Browsing by Author "Ndlovu, Musawenkosi"

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    Bayasibulala: #AmINext? an analysis of Instagram as a tool for activism against Sexual Gender-Based Violence in South Africa
    (2022) Mazana, Nandipha Nwabisa; Ndlovu, Musawenkosi
    Research over the years has shown that there is a global rise in hashtag activism, this type of activism has also inspired what scholars call - hashtag feminism. Hashtag feminism utilizes Social Networking Sites to raise awareness about issues that are often not covered in traditional news media outlets such as TV, newspapers, and Radio Stations. Through this paper, I seek to investigate how Instagram has become one of the Social Networking Sites that has recently started being used for online activism in South Africa. This is done by conducting a qualitative analysis of 700 posts from the hashtag #AmINext, with a period focus of 3 months during South Africa's COVID-19 Level-5 Lockdown. The findings suggest that activists follow similar lines of the hashtag and social media activism parameters such as those of the #MeToo and #BeenRapedNeverReported movements. The analysis found that activists use Instagram to participate in Citizen Journalism by sharing information, raising awareness, organizing, mobilizing, and advocating (Vegh, 2003). Furthermore, there is clear Civic Engagement and Citizen Journalism through things such as sharing information and having calls to action while utilizing hashtags as a way to gain momentum and attention. The findings suggest that these hashtags are able to cultivate a community of activists all around the country while also making sure to encourage more participation. The analysis also shows how there is an importance of such activism when movement is restricted due to national Lockdowns implemented to curb COVID-19, as many victims of SGBV found themselves at home and trapped with their abusers. In paying attention to this analysis, I conclude that perhaps through the exploration of new ways of activism, we can ensure that no voice is ever left behind. Furthermore, despite the possibilities of these new ways of raising awareness and activism, it is always important to see how we can apply the old with the new.
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    I write what we like: A textual analysis of Fallist microblogging
    (2017) Chen, Jon Adam; Ndlovu, Musawenkosi
    Fallists belong to a constellation of radical student activist movements that pledge to disturb and reimagine South African society. Rather than restricting themselves to coordinated forms of collective action, Fallists’ advance their “revolution-as-becoming” within a context of everyday resistance (Haynes & Prakash, 1991; Molefe, 2015). In this dissertation, I propose that Fallists form an “emerging networked counterpublic” made up of individual activists that enact everyday forms of resistance on Twitter (Jackson & Foucault Welles, 2016:399). This dissertation explores the use of Twitter by a microblogger who has emerged organically as a “crowdsourced elite” among Fallists (Papacharissi & de Fatima Oliveira, 2012). I contend that this microblogger exemplifies the repertoires of communication and resistance that pervade within Fallist networks on Twitter (Jackson & Foucault Welles, 2016). The microblogger is identified through methods of observation and social network analysis (SNA). “#whitetip,” a Twitter hashtag network that exemplifies Fallist communication and resistance, informs the interpretive content analysis that follows. This analysis is conducted on the tweets that the microblogger broadcast between 1 April and 30 September 2016. Tweets are categorised according to “evaluative frames” that emerged inductively during the course of analysis. I find that “resentment,” “pride and care,” and “play” made up the vast majority of evaluative frames. The microblogger employs the platform in a manner that disturbs dominant understandings of public sphere communication: the microblogger’s tweets are evaluative rather than deliberative, and assert a marginal, embodied subjectivity (Papacharissi, 2014; Warner, 2002).
