List of Titles

Macroinvertebrate population dynamics, community composition and diversity patterns of two coastal lakes in northern KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

- Campbell, Kaylee Maria

Authors: Campbell, Kaylee Maria
Date: 2024-10-11
Subjects: Indicators (Biology) , Lakes South Africa KwaZulu-Natal , Sibayi, Lake (South Africa) , Lake Mzingazi Dam , Biological monitoring South Africa KwaZulu-Natal , Biodiversity , Geospatial data South Africa KwaZulu-Natal , Land use Planning South Africa KwaZulu-Natal
Language: English
Type: Academic theses , Master's theses , text
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/464406 , vital:76508
Description: The 2018 South African National Biodiversity Assessment (NBA) identified eight freshwater lakes of national ecological importance and a lack of understanding of their biology. The assessment further called for baseline foundational data for their conservation. Aquatic invertebrates are considered to be reliable and sensitive biological indicators of environmental and water quality changes, and understanding aquatic invertebrate dynamics in these systems will provide a comprehensive understanding of how they can be better protected. The NBA also highlighted a gap in data associated with ecological response to landscape developments and climate change (mainly below average precipitation and increased temperatures) and how this contributes to aquatic resource conservation. This further complicates the modelling of important ecological thresholds and hampers the prediction of possible responses of these ecosystems to environmental changes. This gap informed the aims and rationale of this dissertation; to identify longer-term spatiotemporal trends in aquatic invertebrate communities in Lake Sibaya and Lake Mzingazi and to determine whether the surrounding land use changes could lead to long-term changes in aquatic invertebrate communities of both lakes by comparing recent survey data with historical datasets. In Chapter 2, this dissertation investigated the population dynamics of freshwater shrimp, Caridina africana in Lake Sibaya and Mzingazi and compared the data to that of 1975 study published by Hart (1981). This was done to assess any changes in the C. africana populations due to the considerable changes in land use and weather patterns that have occurred in the last 48 years in and around the systems. Results from Lake Sibaya and Lake Mzingazi were also compared to determine any differences in urban and agricultural stressors presented to C. africana populations. This chapter hypothesised that increases in anthropogenic pollution, invasive species and other habitat modifications at Lake Sibaya and Lake Mzingazi would lead to (1) reductions in shrimp densities and changes in population dynamics when comparing with the 1975 data from Hart (1981). Additionally, it was predicted that (2) Caridina africana abundances found at Lake Mzingazi would be lower than those found at Lake Sibaya (3) due to different water quality variables associated with land use. Results showed that C. africana population densities at Lake Sibaya and lake level recordings had experienced significant decreases since 1975 with densities being significantly lower in 2021. Additional differences seen in 2021 when compared to 1975 were that females were more abundant than males, individuals between the sizes of 3mm and 5mm were most abundant instead of those in the smallest size class (<0.83mm – 1.67mm) and females only dominated size classes above 4mm instead of all size classes above 2.5mm. Populations at Lake Sibaya were negatively correlated with nitrate concentrations in 2021 and populations at Lake Mzingazi were negatively correlated with temperature according to generalised linear models. These results emphasized the importance of pollution mitigation, sustainable water abstraction and the maintenance of natural water temperature ranges in the conservation of lentic C. africana populations. There was also no evidence that urbanisation and agriculture presented different threats to freshwater shrimp populations. In Chapter 3, this dissertation aimed to quantify the littoral aquatic invertebrate diversity and assemblage patterns from Lake Sibaya and Lake Mzingazi to provide comprehensive baseline datasets for these coastal systems. This chapter also aimed to investigate the impacts of landscape developments and habitat change on aquatic invertebrate communities by understanding significant water quality parameters as drivers of community variation. Predictions for Chapter 3 were that increases in agricultural and anthropogenic disturbance and habitat modification will lead to (1) aquatic invertebrate community composition at lakes Sibaya and Mzingazi being structured according to water quality variables that stem from surrounding land-use activities, leading to (2) differing community structures at each lake. Lastly, it was hypothesised that (3) the presence of the invasive snail Tarebia granifera would likely be affecting the aquatic invertebrate diversity and composition of both lakes. According to linear models, aquatic invertebrate abundance at Lake Sibaya was negatively affected by salinity, lake level and phosphate concentration, and positively associated with temperature. Taxa richness and Pielou’s evenness at the lake were negatively associated with conductivity and nitrate concentrations respectively. The aquatic invertebrate community at Lake Sibaya also followed typical seasonal patterns. At Lake Mzingazi, Pielou’s evenness was negatively associated with nitrate and ammonium concentrations and no typical seasonal patterns were evident in the community composition. Communities at Lake Mzingazi also exhibited resilience despite changes in physicochemical parameters, emphasising the difficulty in predicting aquatic community response to habitat modification due to lake-specific community resilience. Tarebia granifera populations at Lake Sibaya were found to negatively affect invertebrate diversity scores according to generalised linear models. Additionally, no individuals of Melanoides tuberculata were found in either system indicating the possibility that these native snails may have been outcompeted by their invasive counterpart. The prevalence of significant stressors associated with habitat disturbance and the unexpected results seen at Lake Mzingazi emphasized the importance of monitoring aquatic invertebrate communities in response to climate change and associated land use developments to adequately understand the long-term threats these changes pose to freshwater ecosystems and biodiversity conservation. , Thesis (MSc) -- Faculty of Science, Zoology and Entomology, 2024
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Date Issued: 2024-10-11

