Browsing by Subject "identity"

Now showing 1 - 20 of 30
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    Academic identities and communities of practice in a professional discipline
    (Taylor & Francis, 2009) Jawitz, Jeff
    This paper explores the dynamics surrounding the formation of academic identities in a context where the nature of academic work is contested both as a result of tensions within the discipline and in response to pressure from both the institution and the field of higher education. It is based on a case study which investigated the process of academic identity formation at the micro level of a department at a South African university. The study revealed a complex relationship between identity construction and participation within the particular configuration of teaching, professional and research communities of practice that defined the academic field in the department. Multiple identity trajectories were evident, indicating the role of individual agency, despite the dominance of a professional community of practice within the department. The arrival of new academics in the department without professional practice experience was found to have created the possibility of a changed notion of the academic within the discipline.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    After Race and Class: Recent Trends in the Historiography of Early Colonial Cape Society
    (2010) Worden, Nigel
    This article reviews the recent upsurge of writing on the history of the early colonial Cape Colony from the VOC period to the early nineteenth century. It responds to important questions raised by Nicole Ulrich's review article of Contingent Lives in this issue. In particular it considers what is gained and what can be lost in the recent shift from class-based analyses characteristic of late twentieth-century revisionist South African historiography to research more influenced by the ‘cultural turn’, transnational and microhistorical approaches.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    "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.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Metadata only
    Black Adam: end of the white guy?
    (2010) Steyn, Melissa; McEwen, Haley; Wilhelm, Dominic
    This website features video material that can be used by educators and facilitators to generate discussion of whiteness in post-apartheid South Africa and the post-colonial world in general. While there are infinite ways in which an educator or facilitator could employ the DVD as a resource, below you will find instructions and discussion questions according to our vision for using it as a teaching tool as part of our Diversity Studies Honours and Masters programmes at the University of Cape Town. Ideally, the DVD will be used alongside relevant critical whiteness theory.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    Changing values in heritage: shifts from the tangible to intangible in urban historic environments bo-kaap as case study
    (2021) Shem-Tov, Tamar; Roux, Naomi
    This study explores the emergence of changing values associated with heritage in postapartheid South Africa, expressed as a shift from tangible to intangible heritage values. Central to the study is an understanding of the evolutionary construction of changing values in a rooted heritage community within the urban historic environment of Bo-Kaap, the oldest residential suburb of Cape Town. Exploring changing values in Bo-Kaap, where tangible and intangible heritage intersect in the contemporary moment, showcases how heritage ably and fluidly adapts and transforms as an ever-shifting cultural process, and forges new, or altered, modes of identity construction. Bo-Kaap, as the case study, is a significant historic urban environment of Cape Town's central city with a vibrant community having cultural rootedness in place, in slave ancestral heritage, and existing living heritage deserving of protection. It is examined against a backdrop of the localised political, governance and civic agency milieu. The study follows the narrative of Bo-Kaap from its origins as a residential quarter of the early Cape colonial settlement, through the mid twentieth century when Bo-Kaap became largely fashioned and formed into an ethnically defined 'Malay' quarter, conforming to essentialised notions of race and ethnicity dominant in nationalist ideology, through the apartheid regime and the penetrating effects of Group Areas on the social and physical fabric of the area, until the present day where we are witness to a sea-change in outlook of the public on the very meaning and purpose of heritage. Heritage claims and heritage activism entered the realm of active public discourse in 2019 in response to free-market developmental pressures in Bo-Kaap, with inflections of social justice touching the edges of the heritage debate, and invited a broadening of the outermost limits of heritage discourse. Integral to this story is how heritage systems have been shaped by the past and colonial histories, new systems of governance post 1994, and a culture of intensifying identity politics. Following the arc of time illuminates the complex interrelatedness of heritage values with social, historical, and political trajectories, and aims to examine just how dynamically heritage values arise, merge and shift within the inter-relational temporal space; what activates them, who activates them, and to what end; and how they have entered into a space of heritage activism and public discourse. I suggest that this present change in discourse and the display of emerging sets of heritage values requires a highly critical reflexivity on the part of heritage structures and the profession, to look at what these changes mean for heritage praxis and governance and, more importantly, how to advance the relevance of heritage to a sector of South African society advocating for a decolonised heritage value framework.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    Conceptions of mathematics and student identity: implications for engineering education
    (Taylor & Francis, 2013) Craig, Tracy S
