Browsing by Author "Macdonald, Helen"

Now showing 1 - 14 of 14
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    A body in dissonance: young woemn naviagting mental health and living with depression in Cape Town
    (2021) Oosthuizen, Simone; Macdonald, Helen
    This dissertation investigates the experiences of young womxn diagnosed and living with depression in Cape Town. The investigation focuses on the relationship between the young womxn and their bodies as they live with depression and move through depressive episodes. The ethnographic findings expand on the dissociative - depersonalization and derealizationsymptoms of depression. Secondly, the investigation focuses on problematizing the theoretical construct of the body. These young womxn experienced their bodies beyond subject/object, internal/external, body/mind dichotomies. The dissertation frames the ethnographic findings with a phenomenological lens. Additionally, the dissertation uses a sensory gaze to understand the young womxn's bodily experiences and experiences with depression.
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    Conflicted cure: explorting concepts of default and adherence in drug resistant tuberculosis patients in Khayelitsha
    (2013) Winterton, Laura; Macdonald, Helen; Ross, Fiona C
    This dissertation examines default and adherence in drug-resistant tuberculosis (DR-TB) patients in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, South Africa. The ethnographic data is drawn from three and a half months of participant-observation, illness-narrative interviews, in-depth interviews, focus groups, support-group sessions and creative methodologies such as collage and emotional mapping. The various methods revealed some contradictory experiences with treatment and cure that some patients faced when undergoing treatment for DR-TB. Through an analytical framework of affect and emotions, this paper traces the complexities and disparate conceptions of default and adherence that circulate amongst patients. This paper argues that default and adherence do not operate in isolation but are part of dynamic entanglements of relationships and self-introspection that surface throughout the course of treatment for DR-TB.
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    From care inside the laboratory to the world beyond it: a multispecies ethnography of TB science towards growing a decolonised science in South Africa
    (2022) Shain, Chloë-Sarah; Abrams, Amber; Macdonald, Helen
    This anthropological research began with curiosity about human relationships with microbes. Inside the contained environment of a Biosafety Level 3 laboratory at a South African university-based tuberculosis research division, the fieldwork focused on the relationships between scientists and Mycobacterium tuberculosis − the pathogenic bacterium that causes the disease tuberculosis (TB). These deadly bacteria were cared for and nurtured by women scientists. This care extended to the cells and various species with which they worked. Moreover, this care moved beyond the scope of their immediate scientific research projects and well beyond the laboratory. Care was also central to how the participants conducted their scientific research and themselves in the world. This long-term, qualitative ethnographic research weaves together many layers of care in biomedical scientific research, highlighting that scientific research is a deeply personal, caring and subjective practice. The natural and the social are not − and can never be − mutually exclusive. Boundaries between mind/body, subject/object, human/nonhuman, researcher/researched, subjectivity/objectivity and science/society are porous. Acutely aware of the socio-political moment in which this research was embedded, these findings are put into conversation with South African student calls to decolonise science that emerged alongside the #RhodesMustFall student movement. In particular, the focus is on a 2016 meeting about decolonising science at the University of Cape Town where students argued for connection between the university and the community, science and society and the world of academia and the world of Africans. Implicit was the need for science to be relevant to Africans and deeply complex African social formations and problems. The care by women scientists that was observed inside the laboratory and beyond it speaks volumes to cultivating a more caring science and caring institutions of science that connect the laboratory to the world in which it exists in meaningful, relevant and impactful ways. I demonstrate how the participants embodied a decolonised science, and that what they cared about and how they acted upon those cares could serve as important guides for decolonising science and scientific institutions. This research provides important contributions to the field of science and technology studies (STS), to anthropological research on TB and to the conversation on decolonising science in South Africa.
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    The Invisible Story: Underground Health Narratives of Women in Mining
    (2017) Mutendi, Mutsawashe; Macdonald, Helen
    This dissertation may be read on several different levels. At its most accessible, it is a detailed ethnographic description of how ‘women in mining’ negotiate the daily terrain of caregiving and being exposed to highly contagious and resistant diseases that are associated with mining, which could potentially adversely affect their day-to-day lives, wellbeing and family relations. At its most analytical, it utilises Nixon’s concept of ‘slow violence’ by carefully charting the challenges that a female mineworker faces; having to provide for her family even in the most difficult situations, and sometimes at the expense of her own health. Hence, ‘women in mining’ are situated in a web of connections that exist between working underground and being caregivers in their homes; while at risk of transmitting tuberculosis (TB) and acquiring reproductive health related problems. This dissertation illustrates the tactics and coping strategies that women in mining employ, and argues that they ‘make a plan’ to minimise the negative social consequences of ill health.
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    Invoking heterogeneous cultural identities through Thokoza sangoma spirit possession
    (2014) Keene, Liam; Macdonald, Helen
    This thesis has been indefinitely embargoed, as per the Senate Executive Committee decision on 10 May 2016.
