OpenUCT :: Browsing by Author "Ross, Fiona"

Browsing by Author "Ross, Fiona"

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Open Access
An ‘anthropological' exploration of individuals' perceptions on Infant Mental Health in South Africa
(2023) Mafela, Sedzani; Ross, Fiona
Infant Mental Health (IMH) is a concept developed by psychologists, psychiatrists, child development specialists, to describe preverbal children's emotional well-being. In everyday life, however, people may not be familiar with this idea, use these terms or think about infant well-being in the same way. The research therefore posed the general question 'do infants have mental health?' to a range of participants, including parents, grandparents, and those who haven't had children. A decolonial feminist-queer approach was used. The research revealed that although people did not think of their children's well-being using the language of IMH, they had their ways of ensuring the 'mental health' of their infants. Secondly, mental health is often understood in terms of illness and not as wellness. Lastly, although infants were not thought to have 'mental health', the participants agreed on the presence of mental health in infants and used a variety of terms to describe this concept in their own words as opposed to the formal descriptions according to IMH paradigm.
Open Access
Assessment of the Masisakhe energy information centre
(1994) Hofmeyer, Iilne-Mari; Morris, Glynn; Quangule, Vuyo; Ross, Fiona
Open Access
Beyond the petri dish: potentiality in assisted conception in South Africa
(2019) Moll, Tessa; Ross, Fiona
Research in assisted conception technologies has examined how technologies open up potential trajectories, futures, and family arrangements, yet remain shaped and embedded within local histories and politics (Franklin, 1997, 2003; Inhorn, 2003; Thompson, 2005; Roberts, 2012). Embryos (Franklin, 2006a), sex cells such as eggs and sperm (Ariza, 2018), and IVF more generally (Inhorn, 2003; Simpson, 2013), offer particular potential futures but also threaten existing social orders. In this thesis, I present an ethnographic analysis of potentiality in IVF in South Africa through tracing sites and processes to apprehend, assess, and manage potential. Potentiality invokes desires and fears about the future while inviting attempts to render the future knowable and manageable (Taussig, Hoeyer, & Helmreich, 2013). Drawing on 14 months of multi-sited ethnographic research in fertility clinics and egg donor agencies in urban South Africa, I draw out the political, affective and temporal registers of potentiality as they materialise in concrete instances of reproductive medicine that is entangled within a context of capitalist biomedicine. Here, I argue that while biomedical knowledge systems frame certain objects, times, and futures as having potential, it simultaneously negates and neglects other kinds of futures, an attribute I describe as “scoping.” While ARTs and the social “facts” they reproduce are imaged as global and mobile objects, they are deeply entangled within the terrain — historical, political, economic — in which they become materialised. I argue that while IVF has the potential to disrupt “established” orders, intensive effort, which I theorize as “curature,” works to manage and domesticate IVF’s potential, reinforcing certain shapes of family, gender, morality, race and kinship arrangements. I argue that examining potentiality in IVF in South Africa reveals the politics — namely political-economic and racialised — and histories that shape reproductive technologies and potentialities.
