Browsing by Author "Maluleke, Gavaza"

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    Colonial world-making in future technological landscapes: a qualitative comparative case study of the Sophia the Robot and Miquela Projects
    (2022) May, Abigail; Maluleke, Gavaza
    Future technologies are being produced by private actors in projects promising radical societal changes. Little attention is given to the intention of these private actors. This increases the risk of missing the ways in which private political and economic interests shape future technological imagining. From Jeff Bezos floating space coloniesto Mark Zuckerberg's reality bending ‘metaverse', private companies envision futures that will be far better than present society. However, factors that caused the need for societal transformation are being reworked into the imaginings of future landscapes promising. Through a comparative case study analysis of the robot projects of Sophia the Robot and Miquela Sousa, the argument presented in this research study is thatthe improved and inspiring future landscapes each robot project presents cannot be achieved. This is because the ideological framing of each project replicates the logic of modernity, which functions on structures of oppression. By applying colonial and modern examples from the past and present, this study illustrates the ways in which systems of oppression – such as white supremacy and enslavement- are reproduced in the imaginings of the future in private actors' technological projects as well as the technologies itself.
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    COVID-19 and the decline of autonomy: contact tracing in the age of surveillance capitalism
    (2022) Manne, Stephanie; Maluleke, Gavaza
    To develop successful COVID-19 pandemic response models, governments and policy makers are expanding on the known means of public health surveillance by collaborating with privately owned corporates and implementing new forms of surveillance technology, namely, contact tracing applications. This study examines the long-standing history of surveillance as well as the shifts in public health surveillance with the rise in technologically mediated solutions. In both research and public discourse, the overriding conversation is around the preservation of democracy and human rights and fearing the loss of “freedom” to the adoption of COVID-19 surveillance technologies. After analysing a series of academic journals and news articles that have been published since the beginning of the pandemic, this study highlights how a widespread use of such technologies has been encouraged in the name public health and safety, despite existing evidence of the shortfalls of contact tracing applications. By understanding the fundamental failures of democracy and the inequality that it perpetuates, this study argues that in the same way that the COVID-19 pandemic requires the creation of safe and unsafe bodies, so too does the system of democracy which depends upon creating fear and insecurity so that a reliance on the state is strengthened. As a result, the COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating a world of technological solutionism and surveillance that yields very unequal social, political and economic power dynamics wherein biology and personal data are exploited and commodified. This study employs of the theoretical frameworks of Foucault in making sense of the politics behind pandemic response models and the guiding roles of power, governmentality and biopower. While outlining the dangers of surveillance capitalism, this study makes sense of the push to rely on and preserve the system of global capitalist democracy.
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    Mobilising restless radicals: the #AmINext movement and the formation of feminist digital counterpublics against gender-based violence and femicide in South Africa
    (2024) Senne, Busang; Maluleke, Gavaza
    The #AmINext movement in response to the sexual assault and murder of Uyinene Mrwetyana in 2019 reignited the public discourse of gender-based violence (GBV) and femicide in South Africa. The prevalent research on feminist hashtag activism has made critical links between the use of social media and the platforming of women's rage as a form of mobilising protests against GBV and femicide. However, less analysis has focused on the political significance of affects such as rage within feminist hashtag activism against GBV and femicide in South Africa. This research undertakes a literature review of feminist hashtag activism across the world to situate this form of mobilising in global feminist debates connected to how marginalised genders experience patriarchy differently in diverse contexts. A thematic analysis of 1,600 tweets is employed to investigate how affects form these movements through activists' responses to #AmINext. It uses theories of feminist digital counterpublics to show that digital responses to GBV and femicide may be new, but they are connected to histories of women's resistance. This study argues that #AmINext mobilises rage and grievability to contest the assumptions of how GBV and femicide operate within the coloniality of gender. It found that rage and grievability circulated by activists in #AmINext work to counter hegemonic discourses that render GBV and femicide as extraordinary, reflecting how stories of injustice are bound with emotions that make individuals act politically in ways they would not otherwise.