    Lecturers of first-year mathematics often have reason to believe that students enter university studies with naive conceptions of mathematics and that more mature conceptions need to be developed in the classroom. Students' conceptions of the nature and role of mathematics in current and future studies as well as future career are pedagogically important as they can impact on student learning and have the potential to influence how and what we teach. As part of ongoing longitudinal research into the experience of a cohort of students registered at the author's institution, students' conceptions of mathematics were determined using a coding scheme developed elsewhere. In this article, I discuss how the cohort of students choosing to study engineering exhibits a view of mathematics as conceptual skill and as problem-solving, coherent with an accurate understanding of the role of mathematics in engineering. Parallel investigation shows, however, that the students do not embody designated identities as engineers.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Restricted
    Contextualising journalism education and training in Southern Africa
    (2007) Banda, Fackson; Beukes-Amiss, Catherine M; Bosch, Tanja; Mano, Winston; McLean, Polly; Steenveld, Lynette
    In this article it is argued that journalism education in Southern Africa must contend with defining a new academic identity for itself, extricating itself from dependency on Western oriented models of journalism education and training, as this has been a perennial challenge in most of Africa.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    Curriculum formation: a case study from History
    (Taylor & Francis, 2011) Shay, Suellen
    Drawing on the work of Bernstein and Maton and using a case-study approach, this study explores the formation of an undergraduate history curriculum at the University of Cape Town. This article focuses on two periods of curriculum formation referred to as history as canon and history as social science. With respect to these two curriculum periods the findings reveal the privileging of different kinds of historical educational knowledge, as well as the promotion of different student identities. The article also argues for the need for a more fine-grained conceptual framework for the study of knowledge and curriculum in higher education. The article concludes by highlighting the importance of this kind of research as pressure for curriculum reform intensifies in South Africa.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    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.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    Fatherlessness among young black South African men
    (2022) Mbobo, Siyabonga; Malinga, Mandisa
    Scholars confirm that a huge proportion of black South African men are not participating in their children's upbringing, as a result, children face various challenges that impede their wellbeing. This study is of the view that there is still a need for further investigations to explore the effects of fatherlessness on children's wellbeing and to gain new perspectives on father absence within the context of black societies in South Africa. With that in mind, this study aimed to explore the impact of fatherlessness on the psychosocial wellbeing of young black South African men. The objectives of this study included investigating the following: (1) young men's experiences of growing up without their biological fathers; (2) the psychosocial effects of growing up without a biological father on young black men; (3) the ways in which fatherlessness shapes the development of a gendered (masculine) identity among young black men; and (4) to understand the ways in which fatherlessness shapes young men's participation in cultural practices that facilitate their transition to manhood (e.g. ulwaluko). A qualitative approach research approach was adopted for this study. Semi-structured interviews (face to face) were used for data collection, and both purposive sampling and snowball sampling methods were used to recruit participants for this study. The interviews were conducted with twenty-four (24) young black men (participants) who shared their experiences of growing up without the presence of their biological fathers. These participants resided in Langa township (Western Cape). The interviews were conducted during the third wave of Covid-19, so all the protocols to safeguard the spread of Covid-19 were observed. The data was analysed using thematic analysis. It further drew on the psychosocial developmental theory by Erik Erickson (1963) as a lens through which it reflects on young men's developmental processes and the ways in which such development is shaped by the absence of biological fathers. The findings suggest that many of the participants' conceptions of the roles of fathers were in line with the traditional views of fathers as financial providers, protectors, and disciplinarians. The results of this study also gave insight into challenges faced by young black men who grew up without their biological fathers. These challenges were related to their cultural identity, which then affected their capacity to build intimate relationships, affected them when they were undergoing ulwaluko, and affected their constructions of masculinity. Fatherlessness was also shown to have a negative impact on the education and psychosocial wellbeing of the young black men in the study.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    Harnessing agency: towards a learning model for undergraduate students
    (Taylor & Francis, 2013) Pym, June; Kapp, Rochelle
    This article describes a successful academic development programme in a Commerce faculty at a relatively elite, historically white university in South Africa. The writers argue that the programme has managed to achieve good results in recent years by moving away from deficit models of academic development for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. The article draws on five years of data to illustrate how students' home discourses have influenced their negotiations of institutional discourses. It is argued that many of the students have shown considerable agency in gaining admission to university despite their social backgrounds, but experience a crisis of confidence and self-esteem in the new environment. The article describes how the new model of academic development has responded to this context by providing a more flexible approach to the curriculum, which attempts to harness students' agency as well as foster a sense of belonging to a learning community. Also described are the range of interventions that have been put in place specifically to develop a culture of learning and to promote social connectedness, identity and agency.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    Imagining the city: memories and cultures in Cape Town
