Browsing by Author "Richmond, Samantha"

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    Disability Research and Issues of Access: Insights from the November 2011 AfriNEAD Symposium
    (2011-12) Richmond, Samantha
    People with disabilities, especially within the African context, really do have a raw deal in this life. Not only do we usually have to navigate the medical terrain of our disabilities, but we also have to deal with the physical and social barriers that our society imposes on us. I use the word "we" because I myself am partially-sighted and I unashamedly identify as a person with a disability. This notion of "identifying as disabled" is an interesting one and one that in many ways highlights the complex and fluid nature of disabilities as well as the difficulties associated with trying to have a united disability movement. And perhaps this very notion of identification is exactly why African policy-makers have, until now, stayed significantly far away from addressing disability in a more concerted and integrated fashion. In my capacity as a SCAP researcher, I attended the 2011 African Network for Evidence-to-Action on Disability (AfriNEAD) symposium which was held on 28–30 November at the Elephant Hills Resort hotel, Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe.
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    South African Public opinion on Government's performance in the area of School Education in Post-Apartheid South Africa
    (2010) Richmond, Samantha; Mattes, Robert
    The aim of this research project is to empirically unpack South African public opinion on government's performance in the area of school education. The descriptive analysis chapter shows that school education has not been as politically salient an issue amongst South Africans in post-apartheid South Africa. In addition, this chapter also shows that a vast majority of South Africans positively evaluate government's performance in the area of school education. Furthermore, the multivariate analysis chapter shows that the significant demographic variables collectively formed the strongest basis on which South Africans evaluated government's performance, followed by the significant general experiences with education variable and the significant heuristics variables respectively. Moreover, South Africans' perceptions of the present versus the past appear to be the strongest individual determinant of government's performance. The evidence therefore suggests that South Africans are making use of a schema that deals with their experiences of school education under apartheid to evaluate government's performance.
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    South Africa’s youth and political participation, 1994-2014
    (2014-07-09) Mattes, Robert; Richmond, Samantha
    South Africans hold – often simultaneously – contradictory beliefs about young people and politics. On one hand, driven largely by a romanticized memory of Soweto and the street battles of the 1980s, many people see the youth as the primary catalyst of activism and political change. On the other hand, driven by continuing media depictions of youth unemployment, township protests and the antics of the ANC Youth League, a wide range of commentators routinely experience “moral panics” about the apparent “crisis” of the youth and their corrosive effect on the country’s political culture. In this report, we review a wide range of longitudinal survey data spanning the first two decades of democracy and find that there are indeed a series of real problems with South Africa’s political culture, particularly in the area of citizenship. At the same time, these data clearly show that these problems are largely not peculiar to young people. Across a range of different indicators, we find consistently that there are no, or relatively minor, age profiles to most dimensions of South African political culture.