Open Access
Exploring meaning-making among those who are identified by scientists as vaccine-resistant, vaccine-hesitant, or vaccine-sceptical
(2025) Ngomane, Tsholofelo; Ross, Fiona
Vaccines are an indisputable human right and an important tool in the advancement of world health. Over the last few decades, their function in disease prevention and outbreak management has been increasingly important. Immunization is considered an important investment in one's health, and in South Africa, childhood immunization is an important and effective public health intervention. South Africa uses an opt-out vaccination system. Children receive their first dose of vaccines upon birth unless their parent states otherwise and continue to receive a standard series of vaccinations for common illnesses throughout childhood. These include vaccinations for the BCG, Polio, Rotaviruses, Pneumonia, and Diphtheria. They also receive vaccinations for tetanus, acellular pertussis, inactivated polio vaccine, and a combination of Haemophilus influenzae type B and hepatitis B and measles. Vaccinations and boosters continue until 18 months old. Thereafter, girls and boys ages 6 and 12 receive the Td Vaccine (Tetanus and reduced strength of the Diphtheria Vaccine). Children also receive voluntary vaccines such as the Flu vaccine throughout their lives and the Human Papillomavirus HPV vaccine is given to girls from as early as 9 years and they usually receive a boost later. This suggests that vaccination is already an ordinary part of most South African lives. However, faced with COVID-19, debates erupted about the value, efficacy, and role of vaccinations in the prevention of illness. The dissertation explores debates about vaccination as they arose amid the pandemic. Drawing on three months of research conducted in 2022-3, it reflects on the social anxieties that the vaccine evoked and the nuances of simplistic accounts of vaccine resistance. Several factors have been identified as influencing vaccination resistance. Some are related to mistrust of biomedicine (due, in part, to previous histories of biomedical experimentation and the apartheid state's harmful practices); others are related to specific ideas about the body and how it should be treated, and still, others are related to a lack of access to basic health care resources or negative experiences in state institutions. Some people are skeptical of Covid-19; some are motivated by religious beliefs about post-infection immunity, and some may be the result of specific ways of conceptualizing the relationship between life cycle and risk. The thesis explores people's ideas about vaccination, focusing on those who were ‘vaccine skeptical' and ‘vaccine-hesitant'. It shows that their hesitancy to vaccinate for Covid-19 was influenced by different factors. For most people ‘Time' played a big role in their hesitancy and skepticism to vaccinate. They questioned the time it took to develop the vaccine and presented it to the public and, given both the speed of vaccine development and prior histories of medical abuse, they were reluctant to present their bodies to be used for trials. Another factor that influenced hesitancy was motivated by religious beliefs. Pentecostal Christians in particular did not want to vaccinate because they feared that the vaccine contained “the mark of the beast 666”. The number “666” is associated with the devil by many Christians and they did not want to put themselves in a position that compromised their faith. Social media also had an effect in influencing people to be hesitant to vaccinate, as it is a public platform where people can say anything and that information can be misleading and yet people make decisions based on it. The need to prevent material flow resulted in people not wanting to vaccinate. They believed that the pandemic was politically motivated and a money-making scheme where big pharmaceuticals, the government, and big business people stood the chance to benefit from it hence they did not want to contribute to it by using their bodies. The end result was distrust in the vaccine and the vaccination process.
Open Access
Generation After: Kinship in the aftermath of genocidal sexual violence in Rwanda
(2024) Loning, Sara Marloes; Ross, Fiona
Thousands of women and girls experienced sexual violence during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, with many becoming pregnant as a result of genocidal rape. Based on two years of ethnographic research in Rwanda, this dissertation explores the dynamics of kinship in the aftermath of sexual violence by focusing on the lived experiences of young people conceived in genocidal rape. While working with organisations supporting genocide survivors, I traced how young people learned about the circumstances of their conception and how they interpreted their place within kinship relations given these circumstances. This dissertation examines the subtle work that goes into containing genocide memories in the everyday, revealing the affective efforts, ‘attunement', and vigilance of young people and their mothers as they grapple with the past intruding into their present. Reflecting on subtle moments observed during fieldwork created an understanding of the delicate work that goes into young people's day-to-day control and creativity in managing their social worlds. The dissertation then delves into the shadowed ways that knowledge of violence appears in young people's worlds and how mothers purposefully shield their children from what Veena Das (2000) calls “poisonous knowledge”. Exploring how young people live with fragmented knowledge about ‘who they are', I analyse how they learn about their conception both formally, through the work of civil society organisations, and informally, through modes of exclusion in communities. I examine what this knowledge does to their relationships and sense of self, as well as its practical implications, such as rights to land. The dissertation then zooms out to the post-genocide landscape, investigating how the national commemoration slogan “kwibuka twiyubaka” (remembering and rebuilding ourselves) takes shape in the lives of young people as they engage in kwiyubaka (building oneself). It explores the public and the private spheres of remembering and rebuilding, including the role of NGOs. I also show the dangers of knowledge that had previously been carefully shielded as it enters the public space. Through kwiyubaka as well as parenthood, young people's apparent fixed connections to the past and their conception can be transformed by becoming a ‘person of value' (umuntu w'ingirakamaro) or ‘the parent of someone' rather than ‘a child of rape'. Overall, I suggest that Veena Das' argument that violence is absorbed in everyday life rather than transcended helps us understand how the past sets the stage for kinship. My work shows how the ‘generation after' absorbs memories of collective violence, including the knowledge of being ‘of rape'. In the aftermath of genocidal sexual violence in Rwanda, violence is absorbed in everyday life and managed through affect and care, as well as possibly transcended by ‘the generation after'.
