Browsing by Subject "diversity"

Now showing 1 - 14 of 14
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    An exploration into the meaning that trans* students attach to their experiences at a South African University
    (2022) September, Miché; Price, Linda
    Universities are perceived as non-judgmental because of their tolerant environments and emphasis on producing well-rounded students. Despite transformative initiatives to create an inclusive culture, transgender and gender diverse students may still feel that they are treated unfairly due to stigmatisation or poorly implemented diversity policies. Studies have focused mainly on the gender binary practice of transgender individuals assimilating to cisnormativity. Yet, relatively little work has considered the implications of campus life where transgender students may experience discrimination because of gender-exclusive policies and practices (residence halls, bathrooms, public inclusion, training, and support). This study sought to address this gap. Data from a thematic analysis of qualitative semi-structured interviews were utilised to understand trans* students' perceptions and lived experiences at a South African university. Most of the participants revealed that a hostile climate for transgender students prevailed on campus and that the institution lacks resources and education on transgender issues. Findings reported three major themes: (1) Navigating the power of privilege and institutional systemic oppression; (2) Misalignment and invalidation of one's gender identity on campus; (3) The importance of understanding transgender health from a gender minority experience. Recommendations for creating greater inclusion for transgender students on university campuses are presented.
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    "Because the country says they have to change" : an analysis of a diversity intervention in a South African Police Service (SAPS) station
    (2011-12) Faull, Andrew
    This resource will be of value to scholars of transformation in South African organisations. The shift from apartheid to a constitutional democracy in South Africa brought with it a plethora of questions concerning ideas of nationhood, citizenship, and organisational transformation. Integrally caught up in the revolution, the South African Police Service (SAPS) faces transformative challenges on scales far larger than most other organisations in the country. From being the strong arm of the oppressive elite, it has had to restructure and re-articulate its function while simultaneously attempting to maintain law and order. Like many other corporations and organisations, the SAPS has engaged in interventions aimed at aiding the fluidity of this process. This report is an analysis of one such intervention. It attempts to ascertain the extent to which members are changing as a result of particular diversity workshops conducted in a region of the Western Cape. The analysis focuses on members at one particular station.
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    Being Different Together: case studies on diversity interventions in some South African organisations
    (2011) Steyn, Melissa
    There are few contexts where people are not confronted by differences in the workplace, in organisations and public spaces, and as an aspect of the general body politic. This textbook is intended for students and educators of Human Resource Management, Organisational and Management studies. It is also relevant for diversity practitioners based in South African and international contexts.
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    Characterization of HIV-1 gag and nef in Cameroon: further evidence of extreme diversity at the origin of the HIV-1 group M epidemic
    (BioMed Central Ltd, 2013) Tongo, Marcel; Martin, Darren; Zembe, Lycias; Mpoudi-Ngole, Eitel; Williamson, Carolyn; Burgers, Wendy
    BACKGROUND: Cameroon, in west central Africa, has an extraordinary degree of HIV diversity, presenting a major challenge for the development of an effective HIV vaccine. Given the continuing need to closely monitor the emergence of new HIV variants in the country, we analyzed HIV-1 genetic diversity in 59 plasma samples from HIV-infected Cameroonian blood donors. Full length HIV gag and nef sequences were generated and phylogenetic analyses were performed. FINDINGS: All gag and nef sequences clustered within HIV-1M. Circulating recombinant form CRF02_AG predominated, accounting for 50% of the studied infections, followed by clade G (11%), clade D and CRF37_cpx (4% each), and clades A, F, CRF01_AE and CRF36_cpx (2% each). In addition, 22% of the studied viruses apparently had nef and gag genes from viruses belonging to different clades, with the majority (8/10) having either a nef or gag gene derived from CRF02_AG. Interestingly, five gag sequences (10%) and three (5%) nef sequences were neither obviously recombinant nor easily classifiable into any of the known HIV-1M clades. CONCLUSION: This suggests the widespread existence of highly divergent HIV lineages in Cameroon. While the genetic complexity of the Cameroonian HIV-1 epidemic has potentially serious implications for the design of biomedical interventions, detailed analyses of divergent Cameroonian HIV-1M lineages could be crucial for dissecting the earliest evolutionary steps in the emergence of HIV-1M.