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    Me and My Monsters: A multispecies study on schistosomiasis in Sub-Saharan Africa
    (2023) Parrott, Charne; Macdonald, Helen
    For such microscopic creatures, schistosomes have become monstrous in scale and impact across the World's tropics, and particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. Schistosomes are parasitic blood-fluke worms and their disease, schistosomiasis, is an ancient disease that has evolved with humans for centuries and it is through its connections to humans that it has thrived. This dissertation outlines the actor-network surrounding schistosomiasis through a multispecies lens. Tsing et al.'s (2017) ‘monsters' is utilised to argue that schistosomiasis is a man-made disease, and our influence of nature only exacerbates the situation. Secondly, the purpose of this dissertation is to bring illness narratives to expand our understanding of what it is like to live with these parasites. Lastly, it analyses the social, economic and political structures that made and sustains schistosomiasis as the second most important neglected tropical disease in the world (Adekiya et al., 2020). This is a deadly, slow killing disease that affects millions of people around the world, yet it and the people most at risk of contracting it are severely neglected. It is only through an understanding of the interconnectedness of the actors in this network and acknowledging the social, economic and political processes that hinder, or even aggravate, the control of schistosomiasis that a holistic, successful intervention can be designed.
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    Protocol and beyond: experiment and care during a TB vaccine clinical trial in South Africa
    (2013) Dixon, Justin; Macdonald, Helen
    There has been a substantial increase in the amount of biomedical research being conducted in resource-poor regions of the world since the 1980s, particularly clinical trials involving human subjects. With a particular focus on public-sector clinical trials, a number of anthropologists have recently conducted important ethnographic research into the ground-level operations of clinical research organisations and the relationships between doctors, co-ordinators, participants and non- participants. It has been argued that formal ethics and the scientific practices they govern obscure a relational and affective dimension of clinical trials, which is both necessary for, and transcends, the requirements of trial protocols. On the basis of ethnographic research with a clinical research organisation in South Africa specialising in trialling tuberculosis (TB) vaccines, I contend the explanatory value of tracing the diseases 'under the microscope' from global public health agendas to ground-level research practices when exploring the relationships between the 'ordered separations' of medical research structures and the relational-affective dimension they obscure. Through a close examination of TB at different levels of scale, I aim to open up more avenues of enquiry into the multifarious factors that shape the important relations that develop between clinical research organisations and those on whom research is conducted.
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    Race and identity of Brazilians in South Africa: an ethnographic study on racialization, habitus, and intersectionality
    (2018) Campos, Anita; Morreira, Shannon; Macdonald, Helen
    Despite recurrent academic interest in the study of race in both South Africa and in Brazil, little work has been done in Anthropology about the two countries of the Global South in relation to each other. This thesis is situated in that gap and presents an ethnographic study about the racialised experiences of Brazilian migrants in South Africa, in order to explore the different processes of racialization that occur in South Africa and Brazil. The first part of the investigation focuses on the conflictual encounter between informants’ internalized racial habitus as learned in Brazil with the one they encounter in South Africa. The second part examines the impact that such racialization has on the racial identity of Brazilian individuals. Informants found themselves in situations of racial ambiguity in which they did not fit perfectly in any of the local racial categories, and were classified by South Africans in different (and sometimes multiple) racial categories from their previous one in Brazil. I use the theoretical lens of intersectionality to explore informants’ reflections on 'what they are’ as they socially adapted to South African racial categorisations and habitus.
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    Restitution as justice : historical redress and distributive justice in New Zealand and other settler economies
    (2013) MacIntyre, Katherine Fiona; Macdonald, Helen; Ross, Fiona C
    Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references.
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    Roots and routes : locating Tibetan identities in diaspora
    (2010) Joffe, Ben Philip; Macdonald, Helen
    Cognisant of a legacy of exotification of Tibet and Tibetans, Tibetan studies scholars have argued for a certain instrumental internalisation of romantic Western portrayals by Tibetans. Exemplifying this perspective, Lopez worries that Tibetans have been forced to perpetuate limiting orientalist fantasies about themselves for political expediency. In reproducing Tibet as some hyper-real Shangri-la, it is turned into a floating signifier that loses its historical, nationalist, and political specificity. While I do not deny the relevance of such claims, I suggest that Lopez's formulation is problematic for how it risks implying that identity performed or articulated for an audience is likely to be less complex, less flexible, and to leave less room for personal innovation, socio-historical complexity and multivocality. In judging some self-representations as instrumental, the existence of a more genuine, entrenched, tacit Tibetan-ness behind such staged performances is presupposed. Seeking to problematise this position, I take as my entry-point the idea of instrumentality, and, sketching a rough trajectory of academic writing about Tibet, probe some of the dominant discourses and implicit strategies that emerge in the literature. I draw upon two months of ethnographic fieldwork where I interacted closely with the 'Office of Tibet' of South Africa (a representative organ of the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA)) and the three Tibetan families associated in various capacities with it. As a heuristic strategy, I attempt to locate 'Tibetan-ness' as it emerges (and fades from view) in a variety of contexts. Shifting from strategic and public performances of Tibetan-ness, to everyday gestures and habitus, and back again, I show how convenient distinctions between the public and the private, the local and the global, the political and the religious or cultural, are ultimately unsettled in the face of complex and contingent expressions of ethnic identity that take place in the midst of extensive transnational networks and audiences. As an alternative to a recourse to 'instrumentality,' I propose a rethinking of cultural identity as 'skilful'.
