2012 Annual Report

The Centre for AAC continues to pursue its long-term strategic plan of sustained investment in collaborative research, teaching, community engagement and networking as a platform for new initiatives. Building on the streamlined and highly integrated workflow model, we developed, honed and intensified our activities in these strategic areas over the past two decades. The 2012 Annual Report provides insight into the academic initiatives we have undertaken during the past academic year in order to achieve our mission. We are committed to implementing new ideas and measuring the results, in order that our core functions may be strengthened continually. Our status as a research and teaching centre has benefited us, the Faculty of Humanities and the University community at large by enabling us to collaborate closer with departments, other centres and universities.

We achieved our mission by being truly interdisciplinary in orientation, mode, and scope. In order to expand our research output, we implemented strategies to establish and maintain collaboration with other faculty members and colleagues from other institutions on ambitious national and international projects. This year’s most visible example is the completion of the SIDA-funded project with colleagues from Jönköping University in Sweden on the human rights of children with mild intellectual disability; this project involved 440 participants and allowed 34 post-graduate students from South Africa and Sweden to participate, with respectively three and six students obtaining PhD’s and masters’ degrees. Furthermore, it also resulted in 15 scientific ISI-accredited publications, and 23 conference presentations.