisation Many of the above activities, publications and conference speak to the department’s rapidly growing international regional presence and stature, but other activities have complemented and built further on this, including: Qambela’s two year fellowship with Oxford University “TORCH” fellow, at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) and Gastrow’s three month fellowship at the Urban Studies Foundation at Harvard. Staff in ADS continue to be involved as editors and advisory board members of various international journals and associations, including African Studies (Gastrow), the Journal of Southern African Studies (Fontein), International Journal of the History of Sport (Kaur), Human remains and Violence (Fontein), and associations like the African Studies Association (USA) (Gastrow), Sports Africa (Kaur) and the Royal Anthropological Institute’s working advisory group on Anthropology and the law (Fontein). Several members of staff supervise internationally, including two PhD students at Leuven in Belgium (Fontein), two MA students at Palacky University in Czech Republic (Kaur), as well as organising and participating in various international events to support emerging scholars across the region, both with the African Studies Association (USA) (Gastrow) and through our own Advanced Ethnographic Methods Field school, which this year takes the form of a virtual symposium in December (Fontein, Stadler, Giani). Teaching Our focus on raising academic standards has also emphasised the quality of the courses ADS teaches. In 2019 a process of revitalising our core undergraduate and postgraduate programmes was initiated, and this is beginning to bear fruit. Our re-organised core undergraduate programmes, initiated to coincide with the move to the single, faculty-wide degree, have now bedded down and are well established. As well as introducing new courses, on regional development policy (Nedziwe) and ‘radical activism’ (Timm), this re-organisation has allowed us to create slots in 3rd year and honours to welcome our visiting researchers and postdocs to contribute to teaching, which is much appreciated by our senior students, as they have been offered wonderful specialist courses on for example, the anthropology of sport (Kaur), and on land, migration and belonging (Mujere). Despite the difficulties of covid-related online teaching we have had some wonder successes. In particular Qambela’s V-C’s Teaching award was a recent highlight, as well as his nomination and shortlisting for the “Student Choice” Teaching Award in the Faculty of Humanities.
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