Open Access
Growing Babies, Growing faith: The Formation of Faith in The Life of the Child
(2016) Price, Yusra; Ross, Fiona
The composition and formation of a young child's Muslim identity is situated within a contextual landscape of location, history, demographic, family, community and more which makes every child's upbringing unique. Through multiple interviews, visits and general discussions, this research sets out to understand how caregivers located in Cape Town conceptualise their world, make sense of incorporating religious practice and values into their children's daily lives, and how this is balanced with caregivers' perceptions of what a child can handle at two years old. From our interviews, three themes emerged: firstly, the histories, values and practices of caregivers shape the contextual environment of their children's religious upbringing. Secondly, in addition to Islamic education and practice, a child's feelings and emotions must be nurtured to foreground a positive association with and devotion to Islam. Lastly, notions of time demarcate and shape how caregivers temporalize their child-rearing practices. The aim of this research is to contribute towards the growing discourses around childhood and religion through an ethnography of child-rearing in Cape Town.
Open Access
"If you keep your problems in your stomach the dogs cannot steal them" : trauma, forgiveness, and con-viviality in Rwanda : an ethnographic study following the healing and rebuilding our communities (HROC) project in Gisenyi, Rwanda
(2010) Forcier, Angela; Ross, Fiona
By bringing together survivors of the genocide with released prisoners to discuss trauma, healing, and trust, Healing and Rebuilding Our Communities (HROC) in Rwanda may help people to broaden their networks of support and rebuild everyday life. ... After 1994, Rwandans, particularly in Gisenyi, found that many neighbours were strangers and members of "the other side". Few Rwandans are able to meet their daily needs without accessing relationships of reciprocity, so how are such relation- ships established after genocide? In this thesis I argue that restoring relationships of reciprocity is critical to the restoration of the everyday in Rwanda. The genocide in 1994 was unarguably a traumatic experience for the population in Rwanda, and it damaged common modes of social interaction. But for those I spoke to, forgiveness was important to the process of healing...
Open Access
Infant wellbeing and monitoring: An observation of the Road to Health Booklet in Masiphumelele
(2019) Ngcowa, Sonwabiso; Ross, Fiona
The South African government monitors and tracks the health of newborns and the growth of children. The Department of Health (DoH) does this monitoring using the Road to Health Booklet (RtHB). In this dissertation I analyse the use of the booklet in the township of Masiphumelele in Cape Town. The state produced booklet is intended for the child and mother as a patient-held medical health record. Liaw (1993) defines a patient-held record as notes or space provided on a document for the recording of follow up appointments for further investigation by medical doctors. The RtHB is used to record the child’s development, immunisations and HIV related information from birth to the age of twelve years. The dissertation results from ethnographic research with eight black Xhosa1 mothers and caregivers with children under the age of five years old. Mosley, and Chen, (1984), argue that in developing countries where standard child healthcare has been made available, children should survive the first five years of life. In my research, during the period of six weeks between July, August and September 2017, I followed the booklet in to Masiphumelele. From my observation and semi-structured interviews, looking at the state’s role of ‘pastoral’ care, child wellbeing and living in a township, and recording, under the theme of child wellbeing, certain concepts emerged. These concepts were state power, mothering, caring for children, responsibilisation, gender, kinship, fatherhood, child wellbeing knowledge production, social networking. In this dissertation I use ethnographic findings, accompanied by my own personal narratives. I argue that tracking child wellbeing through this booklet, the state exercises what Foucault (1982) referred to as ‘pastoral power’ in ensuring the wellbeing of the populations.
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
Love and desire: concepts, narratives and practices of sex amongst youths in Maputo city
(2004) Manuel, Sandra; Ross, Fiona
This study analyses the perceptions and practices of sexuality among young people in post-colonial and post socialist Maputo city. Using a combination of various methods, it compares sexuality in two different generations and deeply describes two diverse kinds of relationships: occasional and steady relationships. Occasional relationships tend to show a new pattern of condom use that corroborates with the discourse advocated in prevention HIV/AIDS campaigns. The study shows that young women are redefining the gender roles of the wider society through their sexual practices and identities. Namoro (steady) relationships where sex takes the form of unprotected sex are reciprocated by the exchange of the gift of love and the proposition of commitment on the part of the young men. Here, there are major possibilities for HN/AIDS infection. In both kinds of relationships, sex, described by informants in terms of a model of heterosexual penetration, is perceived as a factor that permits transition from childhood to adulthood, bypassing parental and other senior kins peoples' control.