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The influence of access to financial services and effective financial management practices on SME success in South Africa

- Sisusa, Ubenathi

Authors: Sisusa, Ubenathi
Date: 2024-10-11
Subjects: Uncatalogued
Language: English
Type: Academic theses , Master's theses , text
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/463527 , vital:76417
Description: The success rate of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in South Africa is still low due to the majority failing in their early stages of initiation. The main reasons why SMEs fail can be ascribed to their lack of access to financial services and effective financial management practices. Access to financial services refers to the ability of SMEs to obtain financial products and services from formal financial institutions at affordable prices, while effective financial management practices refer to the adoption of cash and credit management practices to efficiently manage finances within the SMEs. This study investigated the influence of access to financial services and effective financial management practices on SME success in South Africa. Access to financial services was measured by SMEs’ access to transactional bank accounts, savings accounts, credit facilities, and insurance products. Effective financial management practices were measured according to their cash and credit management practices. Lastly, SME success was measured as SMEs operating for over five years, reporting growth according to the owner’s perception, and earning annual profits of R15 000 and above. This study applied the quantitative research design to investigate the influence of access to financial services and effective financial management practices on SME success in South Africa. The study used existing data collected by Ipsos for the FinMark Trust FinScope South Africa MSME 2020 with a sample of 4 897 respondents. The study used secondary data to investigate the independent variables, namely access to financial services and effective financial management practices, on the dependent variable, SME success. Pearson’s correlation coefficient and the multiple regression analysis were used to test the hypotheses of the study. The results showed that these SMEs were mostly from the Gauteng Province (40%), the majority had between 11 and 50 employees (76%), and the owner was the manager (73%). Pearson’s correlation coefficient results showed a significant positive correlation between access to financial services and SME success. It also showed a significant positive correlation between effective financial management practices and SME success. Furthermore, this study’s multiple regression analysis showed that access to financial services and effective financial management practices significantly influence SME success. Thus, SMEs with access to financial services (transactional bank accounts, savings accounts, credit facilities, and insurance products) and adopting effective financial management practices such as cash and credit management are likely to succeed. This study emphasises the importance of access to financial services and effective financial management practices on SMEs’ success. Therefore, it is recommended that to enhance SME success, SMEs need to open transactional bank accounts as soon as they start operating to ensure that they build favourable profiles with the financial institutions to gain access to other financial services such as credit facilities and insurance products. Furthermore, in terms of effective financial management practices, SMEs need to adopt the relevant cash and credit management practices, ensuring that they can meet the financial institutions’ requirements, subsequently enabling them to access financial services. Lastly, this study recommends that financial institutions offer relevant and affordable financial products and services to SMEs to ensure they can access more financial services. This study contributes to SMEs and formal financial institutions in South Africa by identifying the factors that influence SME success, the measures that SME owners can put in place for the SMEs to be successful, the role that formal financial institutions play in enabling SMEs’ success, and the changes they can implement to aid SMEs to access financial services at affordable costs. , Thesis (MCom) -- Faculty of Commerce, Management, 2024
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Date Issued: 2024-10-11

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An epistemic justice account of students’ experiences of feedback

