Upcoming UCT Inaugural Lecture: March 2026

Dear colleagues and students

The University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Inaugural Lecture series celebrates the academic excellence and leadership of newly appointed professors. These lectures hold a special place in our university's intellectual life. They mark the formal recognition of a scholar’s appointment to full professorship and offer an opportunity to reflect on a sustained body of work.

As we are about to resume this series in the new year, we look forward to these lectures, which reaffirm who we are as a university; make visible the questions that animate our research and the public value of our scholarship; and remind us that rigorous inquiry and social engagement must go hand in hand. 

The first lecture of the year in this series will be delivered by Professor Elena Moore from the Faculty of Humanities. 

Professor Elena Moore (Humanities)

Professor Moore will deliver her inaugural lecture, “Who cares? The directions of state-family relationships in changing times”, on Wednesday, 4 March 2026 at 17:30 SAST at the New Lecture Theatre on upper campus. 

This lecture will bring together a sustained body of research on how care is organised, experienced and governed amid social and economic change. It will also examine how responsibility for care is allocated between families, the state and other actors, and what this means for those who provide and receive care.

Professor Moore is professor of Sociology at UCT. Her work shows that care is not simply a private matter or moral choice. It is shaped by law, public policy, labour markets, demographic shifts and histories of structural exclusion in post-colonial contexts. Through this lecture, she will demonstrate how care operates as a social relation embedded in political and economic systems

Professor Moore’s research focuses on family life, gendered inequalities and the relationship between families and the state. She is the author of Generation, Gender and Negotiating Custom in South Africa (2022) and Divorce, Families and Emotion Work (2017), and co-author (with Chuma Himonga) of Reform of Customary Marriage, Divorce and Succession in South Africa (2015).

She is a recipient of UCT’s Distinguished Teacher Award (2021) and the Vice-Chancellor’s Social Responsiveness Award (2023). She currently holds a Wellcome Career Award (2023–2028) and an IDRC Scaling Care Innovations in Africa Award (2024–2027), through which she leads a regional research programme on family caregiving of older persons in Southern Africa. Over the past two decades, her scholarship has shaped public and policy debates on care in the region, and her current work on elder care is influencing regional policy frameworks. 

As the sociologist Arlie Hochschild observed, “Care is the invisible heart of society”. Professor Moore’s lecture invites us to make that heart visible, to examine how care is structured, valued and distributed, and to ask who bears its responsibilities in changing times. 

• Register to attend the lecture.

As this series gets underway for 2026, I encourage colleagues, students, alumni and the wider community to join us for these important occasions as we celebrate our academics contributions to intellectual property. 

Sincerely

Professor Mosa Moshabela
Vice-Chancellor

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