Negotiating spaces, constructing identities and consuming symbolic resources: examining the complex interplay between identity formation, context and media consumption amongst black South African students at Rhodes University

Willetts, Luke

Title: Negotiating spaces, constructing identities and consuming symbolic resources: examining the complex interplay between identity formation, context and media consumption amongst black South African students at Rhodes University
Creator: Willetts, Luke
ThesisAdvisor: Strelitz, Larry
Subject: Mass media -- Psychological aspects -- South Africa -- Makhanda
Subject: Mass media -- Social aspects -- South Africa -- Makhanda
Subject: Mass media -- Sociological aspects -- South Africa -- Makhanda
Subject: Mass media and culture -- South Africa
Subject: Mass media and race relations -- South Africa
Subject: Social movements -- South Africa -- Makhanda
Subject: Student movements -- South Africa -- Makhanda
Subject: Male college students -- South Africa -- Makhanda
Subject: Rhodes University -- Students -- Attitudes
Date: 2019
Type: text
Type: Thesis
Type: Masters
Type: MA
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/95207
Identifier: vital:31127
Description: This thesis has looked at the complex interplay between media consumption and identity formation amongst a group of black South African male students within the context of a racially homogenous communal viewing area located on the Rhodes University campus during the #FMF protests in 2016. Using qualitative research methods the study concluded that the group context of communal viewing helped the students structure and make sense of their daily lives. They actively divorced themselves from the main student populace in an attempt to escape lived experiences of a repressive institutional culture expressed through the university’s monolingual language policies, aesthetics and course material. These students embodied the characteristics of a diasporic community characterised by displacement, dispersal and the continuous re-articulation of differences across contradictory social, cultural and economic contexts. They grappled with an alienating environment by creating a safe space for cultural reproduction aided by the communal consumption of local television programmes. Preferences for local content broadcast in African languages were shaped by a linguistic marginalisation experienced on the Rhodes campus. The politicisation of the context through #FMF in turn politicised the students’ subjectivities leading to a need to be informed of the movement’s progression through evening news broadcasts. Discussions around campus life were dominated by #FMF and the collective experiences of marginalisation in and from the university space. Communal viewing of local television shows allowed this group of students to transcend decades of essentialised African ethnic divisions bringing forward a group identity premised on a lived hegemony signified by blackness.
Format: 103 pages, pdf
Publisher: Rhodes University, Faculty of Humanities, Journalism and Media Studies
Language: English
Rights: Willetts, Luke

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