List of Titles

Counting on demographic equity to transform institutional cultures at historically white South African universities?:

- Booi, Masixole, Vincent, Louise, Liccardo, Sabrina

Authors: Booi, Masixole , Vincent, Louise , Liccardo, Sabrina
Date: 2017
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/141946 , vital:38018 , DOI: 10.1080/07294360.2017.1289155
Description: The post-apartheid higher education transformation project is faced with the challenge of recruiting and retaining black academics and other senior staff. But when we shift the focus from participation rates to equality–inequality within historically white universities (HWUs), then the discourse changes from demographic equity and redress to institutional culture and diversity. HWUs invoke the need to maintain their position as leading higher education institutions globally, and notions of ‘quality’ and ‘excellence’ have emerged as discursive practices, which serve to perpetuate exclusion. The question then arises as to which forms of capital comprise the Gold Standard at HWUs? Several South African universities have responded to the challenge of recruiting and retaining black academics by initiating programmes for the ‘accelerated development’ of these candidates.
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Date Issued: 2017

‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’: challenges facing institutional transformation of historically white South African universities

- Booi, Masixole, Vincent, Louise, Liccardo, Sabrina

Authors: Booi, Masixole , Vincent, Louise , Liccardo, Sabrina
Date: 2017
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/141878 , vital:38012 , https://www.ajol.info/index.php/asr/article/view/163701/153175
Description: Research on transformation of higher education institutions shows that the underrepresentation, recruitment and retention of blacks and women in senior posts is still the major challenge facing the project of transforming higher education, particularly in Historically White Universities (HWUs). Several South African universities have responded to this challenge by initiating programmes for the ‘accelerated development’ of black academic staff. In this project we were interested to examine the wider implications of such programmes for transforming/reproducing existing institutional cultures. Focusing on one particular HWU and the participants in its Accelerated Development Programme (ADP) we asked whether or not the programme could be thought to have contributed to the interruption or reproduction of the existing dominant institutional culture of the university. The paper is based on interviews with 18 black lecturers who entered the academic workforce through the university’s ADP. Employing Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical framework of social and cultural reproduction, we discuss how difficult it is to interrupt the naturalised norms and values that form part of the existing institutional culture of a university.
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Date Issued: 2017

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Wheelchair users, access and exclusion in South Africa higher education

- Chiwandire, D, Vincent, Louise

Authors: Chiwandire, D , Vincent, Louise
Date: 2017
Language: English
Type: article , text
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/59984 , vital:27717 , doi: 10.4102/ajod.v6i0.353
Description: Background: South Africa’s Constitution guarantees everyone, including persons with disabilities, the right to education. A variety of laws are in place obliging higher education institutions to provide appropriate physical access to education sites for all. In practice, however, many buildings remain inaccessible to people with physical disabilities. Objectives: To describe what measures South African universities are taking to make their built environments more accessible to students with diverse types of disabilities, and to assess the adequacy of such measures. Method: We conducted semi-structured in-depth face-to-face interviews with disability unit staff members (DUSMs) based at 10 different public universities in South Africa. Results: Challenges with promoting higher education accessibility for wheelchair users include the preservation and heritage justification for failing to modify older buildings, ad hoc approaches to creating accessible environments and failure to address access to toilets, libraries and transport facilities for wheelchair users. Conclusion: South African universities are still not places where all students are equally able to integrate socially. DUSMs know what ought to be done to make campuses more accessible and welcoming to students with disabilities and should be empowered to play a leading role in sensitising non-disabled members of universities, to create greater awareness of, and appreciation for, the multiple ways in which wheelchair user students continue to be excluded from full participation in university life. South African universities need to adopt a systemic approach to inclusion, which fosters an understanding of inclusion as a fundamental right rather than as a luxury.
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Date Issued: 2017

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Medical practitioners and conscientious objection to the provision of termination of pregnancy services:

- Chiwandire, Desire, Vincent, Louise

Authors: Chiwandire, Desire , Vincent, Louise
Date: 2015
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/143838 , vital:38287 , https://ischp.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/ischp_2015_abstract_booklet.pdf
Description: The 1996 Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act decriminalized abortion in South Africa and the South African Medicines Control Council in 2000 approved the dispensing of emergency contraceptive methods by pharmacists to women without a doctor’s prescription. This legislation has been hailed as among the most progressive in the world with respect to women’s reproductive justice. However, the realization of these rights in practice has not always met expectations, in part due to medical practitioners’ ethical objections to termination of pregnancy and the provision of related services. The aim of this study was to interpret the varying ways in which medical practitioners frame termination of pregnancy services, their own professional identities and that of their patients/clients. A Sample of 58 doctors and 59 pharmacists were drawn from all nine provinces of South Africa. Data were collected using an anonymous confidential internet-based self-administered questionnaire. Participants were randomly recruited from online listings of South African doctors and pharmacists practicing in both private and public sectors. Data were analysed using theoretically derived qualitative content analysis.
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Date Issued: 2015

