Abahlali baseMjondolo and struggle for the city in Durban, South Africa
- Authors: Pithouse, Richard, 1970-
- Date: 2009
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6208 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1008578
- Description: The racialised regulation of space under apartheid was increasingly undone by insurgent popular action from the late 1970s. After apartheid a technocratic agenda that reduced the urban crisis to a housing crisis successfully depoliticised the urban question. At the same time the state made often violent attempts to reinscribe certain aspects of apartheid spatial logic by forcibly removing shack dwellers living in well located suburbs to tiny houses, and then later ‘transit camps’, in peripheral ghettoes. However from 2004 there was a remarkable sequence of popular protest against local governments across the country. An autonomous shack dweller’s movement, Abahlali baseMjondolo, emerged from this grassroots ferment and has since issued a compelling demand for organisational autonomy, grassroots urban planning and the right to the city.
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- Date Issued: 2009
Tri-locus sequence data reject a Gondwanan origin hypothesis for the African/South Pacific crab genus Hymenosoma
- Authors: Teske, Peter R , McLay, Colin L , Sandoval-Castillo, Jonathan , Papadopoulos, Isabelle , Newman, Brent K , Griffiths, Charles L , McQuaid, Christopher D , Barker, Nigel P , Borgonie, Gaetan , Beheregaray, Luciano B
- Date: 2009
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6547 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1006003
- Description: Crabs of the family Hymenosomatidae are common in coastal and shelf regions throughout much of the southern hemisphere. One of the genera in the family, Hymenosoma, is represented in Africa and the South Pacific (Australia and New Zealand). This distribution can be explained either by vicariance (presence of the genus on the Gondwanan supercontinent and divergence following its break-up) or more recent transoceanic dispersal from one region to the other. We tested these hypotheses by reconstructing phylogenetic relationships among the seven presently-accepted species in the genus, as well as examining their placement among other hymenosomatid crabs, using sequence data from two nuclear markers (Adenine Nucleotide Transporter [ANT] exon 2 and 18S rDNA) and three mitochondrial markers (COI, 12S and 16S rDNA). The five southern African representatives of the genus were recovered as a monophyletic lineage, and another southern African species, Neorhynchoplax bovis, was identified as their sister taxon. The two species of Hymenosoma from the South Pacific neither clustered with their African congeners, nor with each other, and should therefore both be placed into different genera. Molecular dating supports a post-Gondwanan origin of the Hymenosomatidae. While long-distance dispersal cannot be ruled out to explain the presence of the family Hymenosomatidae on the former Gondwanan land-masses and beyond, the evolutionary history of the African species of Hymenosoma indicates that a third means of speciation may be important in this group: gradual along-coast dispersal from tropical towards temperate regions, with range expansions into formerly inhospitable habitat during warm climatic phases, followed by adaptation and speciation during subsequent cooler phases.
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- Date Issued: 2009
The aporia of collective violence
- Authors: Praeg, Leonhard
- Date: 2008
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6196 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1008560
- Description: From the theoretical perspective of René Girard, Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida the Rwanda genocide of 1994 may be interpreted as an instance of foundational violence. Given the constant reference in the Rwanda genocide discourse to the failed revolution of 1959, it is perhaps rather a case of deferred foundational violence. Useful as this notion of “foundational violence” may be, as theoretical category it is also hugely challenging because the implicit claim is not just historical (“states are routinely founded on violence”) but analytical (“founding moments are per definition violent”). The result is a profound tension between, on the one hand, the need to understand the event as somehow unexceptional or typical of the founding of new socio-political orders and, on the other hand, the need to judge it as exceptional, an “outrage,” a crime against humanity. This paper treats the tension between the unexceptional and exceptional as aporetic, that is, as a profound puzzle consisting of two equally valid imperatives which are nonetheless mutually exclusive. It is also an attempt to find a way beyond the impasse.
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- Date Issued: 2008
Gowin's Knowledge Vee and the integration of philosophy and methodology : a case study
- Authors: Fox, Roddy C
- Date: 2007
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6682 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1006677
- Description: Universities with a strong research tradition commonly have courses or modules examining the tradition’s philosophies and methodologies to prepare their students to undertake research programmes. Recently, however, authors have called for wider debate concerning how we teach these courses and this paper is intended, in part, to make a contribution to this debate. The Research Philosophy and Methodology module examined here makes an intriguing case study because of a number of distinctive characteristics. The teaching philosophy of the module is social constructivist and it uses Gowin’s Knowledge Vee as its main heuristic device. This facilitates the construction of knowledge about philosophy and methodology in an integrated manner. The module has also been designed for both physical and human geography students at the introductory post-graduate level. There is, therefore, a second element of integration in the curriculum. Lastly, the module is predominantly web-based, being taken by distance students through the exchange agreement between Rhodes University, South Africa, and the University of Trollhättan-Uddevalla, Sweden. Evidence from reflective exercises shows that the learners’ understanding of research and the research process has deepened considerably through using Gowin’s Vee. Furthermore, using the Knowledge Vee in the web-based context has facilitated the integrative aspects of the module.