- Vilakazi, Bella Phetheni

Authors: Vilakazi, Bella Phetheni
Date: 2022-04-08
Subjects: Feedback (Psychology) , Experience , Narrative inquiry (Research method) , Critical thinking , Caring Moral and ethical aspects , ‎Epistemic access
Language: English
Type: Doctoral thesis , text
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/232599 , vital:50006 , DOI 10.21504/10962/232599
Description: I am a storyteller. I believe in the power of stories to share experiences and to elucidate thoughts and ideas and to help us to make sense of complex social practices. This thesis includes the stories of five young women who were learning to become teachers. As they shared their stories with me, I share them with you. This study includes their stories of receiving feedback. These stories are structured within the Narrative Inquiry dimensions of temporality, place and context. These dimensions suggest that stories are historical and move through time, stories are shaped by place and the context in which they unfold (Clandinin, 2013). Furthermore, these stories demonstrate how feedback can serve to give access to powerful knowledge and can serve to recognise who our students are and what they bring to the academy (Hordern, 2018). But feedback can also serve to misrecognise. Much has been written and reported about the barriers preventing students from acting on the feedback on their assignment tasks in higher education. In this study, I argue that feedback is a pedagogic practice that can support students to gain epistemic access. Feedback can only achieve this if it makes the expectations explicit for students to make sense of and make meaning for themselves and if it is offered in a dialogical format which recognises the students, their attempts, their identities, and their knowledge. The research question of this study, ‘How do experiences of forms of feedback affect female undergraduate student teachers’ chances of epistemic access?’, is not unusual. There have been many research projects that have been carried out that examine students’ experiences of feedback (for example, Evans, 2013; Basey, Maines, & Francis, 2014; Nicol et al.; 2014; Carless, 2019; Winstone et al., 2021). But I identified a gap where feedback has not, to my knowledge, been studied directly through the lenses of Epistemic Justice towards Parity of Participation. This study interpreted five undergraduate student teachers’ feedback experiences through these lenses. Narrative inquiry enabled me to design this study in ways that foregrounded experience. Data was collected through multiple conversations during which I organised the participants’ life stories of feedback within the dimensions of temporality, place and context, and sociality. Miranda Fricker’s (2007) theory of Epistemic Justice and Fraser’s norm of Parity of Participation (2000) framed this study. I engaged with Fricker and Fraser’s literature meaningfully as a reader and researcher. I established an understanding of how the lenses offered by Fraser and Fricker allowed me to make sense of the literature more generally, in social life and on the pedagogic practice of feedback. Fricker’s theory of Epistemic Justice considers the epistemically unjust, gendered, raced and classed, experiences of epistemic agents. Fricker (2007) draws on two central concepts to account for epistemic injustices: Testimonial Injustice and Hermeneutical Injustice. Fricker (2007; 2003) explains that testimonial injustice occurs within a testimonial exchange setting, when an epistemic agent as a speaker gives testimony of the epistemic agent’s experiences and knowledge but is not awarded the credibility the speaker deserves (Fricker, 2003). Epistemic agents who participate in a testimonial exchange need to overcome bias and prejudice in order to evaluate testimonies with the degree of fairness the testimony deserves (Fricker, 2013; 2016). Hermeneutical injustice occurs when an epistemic agent is unable to make sense and make meaning of their social experiences. Hermeneutical injustice strengthens when the epistemic agent is prevented from gaining access to resources that might help with sense making and meaning making of these social experiences (Dielman, 2012; Fricker, 2016). To ensure that meaning can be made between people and groups of people, there needs to be some shared understandings of the purpose and process of sense making and meaning-making – or a willingness to co-create such shared understandings. Fraser’s norm of Participatory Parity enabled a consideration of the larger world of political and economic systems that give rise to social injustice. In this study, the theories of Fricker and Fraser are used to illuminate experiences of feedback of the five undergraduate student teachers who are the participants in this study and how these translate to epistemic and social injustice. The norm of Participatory Parity is considered where feedback allowed or restricted participants from participating on an equal footing in the feedback process. Narrative inquiry, a research methodology that is used to study experiences, was used to inform research strategies of this study. Participants’ experiences, data collection and organising the narratives demonstrated the dimensions of temporality and space. The thesis includes biographical vignettes for each of the participants in the study, interspersed with data from across all five participants. The key findings of this study show that feedback generally operates at the surface levels of grammar correction. In light of the theoretical lenses of this study, I argue that the feedback experiences they shared generally did not recognise their attempts and the identities and knowledges they brought to the tasks. Because the focus was on superficial correction of the specific task, the feedback failed to create conditions for the (re)distribution of knowledge. At times the feedback exerted power on participants. Because the feedback was generally in the form of one directional correction (with little space for interaction with the feedback or dialogue with the assessor), this caused status subordination of participants in the epistemic spaces of teaching practice. Lastly, the lack of clarity of feedback was harmful to the potential for dialogical feedback. Such feedback caused participants to experience forms of epistemic injustice in the form of hermeneutical injustice where it failed to create conditions for the distribution of knowledge. Feedback also caused participants to experience testimonial injustice where it failed to create conditions for recognising participants’ processes of sense-making and meaning-making in the various assignment tasks. Participatory Parity could not occur because the processes of recognition and redistribution were constrained. Feedback then created fertile conditions of epistemic injustice to occur, and participants were likely to have failed to gain the much needed epistemic access. This study is not the story of bad, uncaring academics; the study acknowledges the context of large classes and heavy workloads in which feedback is or is not given. Rather, this is the story of five women trying to make their way through the university and out into the world as teachers. The study calls for better theorising of feedback and more support for both academics and students to develop feedback literacy so that feedback might serve as a dialogical pedagogic practice that enables epistemic justice. , Thesis (PhD) -- Faculty of Education, Centre for Higher Education Research, Teaching and Learning, 2022
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Date Issued: 2022-04-08