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‘Licking the snake’: the i'khothane and contemporary township youth identities in South Africa

- Howell, Simon, Vincent, Louise

Authors: Howell, Simon , Vincent, Louise
Date: 2014
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/141645 , vital:37993 , DOI: 10.1080/21528586.2014.917883
Description: The i’khothane youth subculture is a relatively new phenomenon that has emerged in some of South Africa’s townships. Characterised by the rampant consumption of certain goods, such as expensive clothing, the subculture is unique in that it is also defined by the destruction of these goods in performances known as ‘battles’. Demonised by the media, we set out to explore what makes these practices meaningful to the participants themselves. On the basis of in-depth interviews conducted with the members of one group, we bring to the academic literature a scarcely analysed phenomenon that is nevertheless an acknowledged element of popular youth culture in contemporary South Africa. We attempt to place the practice of i’khothane within the context of the patterns of conspicuous consumption that have emerged in (a highly unequal) post-apartheid South Africa. While the practice of burning expensive consumer goods in public may seem alien, especially in contrast to the impoverished surroundings within which the i’khothane live, there are discernable and understandable reasons why the subculture has gained both popularity and notoriety. We show how the practice of i’khothane is a potent means of articulating youth identity in settings seemingly left behind by the ‘new’ South Africa.
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Date Issued: 2014

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Losing, using, refusing, cruising: first-generation South African women academics narrate the complexity of marginality

- Idahosa, Grace E, Vincent, Louise

Authors: Idahosa, Grace E , Vincent, Louise
Date: 2014
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/141820 , vital:38007 , DOI: 10.1080/10130950.2014.874766
Description: In this article we ask how senior academic women in South Africa narrate their experience of being ‘outside in’ the teaching machine. Wide research literature documents the gross underrepresentation of women in senior positions in the academy. It has been argued that intertwined sexist, patriarchal and phallocentric knowledges and practices in academic institutions produce various forms of discrimination, inequality, oppression and marginalisation. Academic women report feeling invisible and retreating to the margins so as to avoid victimisation and discrimination. Others have pointed to the tension between the ‘tenure clock’ and ‘biological clock’ as a source of anxiety. However, experiences of academic women are not identical. In the context of studies showing the importance of existing personal and social resources, prior experience and having mentors and role models in the negotiation of inequality and discrimination, we document the narratives of women academics who are the first in their families to graduate with a university degree.
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Date Issued: 2014

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Xenophobia, sovereign power and the limits of citizenship:

- Idahosa, Grace E, Vincent, Louise

Authors: Idahosa, Grace E , Vincent, Louise
Date: 2014
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/141970 , vital:38020 , DOI: 10.1080/09744053.2014.914637
Description: African foreigners in South Africa have frequently been the targets of violent and discriminatory practices, which occur in the enabling context of negative discourses concerning African foreigners that circulate in various spheres of public life. This study is interested in one particular field of interaction between African foreigners and the South African state, namely the public health sector. Discriminatory and, sometimes, violent practices towards African foreigners on the part of South African citizens are widely documented. Less discussed are the ways in which these practices of violence and discrimination are in fact state practices. We show this with reference to the treatment of African foreigners in the public health sector. We refer to this prejudicial treatment as health-care Xenophobia which is made possible by a wider set of discourses related to citizenship and the rights accruing to citizens which suggest the ‘non-rights’ of the non-citizen.
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Date Issued: 2014

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When breast is not best: young women and breast reduction surgery

- Lamb, Tessa, Vincent, Louise

Authors: Lamb, Tessa , Vincent, Louise
Date: 2011
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/141832 , vital:38008 , DOI: 10.1080/10130950.2011.610978
Description: Most cosmetic surgery patients in South Africa are younger than 21, and in this focus we examine narrative accounts from young South African women who have chosen to undergo cosmetic breast reduction surgery. Feminist debates on cosmetic surgery have focused on the question of whether to regard women who modify their bodies in this way as active agents engaged in liberatory ‘body projects’, or whether such projects are evidence of their subjection to oppressive stereotypes and beauty norms. The latter perspective is challenged here by the participants’ characterisation of breast reduction surgery as profoundly ‘freeing’. The article deals in particular with the conscious choice of participants to knowingly risk not being able to breastfeed children in future in order to achieve a body type which conforms to their understanding of youthful beauty and sexuality.
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Date Issued: 2011

