List of Titles

Sexual socialisation in Life Orientation manuals versus popular music: responsibilisation versus pleasure, tension and complexity

- Macleod, Catriona I, Moodley, Dale D, Saville Young, Lisa

Authors: Macleod, Catriona I , Moodley, Dale D , Saville Young, Lisa
Date: 2015
Language: English
Type: Article
Identifier: vital:6309 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1018866
Description: This paper compares two forms of sexual socialisation to which learners are exposed: the sexuality education components of the Life Orientation (LO) manuals and the lyrical content and videos of popular songs. We performed a textual analysis of the sexual subject positions made available in, first, the LO manuals used in Grade 10 classes and, second, the two songs voted most popular by the Grade 10 learners of two diverse schools in the Eastern Cape. Of interest in this paper is whether and how these two forms of sexual socialisation – one representing state-sanctioned sexual socialisation and the other learners’ chosen cultural expression that represents informal sexual socialisation – dovetail or diverge. Against a backdrop of heterosexuality and an assumption of the ‘adolescent-in-transition’ discourse, the main sexual subject positions featured in the LO manuals are the responsible sexual subject and the sexual victim. A number of sexualised subject positions are portrayed in the songs, with these subject positions depicting sex as a site of pleasure, tension and complexity. Although these two modes of sexual socialisation use different genres of communication, we argue that learners’ choice of songs that depict fluid sexual subject positions can help to inform LO sexuality education in ways that takes learners’ preferred cultural expression seriously and that moves away from the imperative of responsibilisation.
Full Text:
Date Issued: 2015

Quick View

Developing principles for research about young women and abortion: a feminist analysis of difficulties in current South African studies

- Macleod, Catriona I

Authors: Macleod, Catriona I
Date: 2008
Language: English
Type: Article
Identifier: vital:6292 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1014716
Description: Soon after the first democratic elections in South Africa in 1994, the Choice on Termination of Pregnancy (CTOP) Act of 1996, which legalised abortion for the first time, was passed. Since the introduction of the CTOP, a number of studies have been conducted on abortion in South Africa. Many have taken a health-related focus, but some research on young women and abortion has also been conducted, and it is to this (published) research that this article speaks. Two facts highlight the importance of this kind of research in the context of the abortion debate. Firstly, data from the Department of Health indicate that from 1997 to mid-2006, 12% of women undergoing terminations in the provinces in which age-related data are available were under the age of 18 (Department of Health: 2006). Secondly, the subsection of the Act allowing minors to request abortions without parental consent has caused some controversy. For example, the Christian Lawyers Association filed a suit in the Pretoria High Court in 2003, arguing that the above-mentioned subsection was unconstitutional. Their application was not successful. The research conducted on young women and abortion is etched against a background of change and contradiction in young people’s lives in South Africa. In addition to enabling legislation on termination of pregnancy, which is premised on the rights-based approach of the first democratically elected government of South Africa, various opportunities and challenges define the lives of young women. Specifically in relation to sexual and reproductive health, the Department of Health’s National Adolescent Friendly Clinic Initiative aims to make family planning and other services more accessible and acceptable to young women (Dickson-Tetteh et al., 2001). However,HIV/AIDS and “safe sex” programmes define sex as dangerous and individual young women as responsible for close monitoring of heterosexual spaces. The Child Support Grant, shown to enable functional mothering (Case et al., 2005), has sparked controversy in terms of providing perverse incentives for poor young women to conceive (a claim refuted by the research – Makiwane & Udjo, 2005). Young, black and poor women who conceive are, in particular, stigmatised and teenage pregnancy is in many respects racialised (Macleod & Durrheim, 2002). In this paper I highlight some of the problems in the research conducted on young women and abortion in South Africa since the legalisation of abortion. The specific aim of the paper is, through this analysis, to draw out feminist principles that should be considered in this kind of research. My argument draws on postcolonial feminisms that theorise the multiplicity of oppression along gender and, inter alia, race, class, age and location lines (Macleod, 2006). The paper is premised on the assumption that, in a field as fraught with gendered, race and class politics as abortion, regardless of the method used, researchers need to inspect the ideological implications of their work, and to be vigilant about their scholastic practices, and any claims legitimately made.
Full Text:
Date Issued: 2008