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- Date Issued: 2007
Identifying and targeting idiosyncratic cognitive processes in group therapy for social phobia : the case of Vumile
- Authors: Edwards, David J A , Kannan, Swetha
- Date: 2006
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:6244 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1007859
- Description: “Vumile” was a patient in a cognitive therapy group that was designed for socially phobic African students and based on a therapy model developed by Clark and Wells. The case narrative shows how Vumile constructed a personal model of the factors maintaining his social phobia, and within the group and through homework challenged negative beliefs, reduced selfconsciousness and engaged in a range of previously avoided behaviors. A significant maintaining factor, spontaneous images of women looking at him with pity or mockery, was only identified in the last session. However, Vumile was able to use the skills he had learned to investigate this further and to correct these processes, which were distorting his experience of social interactions with women. Significant gains were made after the end of the formal treatment program and these are reflected in scores at follow-up on several self-report scales measuring anxiety, depression and various aspects of social phobic behavior and cognition.
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- Date Issued: 2006
Resilient or resigned? Criminal victimisation and quality of life in South Africa
- Authors: Moller, Valerie
- Date: 2005
- Language: English
- Type: Article
- Identifier: vital:7113 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1010746
- Description: A victimisation study conducted among 3300 householders in South Africa’s Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Municipality (NMMM) in the Eastern Cape Province aimed to inform a crime prevention strategy for the metropolitan area. The study found that the variables ‘fear of crime’ – measured in terms of perceived likelihood of victimisation – and concern about ‘personal safety’ had greater negative influence on life satisfaction than actual victimisation. Individual crimes against the person had greater negative influence on subjective wellbeing and feelings of personal safety than property and other household crimes. Individuals who perceived themselves to be at risk of becoming a victim of crime also perceived greater risk of other misfortunes. However, materially better-off victims reported higher levels of life satisfaction than non-victims in spite of their crime experience. South Africa has high crime rates by international standards and fighting crime presents the country with one of its major challenges in the second decade of democracy. Nevertheless, findings suggest that the negative impact of crime issues on achieving the good life are overshadowed by issues of racial inequalities and poverty. The conclusion is drawn that residents of Nelson Mandela Metropole are hardy when it comes to living with crime but nonetheless suffer stress in doing so. From a methodological perspective, the discussion considers whether subjective crime issues such as fear of crime and personal safety should be regarded as personal or neighbourhood quality-of-life issues. Based on survey findings, the conclusion is drawn that concern for personal safety is both. However, a crime-as neighbourhood-issue is more likely to attract remedial action on the part of local authorities to better protect citizens and allay their fears of crime.
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- Date Issued: 2005
Scales of mussel bed complexity: structure, associated biota and recruitment
- Authors: Lawrie, S M , McQuaid, Christopher D
- Date: 2001
- Language: English
- Type: text , Article
- Identifier: vital:6956 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1011996
- Description: Hierarchically scaled surveys were carried out on beds of the brown mussel Perna perna (Linnaeus) on the South coast of South Africa. The object was to assess spatial and temporal variations in the complexity of mussel beds and to investigate relationships between mussel bed complexity and mussel recruitment. Complexity was divided into three components: physical complexity; demographic complexity; associated biota. A series of variables within each component were recorded at two different scales (10 and 50 cm) within nested quadrats on three separate occasions. The nested ANOVA design explicitly incorporated spatial scale as levels of the ANOVA. These scales were: shores (areas 1 km in length separated by 25 km); transects (areas 20 m in length separated by 100s of meters); 50×50-cm quadrats separated by meters and 10×10-cm quadrats separated by cm) This approach was intended to generate hypotheses concerning direct associations between recruitment and complexity versus co-variation due external processes. Three main questions were addressed: (1) At what scale does each variable of complexity exhibit greatest significant variation? (2) At these scales is there similar ranking of variables of complexity and recruitment? (3) Within this/these scales, is there any significant relationship between the variables measured and mussel recruitment? On two occasions (Nov. 97 and Mar. 98) the majority of variables showed greatest significant variation at the transect-scale. On a third occasion (Oct. 97) most variables showed greatest significant variation at the quadrat-scale and the site-scale. On all occasions a markedly high percentage of the variation encountered also occurred at the smallest scale of the study, i.e., the residual scale of the ANOVA analyses. Some similarity in the ranking of variables occurred at the transect scale. Within the transect-scale, there was little indication of any relationship between variables of complexity and recruitment. Relationships were inconsistent either among transects or among sampling occasions. Overall, the results suggest that a high degree of variation in mussel bed complexity consistently occurs at very small scales. High components of variance generally also occur at one or more larger scales; however, these scales vary with season. Mussel recruitment does not appear to be directly affected by complexity of mussel beds. Instead it appears external factors may influence both complexity and recruitment independently. In addition recruitment may influence complexity rather than vice versa.
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- Date Issued: 2001