Disclaiming/denigrating/dodging: white South African academics’ everyday racetalk
- Authors: Vincent, Louise , Idahosa, Grace E , Msomi, Zuziwe
- Date: 2017
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/141900 , vital:38014 , DOI: 10.1080/14725843.2017.1292119
- Description: The call for the ‘transformation’ of higher education in South Africa is one instance of a wider effort, since the country’s first democratic election in 1994, to surmount an apartheid and colonial legacy of institutionalised racism. In 2015 and 2016 nationwide protests led to universities being shut down as students and staff expressed frustration institutions that continue to be experienced as racist and ‘untransformed’. In this study we report on interviews conducted with senior white academics at one South African university shortly before these protests began. Given that our participants are people of influence in their respective university departments, we asked, in in-depth open-ended interviews, what contribution they saw themselves making to ‘transformation’. We argue that the talk of these participants could be described as what authors in the field call 'racetalk', Talk is understood here as a form of social practice, the analysis of which helps us to understand how racism is reproduced in mundane ways which, taken together, account for the persistence of pervasive institutionalised racism in South African higher education that appears impervious to policy and regime change.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2017
Secrets, lies and redemption:
- Authors: Boshoff, Priscilla A , Prinsloo, Jeanne
- Date: 2017
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/143381 , vital:38241 , DOI: 10.1080/00020184.2017.1285671
- Description: Confession is a central disciplining technology deployed in the second series of Intersexions, a popular South African TV series that seeks to change sexual and social behaviours that contribute to the risk of HIV infection. The article considers the ‘edu’ part of this edutainment programme, specifically with the nature of the lessons and with the form of ‘disciplining’ the narratives presuppose for gendered and sexual subjects. Central to this critical and constructivist exploration of the gender relationships that are validated and expurgated are Foucault’s notions of discourse and confession as a technology of self. We argue that the series presents a range of different gendered and sexual subjectivities but implicitly endorses a modern subjectivity and transformation at the level of the individual.
- Full Text:
- Date Issued: 2017