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    Neoliberalism and rural exclusion in South Africa: Xolobeni case study
    (2021) Madiya, Sisanda Bongiswa; Maluleke, Gavaza; Lushaba, Siyabonga
    This study investigates the exclusion of rural communities from the postcolonial South African nation state as a result of the neoliberal agenda of the democratic government. This is a qualitative study that was conducted using a desktop analysis of literature and information on the case of the rural Xolobeni community and their resistance to mining. The secondary sources analysed included books, journal articles, news articles and online court documents. The study was also guided by the postcolonial concepts of the nation state and neoliberalism, which have both contributed to the conceptualisation of citizenship in the postcolonial world. The study found that economic growth-centred development in South Africa is often at the expense of those living in the poor communities of the country, such as in the rural areas (Capps & Mnwana, 2015; Kunnie, 2000). Rural communities, such as the former Bantustans, are often stripped of their land rights and livelihood strategies without their consent, at the hands of the democratic government of South Africa under the guise of development. This study argues that this is an injustice that results in the exclusion of rural communities from the postcolonial nation state. This exclusion is not only undemocratic – it resembles the oppression of these communities that characterised apartheid in South Africa.
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    The Everlasting Plague of Settler Colonialism in South Africa: An Autoethnographic Study on the Settler Logic of Eliminations? Assimilative Projects and its Impact Upon Understandings of Identity and the Self
    (2023) Mohedeen, Alia; Maluleke, Gavaza
    Eyewitness testimonies are integral pieces of evidence in criminal justice investigations. This is because justified conviction and appropriate sentencing can flow from eyewitness testimony. However, research has demonstrated that eyewitness testimony is often unreliable, even more so, the testimony of eyewitnesses who have witnessed multiple perpetrator crimes. This is because eyewitnesses to multiple perpetrator crimes have the challenging tasks of recalling the crime scene, correctly identifying the perpetrators involved in the crime, and assigning the correct role to each perpetrator. Eyewitnesses in the current study viewed a mock crime video comprising one, two, or five perpetrators and were instructed to answer a number of crime-related questions and identify the perpetrator/s from the line-up. The line-ups were presented sequentially (with one perpetrator in each line-up) for eyewitnesses who viewed the multiple perpetrator crimes. Additionally, these eyewitnesses were required to pair each perpetrator to the role they played in the crime. Analysis of the sample (N = 226) revealed that the accuracy of eyewitnesses decreased as the number of perpetrators increased. The ‘post-identification feedback' effect has not yet been studied in multiple perpetrator crimes. Single perpetrator research demonstrates that any suggestion that the eyewitness chose the correct person from the line-up inflates eyewitness confidence. We hypothesized that the effect would also persist in eyewitnesses who viewed multiple perpetrator crimes. We analysed 1991 of the 226 eyewitnesses and found that postidentification feedback did not significantly affect eyewitness identification and role confidence
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    Transnational Mothering in South Africa A Contemporary Approach
    (2023) Glazer, Natasha; Maluleke, Gavaza
    Literature on migration has been largely saturated by Global North and Asian narratives which as a result has led to an umbrella approach to migration experiences - such an approach negates the reality that experiences and knowledge of migration are relational and contextual. This dissertation, through the use of the contemporary approach to migration and qualitative interviews, will attempt to mitigate the above universalism by focusing on contextual specificities in a migration pattern that has so far been sidelined. This migration pattern is South-South and hones in on the lived realities of poor black undocumented transnational mothers in South Africa from the SADC region. Macro-level factors such as documentation, access to services and the labor market will be reviewed in the analysis, as well as micro-level factors such as mothering practices and relational definitions of motherhood. After which, this dissertation calls for the conceptual renegotiation of transnational mothering and the meaning of motherhood. By investigating diverging experiences and understandings to what have thus far been global hegemonies, this dissertation achieves its aim of recentering theory on migration and shifting knowledge on gender ideologies.
