Stellenbosch University: ADA prepares for bumper hybrid edition of the winter school

The African Doctoral Academy (ADA) gladly returned to face-to-face mode for its summer school in January 2023 and is hard at work preparing for a bumper hybrid edition of the winter school in July.

The seasonal doctoral schools of the ADA, housed in the Africa Centre for Scholarship (ACS), aim to strengthen excellence in doctoral education across Africa and have built up quite a following. The schools are supplemented by monthly master class webinars.

The first fully in-person summer school since the pandemic took place in Stellenbosch from 18 January to 3 February 2023. Delegates from South Africa, Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda and Zimbabwe, among others, attended 12 courses facilitated by world-class leaders in their respective fields. Over the two and a half weeks of the school, the ADA had the privilege of hosting 13 top-rated presenters from South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States. These facilitators provided research and methodology training to both prospective and current doctoral candidates, their supervisors and researchers from various fields and at different stages of their PhD journey.

Together with the Centre for Collaboration in Africa (CCA), the ADA was able to make available African collaboration scholarships to support six delegates to join the programme.

Delegates could also network and attend social events, including the official welcoming by Prof Hester Klopper (Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Strategy, Global and Corporate Affairs). Evening functions featured guest speakers Prof Sibusiso Moyo (Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Research, Innovation and Postgraduate Studies) and Prof Jonathan Jansen (distinguished professor of Education). Prof Moyo spoke on enhancing the knowledge economy and global competitiveness through research collaboration in Africa, while Prof Jansen’s talk invited delegates to reimagine higher education and leverage research capacity for the Africa we want.

For its hybrid winter school, which is scheduled for 3 to 21 July, the ADA has extended the programme to run for a full three weeks. Each week will feature several courses running concurrently. The online and in-person courses will offer intense training by subject experts and will allow delegates to network and exchange ideas.