Browsing by Subject "affect"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Bildung beyond the borders: racial ambiguity and subjectivity in three post-apartheid bildungsromane
    (2019) Gamedze, Londiwe Hannah; Ouma, Christopher; Mkhize, Khwezi
    This dissertation examines the subject formation of racially ambiguous protagonists in K Sello Duiker’s Thirteen Cents, (2001), Yewande Omotoso’s Bom Boy (2011) and Zoe Wicomb’s Playing in the Light (2006), three Bildungsromane set in post-apartheid Cape Town—the mother city—whose violent, racist histories of colonial encounters, slavery and apartheid have led to a strong social sense of racial group belonging and racial exclusion. It is between and among these strictly policed racial groups that these novels’ protagonists seek belonging and a place in society from which to act and speak. Although different aspects of racial ambiguity are foregrounded in these novels—namely phenotypical, cultural and political—these protagonists are all socially marginalised and they must form their identities and subjectivities at the intersections of social trauma and personal trauma brought about and catalyzed by the racist history and current socio-cultural formations in South Africa. Across the two socioscapes of society and family, this trauma is manifest as a gap in language—there is no affirming or cogent racial subject position for these figures from which to speak—and at the level of the body, where circulations of feeling produce the racially ambiguous body as abject or non-existent. As a sub-genre, the post-colonial Bildungsroman has been widely appraised as reconfiguring the thematic, structural and narrative traditions of its classical European counterpart, and my dissertation argues that these novels support this understanding. I also claim that they trace their racially ambiguous protagonists’ subject formation not from an initial subject position of self-centered, willful childhood innocence and ignorance but from a state of non-subjectivity into existence itself—proposing that the trajectories of the novels trace an ontological rather than ideological shift.
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    Dynamics of identity and space in higher education: an institutional ethnographic case study of a transforming university
    (2021) Cornell, Josephine; Kessi, Shose; Ratele, Kopano
    Higher education globally is characterised by persistent inequality, which is particularly acute in South Africa. Due to the enduring legacy of colonialism and apartheid, students from certain categories of identity are marginalised, whereas others are privileged. An essential element of these dynamics of power is space. Intersections of identity such as race, class, ability and gender are axes of power in differential experiences of space. Despite this, space is often neglected in research into higher education transformation in South Africa. Through an institutional ethnography, this study examines the dynamics of space and identity at the University of Cape Town (UCT). The study involved a photovoice project, roving interviews and surveys with students; the collection of multimodal data in which space is documented; campus observations; and semi-structured interviews with staff and policymakers. The first analysis chapter involves a multimodal discourse analysis of the identity discourses produced for the Jameson Plaza by the students in the study, specifically as a place of belonging and connection and a place of alienation and discomfort. The second analysis chapter examines the institutional power geometries at play at the UCT across three specific dimensions: 1) spatial memory and material familiarity; 2) material campus symbolism; and 3) spatialised social practices and relations. The findings illustrate how space and power across these dimensions engender experiences of spatialised belonging or spatialised alienation on campus. The affective potentialities of campus, in turn, influence the types of identities students construct for themselves across campus space. Emerging from these considerations, the final analysis chapter explores what student do across, within and through campus spaces. The chapter focuses on everyday use of space by students at the individual level, and specifically spatial coping strategies students use to negotiate and manage their daily lives on campus.
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    Moving beyond excuses: Confronting disrespect in Obstetrics
    (2016-09-27) Mitchell, Veronica
    This teaching and learning resource aims to promote a socially just pedagogy in Obstetrics. It provides a collection of images, videos and tools to acknowledge different practices. The intention is to illustrate the value of engaging with affect/effect in an affirmative manner as a response to the pervasive and prevailing disrespect and abuse in birthing facilities.
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    The Role of Dreaming in Affect Regulation
    (2022) Zeilinga, Abraham Dirk; Lipinska, Gosia; Solms, Mark
    Research investigating the change in affect across sleep focuses on the association between sleep physiology and affect regulation and often do not consider the contribution of dreaming mentation to affect regulatory processes. The aim of this study was to investigate whether dreaming regulates affect by examining the change in affect within dreams and between dreams elicited during different timepoints in the night. The hypotheses were that if dreams are responsible for affect regulation, there will be a change in self-reported emotion within a dream, leading to less emotionality towards the end of a dream, as well as across the night - leading to less emotionality towards the end of the night. Furthermore, I hypothesized that these within-dream and between-dream changes will be associated with pre-sleep to post sleep change in affect. Healthy students (N = 24; age range 19 – 34 years) spent three non-consecutive nights at a sleep laboratory for PSG monitoring, collection of dream-reports and self-reported dream affect rating. Participants completed an adaptation night followed by two experimental nights. During the first experimental night participants were awoken in Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep during the early night (dream-point: Early REM) and on the second experimental night they were awoken in REM sleep towards the end of the night (dream point: Late REM) to record their dreams using voice recordings and collect self-reported dream emotions using Visual Analogue Mood Scales (VAMS). Participants completed mood scales for emotions experienced in both the first part (1st dream-half) and last part (2nd dream half) of their dream. Recorded dreams were transcribed and assessed for affective word content using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count program (LIWC). Furthermore, participants rated their mood before and after sleep using the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS). A mixed design ANOVA, with dream-half (1st versus 2nd dream-half), dream-point (1st versus 2nd half of the night) and valence (positive versus negative) as factors, was conducted on self-report dream affect ratings. The data showed a significant interaction between dream-half and dream-point, indicating a decline in emotionality from the first half to the second half of early REM dreams, followed by an increase in emotionality from the first to the second half of late REM dream, although still below that of early REM levels. A similar analysis of affective words reported in the dreams showed significant decrease in objectively scored emotional content of dreams from early to late REM. However, there was no association between change in dream affect and change in mood, possibly because participants had little variation in their mood. These results suggest that there are fluctuations in dream affect during the night, which settle at a point between high initial dream affect and low late dream affect, which speculatively represents an emotional homeostatic settling point that allows for next-day readiness. This change towards a speculated homeostatic point and the overall attenuation of dream affect across the night, support the notion that dreaming plays a role in affect regulation.