Quick View

Written out, writing in : orature in the South African literary canon

- Seddon, Deborah Ann

Authors: Seddon, Deborah Ann
Date: 2008
Language: English
Type: Article
Identifier: vital:2263 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004695
Description: As described by Duncan Brown, South African orature represents "our truly original contribution to world literature" (Brown, Voicing the Text 1). This paper explores how orature might be successfully 'written into' the South African literary canon whilst promoting recognition of its existence as an oral form. My recent experiences of the difficulties, challenges, and benefits of teaching South African orature within the Rhodes University English department, have alerted me to the urgent need for the creation of a student- and teacher-friendly anthology which would collect, re-voice, and adequately contextualise a selection of the seminal works of South African oral poets from the colonial to the post-apartheid periods. Much of this poetry already exists in print-form but, despite an increasing recognition of oral poetry through a number of endeavours such the Poetry Africa Festival, the Lentswe Poetry Project on SABC 2, the Timbila Poetry Project and others, South African orature remains marginal in the country's literary canon. It is largely absent from the curriculum in the literature departments of its universities. The need to redress this situation is crucial, but the process of setting up and teaching an undergraduate course in South African oral poetry, while possible, is complicated. The works of our most important oral poets are scattered in a variety of books, libraries, and collections. The usual process of drawing up a booklist of set texts is undermined by the stark reality that many of the books are out of print. Fully giving voice to these texts is even harder to achieve - CD and video recordings of performances (if they exist at all) are not easily accessed or disseminated.
Full Text:
Date Issued: 2008

Quick View

Communication of psycho-educational assessment results: remedial teachers' reading of assessment reports

- Knoetze, Jan, Vermoter, Carey-Lee

Authors: Knoetze, Jan , Vermoter, Carey-Lee
Date: 2007
Language: English
Type: Article
Identifier: vital:6265 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1008264 , http://www.sajournalofeducation.co.za/index.php/saje/article/view/47
Description: Psychological methods of assessing intelligence have been criticised because of their limited diagnostic-remedial nature and especially their lack of potential for initiating effective and pragmatic intervention programmes. Similarly, the means through which the results of such methods are communicated in order to make them useful and constructive can be debated . In this research we aimed to establish the value of psycho-educational assessment reports in terms of the understanding and interpretation of the reports by the irrecipients, specifically remedial teachers, who participated in focus group discussions and offered their opinion on the utility of psycho-educational assessment reports. The outcomes of these focus group discussions pointed to the fact that psycho-educational assessment reports were problematic in the sense that they failed to provide useful, specific, and pragmatic information for learning support programmes to be developed from. The research revealed insights which may be of interest to psychologists writing assessment reports. Suggestions for multi-disciplinary collaboration are addressed. , The South African Journal of Education is open access and available on-line at: http://www.sajournalofeducation.co.za
Full Text:
Date Issued: 2007

Quick View

The Boers and the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) in the twentieth-century moral imaginary

- van Wyk Smith, Malvern

Authors: van Wyk Smith, Malvern
Date: 2003
Language: English
Type: Article
Identifier: vital:6120 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004700
Description: In 1891 Lord Randolph Churchill, father of the more famous Winston, visited South Africa and the soon-to-be Rhodesia on a trip that was intended to combine big-game hunting with the even more exciting prospects of entering the gold mining business. During the eight months of the visit, Churchill contributed a series of letters to the Daily Graphic on his thoughts and experiences, in one of which he had this to say about the Boers: The Boer farmer personifies useless idleness. Occupying a farm of from six thousand to ten thousand acres, he contents himself with raising a herd of a few hundred head of cattle, which are left almost entirely to the care of the natives whom he employs. It may be asserted, generally with truth, that he never plants a tree, never digs a well, never makes a road, never grows a blade of corn…. He passes his day doing absolutely nothing beyond smoking and drinking coffee. He is perfectly uneducated. With the exception of the Bible, every word of which in its most literal interpretation he believes with fanatical credulity, he never opens a book, he never even reads a newspaper. His simple ignorance is unfathomable, and this in stolid composure he shares with his wife, his sons, his daughters, being proud that his children should grow up as ignorant, as uncultivated, as hopelessly unprogressive as himself. In the winter time he moves with his herd of cattle into the better pastures and milder climate of the low country veldt, and lives as idly and uselessly in his waggon as he does in his farmhouse. The summer sees him returning home, and so on [sic], year after year, generation after generation, the Boer farmer drags out the most ignoble existence ever experienced by a race with any pretensions to civilization. (94–95) The piece caused an outcry, and when a year later Churchill republished the letters as Men, Mines and Animals in South Africa (1892), he attempted to exonerate himself by claiming that these views were intended “to be exclusively confined to…the Dutch population of the Transvaal,” not “generally to the Dutch in South Africa” and went on: “The Dutch settlers in Cape Colony are as worthy of praise as their relatives, the Transvaal Boers, are of blame. The former, loyal, thrifty, industrious, hospitable, liberal are and will, I trust, remain the back-bone of our great colony at the Cape of Good Hope”
Full Text:
Date Issued: 2003