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    The media, protest at and nation building in post-apartheid South Africa : The spear : a case study
    (2015) Makwela, Mologadi; Ndlovu, Musawenkosi
    This study examines the media coverage and public debate that ensued following the publication of The Spear, a painting by artist Brett Murray which depicted African National Congress (ANC) President Jacob Zuma with his genitals exposed. The objective of the study is twofold. First, to understand how the debate unfolded in media and second, to unpack the public (and ANC) reaction to the media’s reports. The study attempts of contribute to research related to the relationship between media, society and nation building in young democracies, specifically in post-apartheid South Africa. A qualitative content analysis of a purposely selected sample of online news articles and comments formed the basis of the research methodology through which to identify prevalent themes that arose throughout the debate. Through discourse analysis, the study also unpacks how social structures – by these I mean groups, institutions, the economy, laws, population dynamics and social relations – that form the national landscape are created and maintained through the use of language (Gee, 2005: 65). Afrocentricism, media framing and agenda setting, as well as social and cultural identity theories, provide theoretical constructs with which to unpack a number of important aspects inherent in the media’s representation of Jacob Zuma. The findings reveal that while the painting as a metaphor of the shortcomings of an individual was relevant, historic memory paired alongside increasing class and racial tensions in South African society, escalated what otherwise would have been a form of protest art into an issue of racism and disrespect of African/black culture.
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    Multi-Triangulation Using Qualitative and Crossover Methods to Investigate The Role of Media in Fossil Energy Politics
    (2023) Muranda, Andy; Ndlovu, Musawenkosi
    This research addresses a gap in the continuum of media studies as they relate to energy and politics, which have always been entwined. With each new source of energy or technology, a new form of social dynamics emerges. This study explores the role of media, during the Pennsylvania coal strike of 1902 and the ensuing shifts in political power. Its main hypothesis is – if media helps to shape politics, then its coverage of the 1902 Pennsylvania coal strike, had a hand in delivering democracy to a working proletariat. Using a variety of instruments, and a qualitative-cross over approach, media's role in the 1902 coal strike is explored. Four levels of triangulation, including 3 methods of research are used to analyse 2 datasets. Critical discourse analysis, which maps text, discursive practice and social elements, makes up 2 of the methods; namely transitivity for linguistic texts and a multimodal analysis for the visual text. The 3rd method is a thematic analysis of the global news articles that appeared circa 1902. Each research question entails its own process of triangulation. The terrain of media ideology is probed by triangulating 3 texts: an editorial article, a letter to the editor and a cartoon. They all tackle the 1st research question: • What were the ideologies revealed in visual or lexical patterns, that shaped the discursive composition of reality within media reports during the 1902 coal strike? Then, the 2nd dataset triangulates 3 locations to address the 2nd research question: • What role did media play in the global spread of social democracy? It was found that media discourse unveiled a new ideology within the discursive climate, which influenced society. Ultimately, it shifted the power base. It was also found that media acted globally, triggering wider power contestations. This study will show how media drew on ideology (implicitly or explicitly) to construct meaning around fossil energy politics. It also reveals how global media coverage eased information flows, during the initial wave of democracy and how Timothy Mitchell's conception – ‘carbon democracy' was made possible. Unveiling media's role, helps to unpack its potential in ushering in any new configurations of political power and energy justice, especially as an uptick in renewables is now on record.
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    Rethinking Rhetoric: An investigation of political persuasion online. A case study of Mauritian electoral interviews livestreamed on Facebook
    (2020) Suddason, Kelvin; Ndlovu, Musawenkosi
    The live-commenting feature Facebook Live offers a unique look into how persuasion operates online. By giving citizen-users, or the viewertariat (see Anstead & O'Loughlin, 2011), the opportunity to comment on live political performances, Facebook Live presents a worthy site of investigation into how traditionally-powerful performer-persuaders (electoral candidates) now face off with traditionally-excluded masses of audience-persuadees (citizen-users). The livestream then becomes a mediated space of contestation, where the boundaries between persuader-persuadee and performer-audience fades, where, this study proposes, persuadee becomes persuader, rendering, in the process, the traditional persuader less persuasive, and thus less powerful. The study sought to understand how electoral persuasion operates online in Mauritius by using the Facebook livestreamed interviews of three candidates (incumbent, long-time, and first-time candidate) running in the December 2017 By-Election. A combined rhetorical and content analysis was conducted on candidates' representative claims (see Saward, 2006) and the viewertariat responses to these claims. This study finds that candidates employ a self-centred rhetoric, focusing on their ‘candidateness' rather than their representativeness, which, this study proposes, has ramifications on how candidates approach politics in contemporary Mauritius. The study also finds that the viewertariat is actively engaged in counter-persuasion, constructing their own (re)representative claims and exchanging primarily with other viewertariat members and lurkers (see Hill & Hughes, 1997). The viewertariat exhibits horizontal persuasion which, this study discusses, dilutes the vertical persuasion employed by candidates. The overall findings lead to the conclusion that rhetoric as a theoretical framework must be extended to adequately capture the persuasive dynamics in online electoral public spheres. A new theoretical framework is finally proposed, with the tripartite distinction between performer-text-audience rearranged to include performer-persuasive text-viewertariat-lurkers, and complemented with an argument as to the growing conceptual obsolescence of the ‘audience' in studying rhetoric online.