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    Travelling hair pains of the past: The continued impact of colonialism on the construction of black women's hair
    (2024) Zulu, Buhle; Maluleke, Gavaza
    The study of Black women's hair politics is recent. It refers to the existing social discussions and analyses of Black women's hair by Black women. And focuses on Black women's racial, gendered, political, and personal experiences with their hair. It explores how their views relate to dominant societal meanings attached to their hair. Over the years, this conversation has helped Black women voice and uncover how others perceive their hair. They explore these perceptions in the context of race, gender, location, and class. One dominant narrative that has emerged out of this discourse is the recurring issue of emotional pain experienced by Black women with African textured hair. From the early 1980s to the late 2000s, academic studies showed that Black women's pain about their African-textured hair came from historical racial discrimination and Euro-American beauty standards. Furthermore, these studies showed that western biases informed by discrimination target Black women and their hair. The dissertation analyzes the historical relationship between African and American experiences of Black women and Black hair. It explores how slavery connects these contexts. Furthermore, it examines three critical gaps in the association of Black women's African textured hair with pain. Firstly, the dissertation examines how African textured hair got to be associated with pain over the years. Secondly, it traces how racial historical perceptions on Blackness transformed the pain of having African textured hair to be solely centered on Black women. Thirdly, the dissertation explores how biological determinism during the American slavery era led to the perception of associating African textured hair with pain to be a Black female problem. This dissertation argues that the historical habitual tendency to associate Black women's African textured hair with pain, travels and is a repetitive issue that still affects Black women today. This dissertation used the postcolonial feminist research method. It included an in-depth discourse analysis of existing academic literature on Black women's hair discourses. It also analyzed the work of post-colonial (feminist) theorists in the areas of Black Feminist Thought and Transnational Feminism. This dissertation also analyzes contemporary material data from academic journals, newspaper articles, and YouTube material from the early 2000s Natural Hair Movement (NHM).
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    Women s Reproductive Bodies and Labour as The Premise for The Survival of The Capitalist System: A Transnational Feminist Inquiry into Contemporary and Speculative Future Forms of Capital Accumulation
    (2024) Fredericks, Saskia; Maluleke, Gavaza
    This dissertation examines how capitalism has remained predicated upon women's reproductive bodies and labour in the contemporary moment and its possibilities for the future. Relevant to the current aftermath of overturning Roe v. Wade, this research incorporates the concepts of gender, race, geopolitics, religion, and technology into investigating the transnational reliance of varied capitalist logics of accumulation on women's procreative capabilities. Utilizing a transnational feminist theoretical framework, and a qualitative secondary analysis methodological approach to extract data from secondary literature sources such as academic journal papers and online news articles, this study contends that an abortion ban in the Global North has had a ripple geopolitical effect on the Global South and beyond, exposing the current transnational connection between nation-states to implement foreignaided family planning, biocapitalism, surveillance capitalism, and terror capitalism via the carceral system, as tactics for extracting capitalist profit from the reproductive bodies and labour of women. Furthermore, this research argues, that as emerging logics of capitalist accumulation are becoming increasingly permeated with advancing technologies, the uterus has materialized as a technologized object, with capitalist elites testing the possible replacement of women's procreative abilities and bodies through present technologies such as agricultural breeding, Assisted Reproductive Technologies, and transnational commercial gestational surrogacy – and speculative nearby-future technologies such as the artificial womb. As tech elites begin to tout the possible creation of the artificial uterus as an emancipatory tool to escort in a post-capitalist gender-equal dawn, this thesis asserts that the quandaries of these technologies begin to transcend national borders, revealing that such problems now exist on an ever-developing interlinked transnational scale and further arguing that artificial wombs could additionally drive the concentration of wealth into fewer hands, not liberate all women from reproductive capitalist exploitation, and plausibly expedite a postcapitalist society with intensified inequalities. The research thus culminates with the contention that women's procreative liberation from a capitalist system that relies upon female reproductive bodies and labour to accrue financial gain does not exist in expropriating and replacing the progenitive capabilities of women – it lies in the alteration of patriarchal control via evoking and instituting the social and political modifications that shall lead to the eventual disruption of the misogynistic capitalistic structure and the elites who continue to engross the past, present, and future of the capitalist system.