Negotiating historical continuities in contested terrain : a narrative-based reflection on the post-apartheid psychosocial legacies of conscription into the South African Defence Force
- Authors: Edlmann, Tessa Margaret
- Date: 2015
- Subjects: South Africa. National Defence Force , Draft -- South Africa -- History -- 20th century , Draft -- Psychological aspects , Masculinity -- South Africa , Sociology, Military -- South Africa , Whites -- Race identity -- South Africa , South Africa -- Politics and government -- 1948-1994 , Narrative inquiry (Research method)
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: vital:2608 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1012811
- Description: For a 25-year period during the apartheid era in South Africa, all school-leaving white men were issued with a compulsory call-up to national military service in the South African Defence Force. It is estimated that 600 000 men were conscripted between 1968 and 1993, undergoing military training and being deployed in Namibia, Angola and South Africa. The purpose of this system of military conscription was to support both the apartheid state’s role in the “Border War” in Namibia and Angola and the suppression of anti-apartheid resistance within South Africa. It formed part of the National Party’s strategy of a “total response” to what it perceived as the “total onslaught” of communism and African nationalism. While recruiting and training young white men was the focus of the apartheid government’s strategy, all of white South African society was caught up in supporting, contesting, avoiding and resisting this system in one way or another. Rather than being a purely military endeavour, conscription into the SADF therefore comprised a social and political system with wide-ranging ramifications. The 1994 democratic elections in South Africa heralded the advent of a very different political, social and economic system to what had gone before. The focus of this research is SADF conscripts’ narrations of identity in the contested narrative terrain of post-apartheid South Africa. The thesis begins with a contextual framing of the historical, social and political systems of which conscription was a part. Drawing on narrative psychology as a theoretical framework, the thesis explores discursive resources of whiteness, masculinities and perceptions of threat in conscripts’ narrations of identity, the construction of memory fields in narrating memories of war and possible trauma, and the notions of moral injury and moral repair in dealing with legacies of war. Using a narrative discursive approach, the thesis then reflects on historical temporal threads, and narrative patterns that emerge when analysing a range of texts about the psychosocial legacies of conscription, including interviews, research, memoirs, plays, media reports, video documentaries, blogs and photographic exhibitions. Throughout the thesis, conscripts’ and others’ accounts of conscription and its legacies are regarded as cultural texts. This serves as a means to highlight both contextual narrative negotiations and the narrative-discursive patterns of conscripts’ personal accounts of their identities in the post-apartheid narrative terrain. The original contribution of this research is the development of conceptual and theoretical framings of the post-apartheid legacies of conscription. Key to this has been the use of narrative-based approaches to highlight the narrative-discursive patterns, memory fields and negotiations of narrative terrains at work in texts that focus on various aspects of conscription and its ongoing aftereffects. The concept of temporal threads has been developed to account for the emergence and shifts in these patterns over time. Existing narrative-discursive theory has formed the basis for conscripts’ negotiations of identity being identified as acts of narrative reinforcement and narrative repair. The thesis concludes with reflections on the future possibilities for articulating and supporting narrative repair that enables a shift away from historical discursive laagers and a reconfiguration of the narrative terrain within which conscripts narrate their identities. , Also known as: Edlmann, Theresa
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- Date Issued: 2015
Concerning Marya Schechtman’s narrative account
- Authors: Simuja, Clement
- Date: 2021-10-29
- Subjects: Schechtman, Marya, 1960- Criticism and interpretation , Narrative inquiry (Research method) , Identity (Psychology) , Identity (Philosophical concept) , Self , Individuality
- Language: English
- Type: Master's theses , text
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/190748 , vital:45024