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Translating subjugated narratives in post- colonial city texts: The design of a memorial literary resource Centre near Sophiatown, Johannesburg

- Mazibuko, Nibonge

Authors: Mazibuko, Nibonge
Date: 2020-09
Subjects: Postcolonialism -- Sophia town -- Johannesburg , Apartheid and architecture
Language: English
Type: Master's theses , text
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10948/59072 , vital:60261
Description: The reality of a singular narrative is that it at its core it is exclusionary. A singular narrative is undemocratic as it asserts for dominance rather than forbearance. Through the key writings of theorists Henri Lefebvre and Edward Soja the built environment can be seen as a communicative text expressing the higher-level concerns and ideologies of that particular society. In the context of contemporary post-apartheid South African the cities previously entrenched colonial ideologies and systems continue to dominate and to exclude other narratives and expressions, particularly those of previously marginalised voices, from the greater expression of the democratic city text promoting a singular widely accepted narrative. This disparity has been a concern for many architects and built environment professionals who have had to grapple with the question of what is a democratic, authentic and cosmopolitan African identity within the registers of public architecture. The realities are that to ignore this question would be to allow the continual silencing and perpetuation of injustice against those who are marginalised by the residual effects of the apartheid regime. This exclusion from participation within the development of urban environments is dealt with in this treatise from the perspective of physical expression and representation in the exploration of elevating various narratives, stories, typologies for example within the same city text to reflect a more cosmopolitan, democratic narrative. Another area the treatise deals with is the spatial dimension in challenging local level colonial entrenchments of spatial injustice that continue to work to the disadvantage of the urban poor through an understanding of how these are distilled from higher levels. The Sophiatown/Westbury precinct in the western areas of Johannesburg is seen as one such area which continues to suffer from firstly the residual effects of apartheid segregationist planning as well as an embedded physically un-commemorated history which was erased from the physical realm of the city text through demolition during the apartheid regime and replaced with a newbuilt fabric and a new community of people as a stratospheric layer covering what used to be a vibrant, multicultural and hence highly anti-apartheid precinct. The treatise deals with the challenging and un-layering of this entrenched spatial injustice which is a concept defined and qualified in the writing of theorists Henri Lefebvre and Edward Soja. Ideas and themes expressed by Johnathan Alfred Noble on discovering and expressing cosmopolitan identities and narratives within the South African city text are explored to formulate a non-conclusive modus operandi in the scope expressing suppressed and embedded narratives and liberating them into the story and fabric of the built environment as apart of the wider ongoing conversation of redressing the wrongs of the past in rescripting post-colonial urban spaces. The architectural design dovetails from Nobles ideas regarding expression and representation and becomes like a perforated canvas over the site area which allows the emergent spatial and programmatic conditions of the site to interweave with the characteristics and attributes of the old Sophiatown/Westbury precinct to become a dynamic urban catalyst which liberates the legacy of the area into the physical realm of the city. The study was undertaken through desktop research, literature reviews and first-hand observations and analysis within the qualitative research paradigm. , Thesis (MA) -- Faculty of Engineering, the Built Environment, and Technology, 2020
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Date Issued: 2020-09

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