OpenUCT :: Browsing by Author "Morreira, Shannon"

Browsing by Author "Morreira, Shannon"

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Open Access
A decolonial approach to a socially just curriculum? a case study of a first-year common course in an emerging post-apartheid University eMzansi Afrika
(2025) Mona, Msakha; Morreira, Shannon; Luckett, Kathy
This qualitative case study sought to explore whether and how the University of Mpumalanga (UMP) imagined social justice in its first-year common course, MIC100 (Mpumalanga in Context). The UMP is one of the only two universities established after apartheid in South Africa, and it does not have a colonial and apartheid history. However, its newness does not absolve the UMP from coloniality, thus the study found that the institution is implicated in coloniality due to its existence within a higher education environment that is pervasively Eurocentric. Thus, the study explored how the UMP worked with this complication through its curriculum in MIC100. Theories of social justice and decoloniality framed the study. While pointing out some of UMP's complicities in coloniality, the study found MIC100 to have made significant moves towards social justice and decolonization. The main data for this research was the students' reviews of MIC100, student interviews, and the UMP's documentary data which were analyzed on NVivo. Among the implications of the study, is the need and call for universities to be more intentional in responding to the decolonial question in ways that achieve social justice. Therefore, the findings reveal some of the strategies that were employed in MIC100 that can be adapted by educational institutions, lecturers, and curriculum designers. The strategies include efforts to recognize black students and their cultural products such as African languages; and creating teaching and learning environments where students can feel ayoba.
Open Access
Ethical Becoming, Ethical Fetishism, and Capitalist Modernity: An Ethnography of Design Education
(2022) Fore, Grant A; Spiegel, Andrew; Morreira, Shannon
This thesis comprises an ethnography of design education on which a proposed intervention into the theory and praxis of ethics education is created. It is based on an investigation – conducted in conversation with undergraduate interior design/architectural technology students – into the hegemonic structures of higher education and the singularities that may have the potential to transform them. The ethnographic work involved interrogating students' design processes and ethical sense-making across three semesters of a community-engaged course at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. The course was designed to mirror the operations of an architectural firm, and community partners acted as “clients.” As students designed floor plans, they were affected by multiple actants and forces. The design actants and affective forces constituting student designs are identified to reveal the relations of design. These relations were often concealed and devalued through the hegemonic design logic of capitalist modernity that manifested in ideas such as the “American Dream” and discourses of professionalism which were reproduced through the ideological state apparatus that is the university. While students often made meaning of their experience of design relations through such a hegemonic design logic, such meaning making was not absolute and alternative meanings arose, expressing ethico-aesthetic modes of valuation. When students' meaning making was captured by capital, influential relations were concealed and devalued, creating hauntings within designs. Notions of commodity fetishism and dead labor are utilized to further theorize the concept of ethical fetishism and, in doing so, to imagine new ways both to reveal design's ghostly relations and then to value them for the creative role each plays in constituting the present. By seeking to understand how extensively student design processes are or are not captured by an otherwise totalizing system of capitalism and the beliefs, assumptions, and values of modernity, the thesis identifies moments of slippage where singularities flee the articulating forces of capitalist modernity and the discourses and ideologies born from it. The thesis ends with suggestions towards a new potentiality for ethics education (i.e., ethical becoming) that recognizes and cherishes relationality whilst challenging the beliefs and values of capitalist modernity designing us every day.
Open Access
Evaluating the decolonisation of the Humanities curriculum at the University of Cape Town: Khanyisa courses as a case study
(2025) Phetlhu, Ontiretse; Morreira, Shannon; Hoadley, Ursula
This study sought to bring the conversation around the decolonisation of the curriculum to the fore by evaluating the decolonial work that the Humanities Faculty at the University of Cape Town has attempted to do with regard to the undergraduate degree programme through the introduction of a new suite of course, called the Khanyisa Courses. As such, this study establishes the various ways in which the Humanities faculty through the Khanyisa Courses (specifically the course called: Literature: How and why? – ELL1013F) has attempted to decolonise the curriculum in terms of the way the course is structured, the way it is taught and the way the course is assessed. The aim is to establish whether the course fulfils the decolonial project by means of disrupting and challenging the Eurocentric traditions of teaching and assessing the course. The thesis argues that the ELL1013F course does decolonial work in that it adopts a paradigm shift away from Eurocentric traditions within the discipline of literary studies. The course does this decolonial work by means of adopting epistemic disobedience as one of the approaches in how the course is structured and how the content is taught and assessed – with the idea of the students' positionality being at the at the centre of the learning process thereby disrupting existing hierarchies of knowledge. Furthermore, the thesis argues that the various modules also adopt different approaches in terms of Jansen's (2017) six conceptions of decolonisation and this varied from the different lecturers that taught the modules of the ELL1013F course. Lastly, this thesis shows how the course did not managed to fully decolonise the curriculum, at the level of assessment as it did not overtly disrupt hierarchies of western knowledge in any significant way.
Open Access
Examining Institutional Practices and their effects on Student Success
(2017) Adebulehin, Aderinsola Michelle; Luckett, Kathy; Morreira, Shannon
