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   The ARC team tags Nguni cattle.
As in many other studies, the research identified
that women are key to rural development strategies, but there are obvious hurdles. Their invisibility in decision-making processes and their lack of control over livestock assets and income have a negative impact on intra-household welfare and relations, and economic development.
While findings suggest that there is a complex array of factors – notably issues of power, culture, and perceived ideas about what constitutes appropriate gendered roles – the study demonstrated that there is a need for gender-disaggregated data
to understand the gendered dynamics within households.
The researchers’ journey into the worlds of these two farming communities left the team with
several clear viewpoints that they have distilled
into conclusions. Taken together, the findings have brought home a message that food (and its security) is fundamentally about the social lives of things – that the meanings we ascribe to development are contingent on thinking about the production of food, its socioeconomic, biological and agricultural life – to see the relationality between food and society.
UP RECEIVES GRANTS FROM ANDREW W MELLON FOUNDATION
INEQUALITIES –
A transdisciplinary project
Inequality is not simply a media buzzword but is currently an essential social and human reality – a contemporary problem in the global world. Justice and Humanity: Challenging world (in) equalities, led by Professor Vasu Reddy, Dean of Humanities at UP, is a five-year programme that makes a compelling case for the recognition of a human saliency to this topic. This transdisciplinary project will deliberately disturb established convictions so as to reinforce new, fresh and potentially powerful conceptual and empirical work on inequalities. Focused on research-driven outputs, postgraduate education and a public humanities component, the programme will be linked to the work of graduating students.
CURRICULUM TRANSFORMATION –
A supra-institutional project led by UP
The Andrew Mellon Foundation approved, in 2016, a grant to the University of Pretoria to support a five-year supra-institutional collaborative programme led by the Dean as Principal Investigator, in collaboration with colleagues at six research-intensive universities: Rhodes and Stellenbosch Universities, and the Universities of Cape Town, the Free State, the Western Cape and the Witwatersrand.
Unsettling Paradigms: The Decolonial Turn in the Humanities Curriculum at Universities in South Africa is designed to strengthen knowledge and to empower our students. The aim is to generate and disseminate interdisciplinary and engaged research and knowledge focused on curriculum transformation within South African universities. The project is thus an intervention in the current epistemic, theoretical and methodological struggles being articulated around the meaning of a transformed university.
TANGIBLE HERITAGE CONSERVATION –
Building research capacity
UP was awarded a planning grant for 2016 to develop a Master’s degree programme in Tangible Heritage Conservation (THC). THC is the inclusive term for cultural objects of significance, including resources such as archaeological artefacts, cultural handicrafts, religious objects, water-colour paintings, beadwork, baskets and sculptures. THC resources can be divided into moveable objects (usually found in museums
and art galleries) and immovable objects (structures such as
monuments or architecturally designed buildings, archaeological
sites, and vernacular architecture).
The envisioned academic programme will build the research capacity of a new generation of conservators and aid in diversifying the current demographics of the conservation profession.
Vasu Reddy
 UP Research Review 2016 | 51
Safiyya Goga









































































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