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    Seeing selves and others: rethinking 'the tourist gaze' of township tourism as inter-subjectivity in Cape Town, South Africa
    (2011) Dickson, Jessica Lynn; Macdonald, Helen
    This dissertation is intended as an "ethnography of the particular" that might demonstrate the inter-subjectivity of 'hosts' and 'guests' subject-positions so often presented as static and oppositional of township tourism in Cape Town, South Africa. The majority of research engages in a continuing debate that emphasizes either the 'hosts' or 'guests' of a global tourism industry as either the victims or profiteers of exploitation, or innovative and entrepreneurial agents of change. I attempt is to look for the transformative potentials in the ambiguities and ambivalences surrounding township tourism, as an industry representing evidence of further penetration by neoliberalism in sub-Saharan Africa, that does not pardon the proclivities of late capitalism to widen the gaps of social stratification, but rather questions its determinism in shaping subjectivities.
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    Speaking Distress Out of Being: An Exploration of Memes and Expressive Phrases as Jokes and Coping Mechanisms for University Students
    (2022) Mathobie, Roxanne; Macdonald, Helen
    Shorthand phrases and meme culture have become rampant among university students when expressing their experiences in institutional spaces. This thesis explores the use of such phrases and memes among students as they navigate the various pressure and stressors of being undergraduate students during the Covid-19 pandemic. Based on the findings of this fieldwork I argue that the use of memes and phrases are central to students coping in this space as it allows for light humor and joking around the often tense and stressful circumstance. This use of humor offers up a release that while not changing the circumstance at hand allows for a suspension of tension just enough to allow students to keep going (pushing and working) through the semester. Aside from being useful as a release and breath through the tense time the use of memes and shorthand phrases has also allowed for the creating of space and community online during a time when many students have been isolated and physically distanced, unable to create new friendships. Overall, this research has found that among the nine participants use of memes and phrases such as ‘in the pits' allows for a distancing of the emotions and personal from the stressful circumstances phased, leaving enough room for light sharing that does not cost the user or listener further strain.
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    The Middlestage: State-Sponsored Overseas Chinese Academics and China's Managed Cultural Globalisation
    (2021) Chen, Tian; Macdonald, Helen
    This in-depth ethnographic study focuses on state-sponsored Overseas Chinese Academics (OCAs) and China's managed cultural globalisation based on two years of multi-sited fieldwork in South Africa, Australia, and China. Extending Goffman's (1956) theoretical frameworks of everyday dramatism such as the frontstage and the backstage, I adopt the middlestage as the primary conceptual lens of my investigation. The middlestage of China's managed cultural globalisation is examined as a fluid and embodied space where state-sponsored OCAs and Chinese state institutions negotiate power in the process of producing performances. I argue that for state-sponsored OCAs, the middlestage of China's managed cultural globalisation is simultaneously a space of curation, negotiation, and re-imagination. The research also incorporates an ethnographic fiction titled The Islanders and provides a thick description of my state-sponsored OCA participants' life trajectories. The Islanders reveals how individual OCAs curate their performances and self-presentations, negotiate their social mobility and identities; and reimagine their realities whilst seeking conviviality on the middlestage. The thesis discusses and demonstrates how ethnographic fiction can be used as an essential tool for anthropological research.
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    Whoever said a little 'dirt' doesn't hurt? : exploring tuberculosis (TB)-related stigma in Khayelitsha, Cape Town
    (2011) Abney, Kate; Macdonald, Helen
    This paper considers the significance of Tuberculosis (TB)-related stigma and stigmatising acts in areas of Khayelitsha Township in Cape Town, South Africa. Data is drawn from three months of in-depth participant observation, interviews and support group sessions. Stigma is a moral process which emerges within social webs of meaning making. By focusing on patient narratives and local illness transmission models (ITMs) both 'enacted' and 'felt' stigma are explored. Three themes emerged during fieldwork: the singularity of dirt as a mode of TB transmission, the paradoxical visibility of the face hidden by the clinical mask, and the ordering/disordering intentions of those who gossip. Utilising Das' (1990) idea of 'organising images' to understand these themes, it is evident they are each imbued with power and meaning within local worlds and thus extend our understanding of stigma and stigmatisation. I argue for the theoretical expansion of stigma through employing alternative literatures, such as the anthropology of violence, witchcraft and narrative studies. In addition, new methods need to be explored which mirror the adversity faced by those living with TB. In this work I suggest 'provoking' stigma is the most effective manner to understand its effects.