...Speakers at The 2025 SASA Annual Conference
Yumnaa Ocks
Speaker
Yumnaa Ocks
Speaker
Yumnaa Ocks is a PhD candidate at the University of the Western Cape, where she is also a lecturer in the Department of Library and Information Science. Her research interests lie at the intersection of emerging technologies and information governance, with a particular focus on the integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) technologies within academic libraries. Her work critically explores issues related to patron privacy, data ethics, and institutional compliance in the digital information era. Through her scholarship, she advocates for responsible innovation in library services that upholds the rights and confidentiality of users while embracing technological advancement within libraries.
Geraldine Frieslaar
Speaker
Geraldine Frieslaar
Speaker
Geraldine Frieslaar is chief archivist at the New Archival Visions Programme based in the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the Western Cape (UWC). Before her appointment at UWC, she served as the director of the South African History Archive. Frieslaar worked in various positions in the last 17 years across archives, museums and universities which included the District Six Museum, the Robben Island Museum, and at her alma mater, Stellenbosch University where she was appointed as the curator for research, dialogue and social justice in 2021. Through her work experience and academic research, Frieslaar cultivates an understanding of historic and systemic challenges facing archival and museological spaces and thus her research interests are around interventions that disrupt traditional modes of thinking and making these spaces more accessible, dialogical, participatory, and inclusive through archival activism, teaching, practice-based research and theory. Selected publications include:-Transformation of Archives and Heritage Education in post-apartheid South Africa. African Sun Media: Stellenbosch, 2023.-“The Value of Post-apartheid Archives: Heritage Economies of South African Archives in the Wake of Apartheid” in Alternative Economies of Heritage: Re-imagining Cultural Value through Digital, Decolonial and Sustainable Practices. Routledge, 2025.