- Description: The persistence of personal identity stands at the heart of many human practices, such as paying individuals for their work or holding people responsible for their actions. As such, it seems important that theories of personal identity are able to account for the practical implications of continuity of personal identity. Mindful of the practical importance of personal identity, Marya Schechtman (1994) argues that her narrative view only accounts for the four features that persons must possess. Any account of personal identity is supposed to make persons capable of possessing these features. She then posits her narrative self-constitution view as an account of personal identity she feels is capable of explaining the link between personal identity and certain features of persons. In this thesis project, I present how the narrative views, as described by Schechtman and others, are interpretive enterprises and that this leads them to a potentially devastating conclusion. The narratives must be constructed from something, and I argue that it is memory. But empirical facts about memory do not allow for it to persist in a quantitative way, but rather in a qualitative way, much like persons. Upon making this argument, I further argue that if mainstream psychological views is correct, this reduces the persistence of memory to resemblance relations. And memory is the building blocks of narrative. If this is the case, then narrative is also reduced to resemblance relations. Narrative, therefore, does not persist through time in a non-qualitative way, and one is better off accepting a psychological theory by virtue of parsimony. Ultimately, I argue that Schechtman and narrative theorists may save narrative views by adopting what I call as a ‘causal narrative view’. A causal narrative view will encapsulate all of the relevant features of the typical narrative view, including the emphasis on construction, but will also add the addendum that narrative states must be placed in a causal relation to each other. , Thesis (MA) -- Faculty of Humanities, Philosophy, 2021
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- Date Issued: 2021-10-29
Language and the Thing in Itself in the fiction of John Banville
- Authors: Payne, Jessica Raechel
- Date: 2021-10-29
- Subjects: Banville, John Criticism and interpretation , English literature 20th century History and criticism , Language and languages in literature , Narrative inquiry (Research method) , Hermeneutics , Excess (Philosophy) , Literary criticism
- Language: English
- Type: Master's theses , text
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/190019 , vital:44956
- Description: This thesis consists of an exploration of the interaction between language and the thing in itself in the fiction of John Banville. The thing in itself is that which exceeds the text and to which it cannot refer, even as it is compelled to do so. In exploring this tension, the thesis focuses on how Banville’s writing, in foregrounding the inadequacy of the literary text, makes the reader aware of the existence of what exceeds it. Each of the chapters in the study examines the various strategies through which Banville gestures beyond the text in spite of the limitations placed upon him by form and genre. The first chapter studies the tendency in this writer’s texts to view death as an apotheosis of the soul in which the individual finally has access to the thing in itself, which they had previously encountered as infants before entering language. The second chapter examines how elements of Romantic thought, such as nostalgia, the seniority of the child over the adult and a particular impression of the natural world, contribute to Banville’s attempt to gesture towards the thing in itself. In the third chapter, the role of language in distorting one’s understanding of the other is examined. The final chapter of the thesis examines the narrative strategies (including mise en abyme, ekphrasis, metaphor and catachresis) Banville uses in order to present the reader with excess. Ultimately, this study suggests that Banville uses various narrative strategies to make his reader aware of that which exists outside of the text. By gesturing beyond the novel to the sublime, and by self-reflexively exposing the inner workings of the writing process to the reader, Banville’s texts confront the reader with an intimation of ineluctable excess. , Thesis (MA) -- Faculty of Humanities, Literary Studies in English, 2021
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- Date Issued: 2021-10-29
Sexual socialisation: young adult women storying how sexual activities were discussed in South African cultural contexts
- Authors: Ludidi, Zizipho
- Date: 2022-04-07
- Subjects: Socialization South Africa , Sex Social aspects South Africa , Young women Socialization South Africa , Young women Sexual behavior South Africa , Culture , Memory , Narrative inquiry (Research method)
- Language: English
- Type: Academic theses , Master's theses , text
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/292737 , vital:57011
- Description: Epidemics such as HIV/AIDS, unplanned pregnancy, gender-based violence and homophobia, in South Africa, have focused research on how young people learn about sex. This research has often focused on young girls from risk-saturated areas, and specific agents of socialisation, where they might learn about sex, such as parents, life orientation at schools, peers, media, and traditional cultural approaches. Using a narrative theoretical framework, through memory work, this study explored how black young adult women friends – who were university students – experienced forms of sexual socialisation, through various communication in South African cultural contexts. Findings from the thematic narrative analysis that was conducted demonstrated that sexual socialisation is a complex life-long process. This takes place through a collision of contradictory messages, from different agents of socialisation, in different cultural contexts. Themes were identified and organised to tell an overall sexual socialisation story that progressed through time, moving from a stage of perceived innocent oblivion, mixed messages in primary and high school, “liberal” university stories and the current stage of reauthoring stories. , Thesis (MA) -- Faculty of Humanities, Psychology, 2022