    (2010) Field, Sean; Meyer, Renate; Swanson, Felicity
    The overriding strength of this book is that it places people – ordinary people – at the centre of memory, at the centre of historical and contemporary experience, and thus at the centre of re-imagining and owning the city of Cape Town. It is as they speak – what they choose to say, what they choose to remain silent about, that we become aware of the possibilities of the city, if it really did embrace all its people, in all of their diversity. Imagining the City makes an important contribution to public discourse about a vision for, and ownership of the city by affirming the memory of its inhabitants, and by hinting at the work that can, and should still be done in foregrounding memory and culture in the re-imagination of Cape Town as a city.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    Learning as acquiring a discursive identity through participation in a community: improving student learning in engineering education
    (Taylor & Francis, 2009) Allie, Saalih; Armien, Mogamat Noor; Burgoyne, Nicolette; Case, Jennifer M; Collier-Reed, Brandon I; Craig, Tracy S; Deacon, Andrew; Fraser, Duncan M; Geyer, Zulpha; Jacobs, Cecilia; Jawitz, Jeff; Kloot, Bruce; Kotta, Linda; Langdon, Genev
    In this paper, we propose that learning in engineering involves taking on the discourse of an engineering community, which is intimately bound up with the identity of being a member of that community. This leads to the notion of discursive identity, which emphasises that students' identities are constituted through engaging in discourse. This view of learning implies that success in engineering studies needs to be defined with particular reference to the sorts of identities that students develop and how these relate to identities in the world of work. In order to achieve successful learning in engineering, we need to recognise the multiple identities held by our students, provide an authentic range of engineering-related activities through which students can develop engineering identities and make more explicit key aspects of the discourse of engineering of which lecturers are tacitly aware. We include three vignettes to illustrate how some of the authors of this paper (from across three different institutions) have applied this perspective of learning in their teaching practice.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    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.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    Neither Here nor There: Exploring the Transnational Identity of West African Migrants living in South Africa
    (2021) Opara, Ijeoma; Akokpari, John
    Transnationalism as a theory has explained the causal nature of migration over time, against the backdrop of an ever-changing globalised world. The movement of people and their motivating factors have been deeply researched within migration literature and other surrounding fields. However, the intricacies of transnationalism among migrants have remained fairly unexplored, with little being written specifically on the topic of intersecting identities and othering experienced by transnational migrants. In South Africa, xenophobia has been a strong issue connected to migrants, whereby those from other African countries face discrimination based on their nationality, ethnicity, and economic disparities. However, there is a dearth in understanding how othering as a concept manifests beyond the overt forms of violence, and how it links to systemic forms of exclusion. The term ‘West-a-phobia' explores a more specific phenomenon of xenophobia, whereby West African migrants living in South Africa face discrimination based on specific national, cultural, and economic characteristics of their identity. By using this concept, and by providing the historical context of othering, this dissertation explores transnational identities through unpacking concepts such as ‘othering', ‘transnationalism', ‘identity', and critiquing the nationstate. A qualitative approach was implemented by interviewing six respondents residing in Cape Town and Stellenbosch, South Africa. Respondents' contributions were collected via online response sheets and face-to-face interviews from August to November 2019. This was followed by critical analysis and concluded with evidence-based nuances surrounding the intersecting tenets of the aforementioned concepts. The key findings from this study conclude that West African migrants that have lived in South Africa over a certain period of time experience a lack of cohesion and integration into society. This takes place through processes of othering through physical differentiation and cultural characteristics. Furthermore, West African migrants maintain a connection to their country of origin through engaging in what Crush and MacDonald (2000) characterises as transnational activities. Finally, this study concludes that there are stratified layers to the conceptualisation of citizenship, and that the qualitative research done corroborates with certain aspects of transnationalism theory.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    Performativity and gameplay: gender, race, and desire amongst a team of League of Legends players
    (2020) Whitfield, Kirsten/Waker; Deumert, Andrea