Open Access
One Meal at a time: Nourishment in the Cape Winelands
(2017) Truyts, Catherine; Ross, Fiona; Kruger, Lou-Marie
Emerging fields of inquiry in epigenetics and the 'Developmental Origins of Health and Disease’ (DOHaD) propose the 'first thousand days’ of life as a critical period for the formation of new life. During this time food is one crucial set of signals that edits life, and is particularly pertinent in the South African context where entrenched inequality is marked in statistics of hunger and food insecurity. A landscape of norms, both biomedical and social, comes to bear on the mother-child dyad, with a view to secure future health. This thesis tacks between this imaginary (noting registers of temporality and belonging), and everyday lived experience embedded with practices of care. Based on five months of ethnographic fieldwork in Kylemore in the Cape Winelands, I provide a detailed exploration of the space between prescription and practice. By tracking modalities of care, each chapter pauses at a meal or moment of ingestion. This attention reveals the complexity of food and sociality; the relationship of discourse to the everyday; and multiple, dextrous ways of providing care. Social precarity, shaped by the enduring political economy of the valley, made following the dictats of public health extremely difficult, as they pertain to the 'first thousand days’. I argue that a conceptual poverty exists around the complex forces shaping ingestion and social and biological practices, which presents a 'space between’ social and medical disciplines that requires attention. Nourishment, as an approach and concept is offered to this space, in order to help make visible the complexities of belonging and temporality that are active in between bio-social prescriptions and actual practices.
Open Access
Perceptions of and attitudes to HIV/AIDS among young adults at the University of Cape Town
(2002) Levine, Susan; Ross, Fiona
Given the exponential rate of growth of HIV/AIDS in the Western Cape in recent years, and university concerns about the health of students and others, knowledge about young peoples' ideas and social constructs of the virus and syndrome is important. Medical anthropology lecturers Fiona Ross and Susan Levine present here their preliminary findings about University of Cape Town student perceptions regarding HIV/AIDS. This paper shows that young adults tend to imagine that they have an immunity to HIV infection and so continue to practice unsafe sex, irrespective of their educational background and specific knowledge about HIV/AIDS. The data suggest a critical need to reassess the efficacy of education as a means of disease prevention, and to examine more closely the knowledge, attitudes and practices of young adults.
Open Access
The performativity of multicultural discourses: youth, conflict and contradictions
(2009) Maude, Martin; Ross, Fiona
The Rainbow Nation discourse in South Africa is meant to create a liberatory myth that unites the nation in its cultural and racial differences. However, discourses of multiculturalism are translated, as well as performed, differently within and between various levels of society. The thesis looks at how Rainbow Nation ideals are appropriated by the Non Governmental Organization City at Peace, as well as the young people involved in the City at Peace programme. Ideas about culture and race are negotiated and performed differently because both these terms have shifting meanings depending on context. Race, for example, is often conflated with culture in multicultural ideology (Gunew 1997: 23), but race actually informs class in lived South African realities (Mbola 2008; Kindon and Knight 2004; Dolby 2001). And yet, people may adhere both to 'race as culture' and 'race as class' through different performances pertaining to context. Drawing on Judith Butler (1990), the thesis looks at different levels of performativity of multicultural discourses that reiterate what I call the 'culture'/ 'race' complex, or the assumption that cultural/racial differences are root causes of conflict in South Africa today. The 'culture'/ 'race' complex overlooks how class and gender relations also contribute to tensions and abuse in the country. The thesis argues that misdiagnosing the root causes of conflict in South Africa also leads to a misunderstanding of appropriate conflict-resolution strategies. Many young people in South Africa see themselves as active agents in the making of a 'new' South Africa, and subscribe to Rainbow Nation ideals. However, while Rainbow Nation ideals may provide something to hope for, it is crucial that hope also instigates appropriate action for change. The 'culture'/ 'race' complex suggests that cultural/racial differences need to be overcome to better the country; the thesis argues that tensions and abuse in South Africa are both interpersonal and structural, and must include gender and class in consideration of how difference leads to conflict.