Quick View

Farmers' strategies and their implications for land reform in the Orange Free State

- Beinart, William

Authors: Beinart, William
Date: 1994
Subjects: Agriculture -- Orange Free State Land reform -- South Africa -- Orange Free State Land tenure -- Orange Free State
Language: English
Type: text , Manuscript
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/2813 , vital:20328
Description: It is possible to conjure a wide variety of future agricultural scenarios in South Africa. But new policies should be developed only with close attention to what exists and what is feasible. Analysis of the potential for land reform should remain sensitive to local ecological and economic conditions and to the current strategies of both farmers and dispossessed. Rural life for many people remains insecure. Farmworkers are particularly vulnerable at present and might become more so in a phase of rapid reform and uncertainty. Although the most carefully planned strategy of reform might be undermined by the sheer demand for land or informal reoccupations, the aims of restitution, justice and redistribution should be tempered by the equally difficult demands of production. Drawing on material from a local research project in the Orange Free State (OFS), done jointly with Colin Murray, this article concentrates on three issues: patterns of land ownership; farming strategies; and land availability. The position of farmworkers and those who have recently moved off farms, as well as the potential for new patterns of occupation will be addressed in subsequent project papers (Murray, 1993). , Digitised by Rhodes University Library on behalf of the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER)
Full Text:
Date Issued: 1994

Quick View

Change is not made without inconvenience

- Bozzoli, G R

Authors: Bozzoli, G R
Date: 1980
Subjects: Academic Freedom -- South Africa Social change -- South Africa Education and state -- South Africa Education -- South Africa -- Aims and objectives Education -- Standards -- South Africa Black people -- Education -- South Africa Universities and colleges -- South Africa School integration -- South Africa Discrimination in education -- South Africa
Language: English
Type: text
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/259 , vital:19942
Description: "Change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better". I propose to examine a few of these “inconveniences", some of which may turn out not to be inconvenient at all, while others may mean a complete revision of life style, or abandonment of a cherished ideal. In either case, a most vital issue surrounding change is a quantity well known to scientists and engineers, austronauts and motorists, the quantity known as the rate of change, or alternatively, the acceleration or deceleration. Change comes fastest when great pressures or forces are exerted, either revolutionary forces which are aimed at causing events to move rapidly, or oppositely, when the forces of authority are exerted to prevent matters from developing at all. These latter cause a deceleration of the movement of events, but both conditions represent high rates of change with the concomitant dangers that flow from the existence of inertia in the system and the people. Inertia in the accelerating condition results in the movement passing beyond control. Inertia in the decelerating condition entrenches those who are opposed to change and blocks all the natural outlets through which internal pressure could be relieved. Communication demands as a prerequisite, education, so that the essential link in the control chain lies in the schools and universities, and particularly in the universities. If the feedback is to come into play, then the universities must be the places where people learn to process the information. Universities are also the places where real change could originate as history has shown, so that either way, their role is vital. Paradoxically, although universities have, on the face of it, changed vastly over the centuries, and particularly during this half century, yet they have, by and large, retained their democratic character more successfully than any other institution. As 1 see it therefore, the universities should be and could be, very deeply involved in societal change,
Full Text:
Date Issued: 1980

Quick View

Showing items 1 - 10 of 10