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- Date Issued: 2022-04-07
‘They do not understand us’: a psychosocial analysis of the everyday lived experiences of a CYCC care worker in semi-rural South Africa
- Authors: Pieters, Cinnamon-Paige
- Date: 2022-04-07
- Subjects: Child care workers South Africa Attitudes , Narrative inquiry (Research method) , Intersubjectivity , Free association (Psychology) , Child care South Africa Psychological aspects , Burn out (Psychology) South Africa
- Language: English
- Type: Article , text
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/294482 , vital:57225
- Description: This paper employs a psychosocial framework to analyse the everyday lived experiences of a child and youth care worker in semi-rural South Africa. The aim is to provide a new perspective of care work by drawing on narrative analysis alongside a psychoanalytic approach to qualitative research. With an emphasis on the socially constructed nature of reality, the researcher aims to elucidate the rich unconscious depths of being a care worker and the dynamics of the intersubjective reality of care work. Employing a free association narrative interview technique allows the researcher to gain understanding of the narratives that the care worker draws on in the construction of his identity as a care worker. The use of a psychosocial approach enables the researcher to pay attention to both the social context that influences the narratives that he draws on, but also the psychological ‘pay offs’ of these constructions. Most notably, the study highlights how the care worker’s identity is mediated by a defended subjectivity and argues that his failures in mentalization might stem from the way he is treated as a care worker by other professionals as a result of their mindblindness. This maintains his narrative of invisibility, and the pervasive feeling of being misunderstood as a professional in his own right. The findings are discussed in terms of their contribution to understanding some of the challenges that CYCC care workers face. , Research Article (MA) -- Faculty of Humanities, Psychology, 2022
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- Date Issued: 2022-04-07
An epistemic justice account of students’ experiences of feedback
- 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
Making the personal political: understanding the impacts of participation in an anti-rape protest for women who have experienced sexual violence
- Authors: Barker, Kim Elise
- Date: 2023-03-29
- Subjects: Sexual assault South Africa , Silent protest , Under-reporting , Sexual abuse victims Attiudes , Narrative inquiry (Research method) , Rape Psychological aspects
- Language: English
- Type: Academic theses , Doctoral theses , text
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/422590 , vital:71960 , DOI 10.21504/10962/422590
- Description: South Africa is recognised as a country with unusually high levels of rape and sexual violence. The majority of those who experience sexual violence do not acknowledge, disclose or report it, and do not access support. Many factors have been identified which can inhibit acknowledgement and disclosure. While silence is to be honoured as a chosen response, unwanted silencing is of concern. The annual Silent Protest at Rhodes University is a day-long anti-rape protest which draws attention to the attitudes and practices which silence victim-survivors, and enacts solidarity with victim-survivors of sexual violence. I conducted a three year “critically engaged, activist ethnography” with the community of Silent Protestors and organisers. My focus was on the stories that victim-survivors told about the impacts of participating in the protest. Changes in the research context allowed for a participatory action research cycle to be incorporated into the methodology. This offered an opportunity to implement and evaluate some changes suggested by my research contributors. My contributor’s narratives highlighted the ways in which as a society we position those who have been subjected to sexual violence in ways that are limited and limiting and which diminish victim-survivors’ sense of agency and value. This malignant positioning restricts the choices available to victim-survivors. The anticipation of being positioned in negative ways can inhibit victim-survivors from disclosing a violation and accessing care and justice. Participation in the Silent Protest seems to stand against some of the factors which inhibit acknowledgement and disclosure. Through their participation many women took up opportunities to share their story with at least one other person and to receive and offer care. Most described participation as having been beneficial and having helped them move towards living well again. The ways in which the Silent Protest positioned victim-survivors and the choices they were offered in relation to that positioning seemed to open up opportunities for thinking, feeling and acting in ways that they preferred. This suggests that interventions which mobilise both political resistance and mutual care hold promise for developing more accessible and effective services to those affected by sexual violence. , Thesis (PhD) -- Faculty of Humanities, Psychology, 2023
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- Date Issued: 2023-03-29