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    Consolidated report of DEISA case studies
    (2010) Steyn, Melissa; Kelly, Claire
    DEISA (Diversity and Equity Interventions in South Africa) was a research programme which studied the transformation "industry" in South Africa, exploring issues such as the kinds of interventions. The content of this report has been used as part of the Diversity Studies MPhil Programme at the University of Cape Town. Specifically, it has been used for the course "Diversity Implementation and Practice", a course which introduces students to the strategies used, and challenges faced by, diversity practitioners in South Africa. This report could also be useful for the study of human resource management and industrial sociology in post-apartheid South Africa.
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    Diversity intervention for health educators : a detailed description of diversity workshops with health educators at UCT
    (2011-12) Ismail, Salma; Steyn, Melissa
    This report is of value to scholars of organisational transformation in post-apartheid South African organisations. Also, diversity practitioners who work in the context of higher education will find this report to be of interest. The diversity workshops were held with academic staff who supervise fourth year medical students' research and health promotion projects in the Public and Primary Health Care Department at the University of Cape Town. These include staff who are site facilitators, lecturers and registrars in the Health Science Faculty. Many of them, except for the site facilitators, who mainly supervise the health promotion projects, have had no training in teaching methodology or educational theory. Therefore, the emphasis of the training was on the supervision of the research (Epidemiology) projects. The supervisors were facing complex challenges in establishing new ways of teaching to support the changing learning environment - small group learning in institutional and community settings, and the increasing diversity of the student body. To enable staff to respond to these challenges an Adult Educator from the Centre of Higher Education and Development was asked to run workshops with staff in which diversity is made an explicit presence in the learning process. This report documents the process of the workshop implementation.
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    Diversity Literacy
    (2012) Steyn, Melissa
    This resource provides the entirety of the Diversity Literacy course content. Melissa Steyn's (2010) notion of Critical Diversity Literacy is the conceptual foundation upon which the course is conceptualised. Diversity Literacy can be defined as a set of practices or conceptual tools which allow one to think critically about complex social issues such as identity, power and difference. The course engages many of the central problems which affect processes of transformation in the 'new' South Africa (class, racial, and gender inequality, postcolonial and globalised power relations) in addition to areas of social conflict (Affirmative Action, xenophobia, gender based violence, criminalization of the poor). Divided roughly into two aspects, the course focuses on theories of diversity and contemporary local and global social issues. These are presented in an integrated format, by critically examining and analysing how different authors foreground, think about and represent certain issues. The course is intended for senior level undergraduate students from all faculties. As a course offered to senior students from all disciplinary backgrounds, Diversity Literacy will prepare students to function effectively in diverse social contexts upon their entry into the work environment.
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    Diversity, inclusion, and social justice in the information context: global south perspectives
    (2020) Raju, Jaya
    This is an editorial of the special issue of the International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion 4(3/4), 2020 authored by the guest editor (Jaya Raju).
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    Embodying virtue in employment: Exploring the employment experiences of people with disabilities
    (2018) Bam, Armand; Ronnie, Linda
    Research on the employment experiences of people with disabilities (PWD), on a global level, is limited. While South Africa has a well-defined legislative framework that has been determined in consultation with disabled people's organisations, compliance with legislation appears to have failed to ensure that employment targets are met, or rather, it has overlooked the underemployment of PWD. As a response to the challenges, this study explored the employment experiences of PWD. A qualitative, explorative, multiple case study approach was employed. Twelve participants were selected using a purposive technique. Semi-structured interviews were used to collect data and provided insight into how PWD viewed their world. The interviews were supplemented through document analyses, and various modes of observation provided additional insight into each of the cases. The process of analysing the interview data followed an inductive approach during which three broad themes were identified. Factors influencing Employment elaborated on the participants' pre-employment experiences of gaining access to employment, which were shown to be impacted by various environmental barriers. Early Experiences of Inclusion at the Workplace established that induction and orientation processes were opportunities for educating co-workers about disability. However, the disclosure of disability did not guarantee improved employment experiences for the research participants. Feeling part of a team promoted early experiences of acceptance. Accommodation in the Workplace determined that PWD's accommodation requests were often evaluated and considered in terms of the costs to employers, and primarily focused on technology to improve their productivity. The need for personal assistance for the PWD in the study was found to be unavoidable. A conceptual model is presented as an alternative framework. It offers insight into how to improve disabled individuals' employment experiences to organisations and their management, and people with disabilities themselves. The model suggests that organisations operating from within a virtue framework can facilitate equal opportunities for employees. Organisations are to be more competitive, innovative and creative, and improve their sustainability. The experiences of PWD could be improved through establishing working communities within organisations as these distribute decisionmaking. The climate for organisational inclusion could also be improved by the working community's ability to redefine work and equip PWD appropriately, thereby promoting organisational citizenship, with benefits to both the organisation and individual.