Given South Africa’s racialized history of access to education, redress efforts targeted at achieving equity in access to universities for students from across racial backgrounds have been well underway for over two decades now. More recently, within the higher education sector, ensuring that access translates into success has become a priority. Drawing on this concern, this research study looks into what constitutes success for previously excluded students at a historically white university. In addition, this research study examines the experiences of these students to uncover factors which contribute to either enabling or constraining their abilities to achieve this much sought after success. The analysis presented in this study arrived at the conclusion that institutional practices continue to entrench various forms of systematic exclusion which in turn significantly affect black students’ abilities to achieve success at a historically white university.
Open Access
‘Let's build houses': the order of housing development shaping childhood topography in Mafuyana, Maphisa
(2018) Ncube, Min'enhle; Ross, Fiona; Morreira, Shannon
This thesis describes the physical, social and economic ordering of Mafuyana (Garikai), an urban township in Maphisa, a rural growth point in Matobo District in Matabeleland South province, Zimbabwe. It explores the ways in which this ordering informs the social construction of childhood. The township was constructed as part of Operation Garikai/Hlalani Kuhle, a housing program that served to rehouse victims of Operation Murambatsvina both of which occurred through Zimbabwe's tradition of restoring order from informal settlements for modernist planning strategies. The configuration of Operation Garikai/Hlalani Kuhle compares to the colonial framework of low-cost African housing that has historically been neglected by its municipal authorities. This neglect leads to infrastructure that is hazardous to infants. The evolutions of rural dwellings in southern Africa since the 19th Century and labour migration under colonialism – which characterised the scattering of peoples and the formation of new communities – were determined according to available resources, the physical nature of regions, the models of kinship and daily activities of rural life. Children in these contexts formed the basis of family construction, and also in Maphisa where parents or caregivers value them as a social investment during their ageing years. However, the introduction of urban infrastructure in rural Maphisa produces a framework that residents find challenging when performing their traditions of rural life in the process of raising children. The debilitating infrastructure in Mafuyana resulting from poor planning has caused residing families to face physical hardship in their dwelling. In order to habituate children into a harsh world, infant rituals associated to rural life ways in Matabeleland are performed by residents – some of which challenge modernist health discourses of cleanliness and orderliness. When makeshift endeavours on fragmented housing fail to meet their satisfaction, some residents resort to migrating – either within the township or beyond its boundaries in search for better dwelling. This scenario reflects that settling in such an ordered space lacks permanence, because locals struggle to ‘fit' into its makes, despite their efforts. The dissertation argues that the modernist developmental ordering of the growth point's township influences the developmental ordering concerned with the children that reside in it. Furthermore, examining this developmental ordering of children gives an indication on whether the housing in which they live enhances life for the growing human being.
Open Access
Navigating extreme weather events: An anthropological investigation
(2025) Perin, Ridah; Morreira, Shannon
The aim of this study was to investigate how do people respond to extreme weather events (EWEs), paying special attention to heavy rainfall. The data and literature gathered unearths strategies and tactics embedded in the social structure of the area of Crawford. These strategies and tactics are either manipulated or reconfigured in patterns of individuality, to gauge what necessary actions are required to mitigate the impacts of heavy rainfall. These approaches were used to answer the foundational question of this study, what roles do existing social relationships play in people's perceptions and responses to extreme weather events? By utilising qualitative research techniques, this study argues that residents of a middle-income neighbourhoods like Crawford respond, adapt and prepare for extreme rainfall in individualised manners. Contrary to areas of less socioeconomic standing who utilise communal strategies such as conviviality to address the challenges heavy rainfall brings.
Open Access
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.
Open Access
Seeking solidarity : categorisation and the politics of alienism in the migration of Zimbabweans to South Africa
(2009) Morreira, Shannon; Frankental, Sally; Ross, Fiona C
This ethnographic study is concerned with the process of movement of Zimbabwean nationals to Cape Town, South Africa, that results in their categorisation by the South African state as "illegal immigrants." Based on ﬁeldwork carried out in Harare and Cape Town in 2006 and 2007, it explores the effects of state-based categorisation of people within Zimbabwe on migration. The study argues that migrants had often been multiply displaced in Zimbabwe as a result of the political situation before crossing the border to South Africa. It explores the factors, both political and economic, that affected migrants’ decisions to move over great distances, and to move multiple times. Drawing on informants’ experiences both in Zimbabwe and South Africa, the study is further concerned with informants’ expectations of South Africa and the differing realities they encountered upon arrival. It considers informants’ experiences of crossing the border, exploring the anthropology of the borderlands to investigate the political economy of movement from Zimbabwe to South Africa. The study further argues that Zimbabwean migrants to South Africa draw upon localised discourses of human rights, based upon ideas of morality, in their expectations of welcome by the South African state. These expectations are found to be erroneous in that undocumented migrants’ notions of violation differ to those employed by the South African state. Whilst migrants assert that conditions of structural violence in Zimbabwe are serious enough to warrant asylum, the South African state considers these reasons to be less valid than those of physical political violence. Within the South African discourses around the Zimbabwean crisis, there are thus forms of suffering that are considered more valid than others.
Open Access
Transnational human rights and local moralities : the circulation of rights discourses in Zimbabwe and South Africa
(2013) Morreira, Shannon; Ross, Fiona C
In this multi-sited ethnographic study, based upon anthropological fieldwork conducted in Harare, Zimbabwe and Musina and Cape Town, South Africa in 2010 and 2011, I use the contemporary political and economic context of Zimbabwe, and the resultant movement of Zimbabweans to South Africa, as a case study through which to explore the ways in which the global framework of human rights is locally interpreted, constituted and contested.

Browsing by Author "Morreira, Shannon"

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