Open Access
The pregnant pause: exploring expectations and experiences of pregnancy and motherhood in a Cape Town body positive community
(2021) Le Roux, Jodi; Ross, Fiona
This dissertation explores the concepts of pregnancy and motherhood held by women in body positive communities in Cape Town, South Africa. By focusing on their expectations and experiences of these concepts within body positive communities and their wider social circles, the research examines what it means for women to want or not to want to be pregnant; what it means to be pregnant; whether pregnancy and motherhood are experienced as sociallyascribed performance, and what it might look like to challenge the social conventions around pregnancy and motherhood. The contextual landscape where the perception of women is typically polarized into contradictory identities through pro-natal social convention, frames the research. I collected data over a six month period through multi-sited ethnography and the qualitative anthropological techniques of participant observation, semi-structured interviews and autoethnography. Through an overarching lens of intersectional feminism I drew from an interdisciplinary body of literature, focusing on body positivity, embodiment, gender identity roles, sexuality and resistance, to consider each woman's lived experiences and the ways in which they inhabit or don't inhabit the conflicting identities that society impresses upon them. The research revealed a number of themes: Firstly, within these communities, the exploration of body positivity is inextricably fused with the project of reclaiming female sexuality. Secondly, expectations and experiences of pregnancy and motherhood revealed tensions and paradoxes between the expectation of the ‘ordentlike', natural mother as a social object and the individual subjective self and her rights and desires. Thirdly, body positive communities enable members to enact both overt and tacit forms of resistance in opposition to South African gender norms and roles. The research demonstrates that, body positive communities provide safe spaces and support for these women in terms of personal expression, growth and healing.
Open Access
The role of rural electrification in promoting health in South Africa: Medical Research Council
(1997) Ross, Fiona; Matzopoulos, Richard; Phillips Rozett
Open Access
Torn wheels and rough pavements: an ethnography of navigation towards informal and indigenous urban futures amidst crisis in Warwick Junction, Durban
(2023) Robbins, Matthew; Ross, Fiona
This dissertation explores the context(s) in which ‘mobile informality' is practiced by traders and associated workers in Durban's Warwick Junction, theorising the conceptual affordances that arise from it. Using an ethnographic approach, the study explores the navigatory responses of barrow operators and recyclers to the ‘friction' and ‘roughness' which make up the fabric of life-making projects in a city in crisis, and investigates the State and Municipal logics of governing informality. I show that eThekwini Municipality's attempts to achieve a ‘caring and liveable City' in line with its Modernist ideals, through such approaches as the formalised, restrictive and aggressively policed permit system for informal workers, negatively impacts many informal workers. Additional ‘frictions' in the path of informal work – which emerge daily as issues of safety, of dignity, of rights, and of access to opportunities – are rooted in the Municipality's problematisation of informality as a survivalist response to moments of crisis, and thus as something counter to ‘a modern Durban', and therefore which ought to be discouraged. This account is challenged by informal workers and NGOs in Warwick, who understand informality as a set of indigenous urban forms and practices which are entirely appropriate to the time and place in which they exist, and which should be protected and accounted for in the policy and planning of a truly ‘caring and liveable' city. By pushing up against the Durban's ‘margins of refusal', these actors practice informality as a prefigurative politics of urban life, an approach which offers much to the theorisation of city futures.
Open Access
"We must be responsible for our children" : the makings of motherhood in Ocean View
(2016) O'Rourke, Shannon Laraine; Ross, Fiona
This thesis explores conceptions and experiences of motherhood in Ocean View, South Africa through the investigation of a maternal and child health intervention. The Moms and Tots support programme seeks to provide mothers with health education and supportive social networks to improve maternal and child health in a resource-poor context. Based on data collected from participant observation and interviews, three major themes have emerged from the research: the framing of Ocean View and its residents within a discourse of deficiency, the responsibilization of the mother, and the demanding nature of care in the face of resource scarcity. Notions of the ideal mother represent a moral discourse around what it means to bring a new life into the world, and who is equipped to do so. I argue that positioning the mother as the site of intervention for improved well-being of future generations underplays the political-economic context that shapes physical, mental, and emotional health in Ocean View. Knowledge interventions that seek to produce behaviour change must focus on the mother's potential rather than risk and adequately acknowledge the constraints in social and material environments if they are to offer viable solutions for health improvement. The Moms and Tots programme plays a vital role in diffusing maternal responsibility through offering social and material networks of support to mothers in Ocean View.

Browsing by Author "Ross, Fiona"

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