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    Extinctions: Past and Present Week 3 - Plant and insect diversification
    (2017-03-17) Chinsamy-Turan, Anusuya; Anderson, John
    In this video, Professor Anusaya Chinsamy-Turan interviews Emeritus Professor John Anderson who reflects on how the End Permian extinction event wrought profound changes in the plant diversity of the time. He discusses specific examples of the change in the kinds of plants present before and after the End Permian event.
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    Genetic diversity in tef [Eragrostis tef (Zucc.) Trotter]
    (2015) Assefa, Kebebew; Cannarozzi, Gina; Girma, Dejene; Kamies, Rizqah; Chanyalew, Solomon; Plaza-Wüthrich, Sonia; Blösch, Regula; Rindisbacher, Abiel; Rafudeen, Suhail; Tadele, Zerihun
    Tef [Eragrostis tef (Zucc.) Trotter] is a cereal crop resilient to adverse climatic and soil conditions, and possessing desirable storage properties. Although tef provides high quality food and grows under marginal conditions unsuitable for other cereals, it is considered to be an orphan crop because it has benefited little from genetic improvement. Hence, unlike other cereals such as maize and wheat, the productivity of tef is extremely low. In spite of the low productivity, tef is widely cultivated by over six million small-scale farmers in Ethiopia where it is annually grown on more than three million hectares of land, accounting for over 30% of the total cereal acreage. Tef, a tetraploid with 40 chromosomes (2n = 4x = 40), belongs to the family Poaceae and, together with finger millet (Eleusine coracana Gaerth.), to the subfamily Chloridoideae. It was originated and domesticated in Ethiopia. There are about 350 Eragrostis species of which E. tef is the only species cultivated for human consumption. At the present time, the gene bank in Ethiopia holds over five thousand tef accessions collected from geographical regions diverse in terms of climate and elevation. These germplasm accessions appear to have huge variability with regard to key agronomic and nutritional traits. In order to properly utilize the variability in developing new tef cultivars, various techniques have been implemented to catalog the extent and unravel the patterns of genetic diversity. In this review, we show some recent initiatives investigating the diversity of tef using genomics, transcriptomics and proteomics and discuss the prospect of these efforts in providing molecular resources that can aid modern tef breeding.
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    Negotiation of learning and identity among first-year medical students
    (Taylor & Francis, 2013) Badenhorst, Elmi; Kapp, Rochelle
    The demand for medical schools to produce competent doctors to meet health needs in South Africa has increased. In response to this challenge, the Faculty of Health Sciences at a relatively elite university introduced a problem-based, socially relevant curriculum in 2002. The classroom environment is designed to facilitate a learning context where students from diverse backgrounds engage critically and learn from each other. This study draws on data from a larger qualitative case study to describe how a group of 'black' students who failed their first semester experienced the school–university transition. Drawing on post-structuralist theory, this article analyses how the students negotiated learning and identity. The argument is made that the students re-positioned themselves in deficit, outsider subject positions in order to survive their first year. This article ends with a consideration of the implications for developing a learning environment which recognises difference and fosters diversity.
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    Sicily: island of cultural and artistic diversity
    (2012) Saunders, Edward
    Because of the Mafia's continuing grip on Sicily, the island's long and rich history is often overlooked. These audio lectures will be of interest to those who wish to learn more about the history of Italy and the cultural and aritistic diversity of this island, earlier known as Sicily.
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    The relationship between demographic groups and perception of inclusion in a South African organisation
    (2014) Daya, P; April, K A
    The extreme demographic-role misrepresentation within organisations is a key business and societal issue in post-Apartheid South Africa. This research relates to deepening the understanding about the perception of inclusion with respect to demographic groups such as race/ethnicity, gender, age, tenure, religion, sexual orientation, disability, position/grade, department, as well as site location. Secondly, it seeks to understand which groups perceive inclusion less positively than other groups, when we consider the occurrence of all the groups simultaneously using structural equation modelling (SEM).