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    The media's role in the consolidation of democracy in South Africa: the case of the SABC's soap operas as a cultural public sphere
    (2021) Afrika, Lefa G; Ndlovu, Musawenkosi; Wasserman, Herman
    This study has been inspired by the political events in the past few years that signalled a general decline, instead of consolidation, of democracy in South Africa. The decline has caused a rising trust deficit between the government and the citizens of South Africa. These events have raised questions of the role of the media in the consolidation of democracy. Katrin Voltmer's pioneering work, The Media in Transitional Democracies (2013) shines an important light in delineating the role of the media in transitions, including democratic consolidation. Much of the focus of scholastic research in the subject of media and democracy has been on news and journalistic content. Jurgen Habermas' seminal work, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989) also accorded more weight to the rational and cognitive, as opposed to the affective and emotive aspects of the media when arguing in favour of emancipatory potential of the public sphere. The rational and cognitive aspects are generally associated with news and journalistic content (McGuigan, 2005: 430). Unlike Habermas, this study follows the lead by scholars like Van Zoonen (2006) and McGuigan's (2005) interest in the popular entertainment content which has often been regarded as having little significance in politics, especially democracy. In its emphasis on the consolidation aspect of South African democratic transition, the study is conducted against the backdrop of the broader ‘third wave' transitions of the early 1990's (Huntington, 1991). The study's theoretical framework is aligned with Christians et al.'s (2009) revision of the Four Theories (Siebert, et al, 1956) of the press. Their approach is useful because of its normative strength that opens the possibilities of media roles in democratization. The normative approach allows a free exploration of the potential of the media, instead of restricting the media to the political systems within which they operate. In addition, it aligns itself to Jim McGuigan's theory of the cultural public sphere which highlights the often-ignored political potency of popular cultural texts in the public sphere. McGuigan (2005: 430) argues that the affective or emotive aspects of popular cultural texts enhance, rather than hinder, the quality of political engagement in the public sphere. Through entertainment television programmes, democratic ways of life can be portrayed as part of everyday, ordinary life (Stevenson, 2010: 276). Against the widely held expectation that the media should play a positive role in democracies, some scholars have noted that in reality, “this is not necessarily so” (Jebril, Stetka & Loveless, 2013: 3). Rather, the media can serve dictatorships as happily as they serve democracies (Voltmer, 2013: 23). Using the case studies of two soap operas of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), Muvhango and 7de Laan, the study explores the role of popular media in the enhancement or consolidation of democracy, and the circumstances under which this is carried out. The media of interest for this study is public service broadcasting (PSB). For most democracies of the third wave, especially in Africa, PSB has been an easy victim of political power. Because of its dependence on the state, PSB tends to be more susceptible to political interference than other media types. Like other PSBs, the SABC has clearly spelt-out objectives that are linked to the national developmental objectives, including the goal of promoting and deepening democracy. This connection makes it possible to evaluate the selected entertainment case studies against these objectives. The study uses Multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) because it allows for the analysis of text in its multimodal form such as visuals and audio. It equally allows for the application of analytical tools borrowed from film and television theories. By indirect measurement, MCDA model is used in the study to evaluate how democracy is represented (promoted, negated, omitted) in various aspects of the text.