    Computer gaming is an important and growing form of popular media that has many cognitive and social benefits for players. It has also developed a reputation for being a white-male pastime and barring access for people who fall outside of that social grouping. While statistics show that this is increasingly not the case, certain games, particularly those that fall under the category of eSports, do attract largely male player bases. League of Legends is one such game. With Butler's Performativity Theory as a theoretical starting point, a qualitative sociolinguistic study was undertaken into the gendered dynamics of a male-dominated clan of League of Legends players. The data, collected primarily via audio-recordings of player interactions between games, is used as the basis for a sociolinguistic case study that looks at how performativity plays itself out in an environment that is characterised by a strong gender bias. With a focus on a Coloured female gamer in a League of Legends team, this paper explores the ways in which she and her teammates construct their own genders within this particular sociolinguistic context. The relationship between identity and desire, which has been a point of debate in sociolinguistics, is discussed in the context of the clan's interactions. Here I focus on the debate between Cameron and Kulick on the one hand and Bucholtz and Hall on the other. The paper looks into ways in which desire and identity interact with each other during sociolinguistic interaction. Moreover, issues around the construction of gender, race and sexuality are central to the study. The paper uses the data collected to look into the ways that social identities are collaboratively constructed, and contested. The discussion shows that while the team members replicate the gender binary, they do so by simultaneously reifying and challenging gendered norms. The study provides a compelling look into the ways in which gender identities are played with in interaction, and sheds some light on the fluidity of performative identity while simultaneously sketching out the ways that such performance is limited by its environment.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    Positioning (in) the discipline: undergraduate students' negotiations of disciplinary discourses
    (Taylor & Francis, 2009) Kapp, Rochelle; Bangeni, Bongi
    This paper is drawn from a longitudinal case study in which the authors have tracked the progress of 20 Social Science students over the course of their undergraduate degrees at a historically 'white' South African university. The students are all from disadvantaged educational backgrounds and/or speakers of English as a second language. The paper draws on post-structuralist and post-colonial theory to trace the process by which students position and reposition themselves in relation to disciplinary discourses over the course of their senior years. The students both absorb and resist the values of their disciplines. The authors argue that the process of writing in their disciplines is also a process of working out their own identities as they try to reconcile their home discourses with those of the institution and their peers, or in some cases, confirm or shed their home identities.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    Race and identity of Brazilians in South Africa: an ethnographic study on racialization, habitus, and intersectionality
    (2018) Campos, Anita; Morreira, Shannon; Macdonald, Helen
    Despite recurrent academic interest in the study of race in both South Africa and in Brazil, little work has been done in Anthropology about the two countries of the Global South in relation to each other. This thesis is situated in that gap and presents an ethnographic study about the racialised experiences of Brazilian migrants in South Africa, in order to explore the different processes of racialization that occur in South Africa and Brazil. The first part of the investigation focuses on the conflictual encounter between informants’ internalized racial habitus as learned in Brazil with the one they encounter in South Africa. The second part examines the impact that such racialization has on the racial identity of Brazilian individuals. Informants found themselves in situations of racial ambiguity in which they did not fit perfectly in any of the local racial categories, and were classified by South Africans in different (and sometimes multiple) racial categories from their previous one in Brazil. I use the theoretical lens of intersectionality to explore informants’ reflections on 'what they are’ as they socially adapted to South African racial categorisations and habitus.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    Researching 'ideological becoming' in lectures: challenges for knowing differently
    (Taylor & Francis, 2009) Thesen, Lucia
    This article is a response to Haggis's injunction to 'know differently' if we are to grow our understandings of student learning. It identifies concerns that have arisen in the course of research into engagement (conceived of as 'ideological becoming') in first year lectures in the humanities at a South African university. These issues include: (a) how the co-presence of students and lecturer challenges conventional notions of 'student learning' as other; (b) the theoretical and practical challenges related to identifying fleeting 'liminal moments' in situations in which students and lecturers are co-present; and (c) what we can learn from a view of academic engagement as distributed across time and place. The tool of entextualisation is used to track participants' 'interest' across sites. The article offers a view of learning as embodied, emergent and contested, rather than neatly packaged and predictable.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    Shifting language Attitudes in a linguistically diverse learning environment in South Africa
    (Taylor & Francis, 2007) Bangeni, Bongi; Kapp, Rochelle
    This paper draws on post-structuralist theories on language and identity to explore the shifting language attitudes of 15 'black' students over the course of their undergraduate studies at a historically 'white' South African university. All the students speak an indigenous language as their first language. Those students who have been educated in racially mixed schools are relatively at ease in the environment and are able to straddle racial and linguistic boundaries. Those who have been educated in working-class, ethnically homogenous schools enter the institution with a strong desire to preserve their home languages and home identities. For them, English is equated with 'whiteness'. The paper describes the process through which this equation is questioned as English and institutional discourses become more dominant in students' lives, and as relationships with their home communities become strained. By the time the students enter their senior undergraduate years, a shared speech code emerges. The authors argue that this code signals students' dual affiliation to English (and the cultural capital it represents) and to their home identities. In mixing languages across boundaries of school background and across traditional ethnic barriers, the code also signals students' shared group identity as first-generation university students in post-Apartheid South Africa.