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Multiple femininities in a'single sex'school: re-orienting Life Orientation to learner lifeworlds

- Mthatyana, Andisiwe, Vincent, Louise

Authors: Mthatyana, Andisiwe , Vincent, Louise
Date: 2015
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: vital:38019 , http://hdl.handle.net/11660/3689
Description: Life Orientation sexuality education in South Africa faces many pedagogical challenges, not least among which is that it is sometimes perceived as irrelevant to learners' real interests and concerns. Learners report that the content is repetitive and that they learn more from peers than from the reiterated lessons of risk and disease avoidance that permeate sex education messages. In this article we describe the world of the study site - a 'single sex' school - as consisting of diverse informal student sexual cultures in which repertoires for the development of learner sexual identities are developed, negotiated and transmitted. The study is based on detailed ethnographic immersion in the study site which generated rich data drawn from in-depth interviews, focus groups, observations and solicited narratives. We argue that even the enlightened, tolerant 'best practice' form of sexuality education that takes place at the study site fails to take diverse learner identities, lifeworlds and experiences seriously as a pedagogic starting point, but rather tends to homogenise learners and to impose on them what they need to learn. A more empowering form of sexuality education would take seriously how young people understand themselves as sexual subjects located in unequal ('raced' and classed) social contexts.
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Date Issued: 2015

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Strangers “at home”: gay, lesbian and bisexual students’ strategies for resisting heteronormativity in university residence life

- Munyuki, C, Vincent, Louise

Authors: Munyuki, C , Vincent, Louise
Date: 2018
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/141680 , vital:37996 , DOI: 10.20853/32-3-2521
Description: Higher education in post-apartheid South Africa has been concerned with the establishment of non-discriminatory institutions. However, research continues to highlight various experiences of exclusionary practices across universities in South Africa. In this article, we demonstrate the various coping mechanisms that some students who self-identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual in the university residences adopt to deal with the exclusionary practices that the dominant heteronormative culture of the institution (re)produces which positions them as “sexual strangers” within the institutional “home”. We adopt Vangelisti and Crumley’s (1998) three categories of behaviour namely “acquiescence” which we term here as endeavours to “fit in”, “invulnerability” which we identify as “keeping one’s distance”, “verbal active” as “voicing” and a fourth category we identify as “turning the tables on heteronormativity” in our discussion. We also highlight the various forms of responses that the institution adopts in its attempts to create a conducive environment for all.
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Date Issued: 2018

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‘… a huge monster that should be feared and not done’: lessons learned in sexuality education classes in South Africa

- Shefer, Tamara, Kruger, Lou-Marie, Macleod, Catriona I, Baxen, Jean, Vincent, Louise

Authors: Shefer, Tamara , Kruger, Lou-Marie , Macleod, Catriona I , Baxen, Jean , Vincent, Louise
Date: 2015
Language: English
Type: Article
Identifier: vital:6314 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1020933 , http://www.mrc.ac.za/crime/aspj/2015/AhugeMonster.pdf
Description: Research has foregrounded the way in which heterosexual practices for many young people are not infrequently bound up with violence and unequal transactional power relations. The Life Orientation sexuality education curriculum in South African schools has been viewed as a potentially valuable space to work with young people on issues of reproductive health, gender and sexual norms and relations. Yet, research has illustrated that such work may not only be failing to impact on more equitable sexual practices between young men and women, but may also serve to reproduce the very discourses and practices that the work aims to challenge. Cultures of violence in youth sexuality are closely connected to prevailing gender norms and practices which, for example, render women as passive victims who are incapable of exercising sexual agency and men as inherently sexually predatory. This paper analyses the talk of Grade 10 learners in nine diverse schools in two South African provinces, the Eastern Cape and the Western Cape, to highlight what ‘lessons’ these young people seem to be learning about sexuality in Life Orientation classes. We find that these lessons foreground cautionary, negative and punitive messages, which reinforce, rather than challenge, normative gender roles. ‘Scare’ messages of danger, damage and disease give rise to presumptions of gendered responsibility for risk and the requirement of female restraint in the face of the assertion of masculine desire and predation. We conclude that the role which sexuality education could play in enabling young women in particular to more successfully negotiate their sexual relationships to serve their own needs, reproductive health and safety, is undermined by regulatory messages directed at controlling young people, and young women in particular – and that instead, young people’s sexual agency has to be acknowledged in any processes of change aimed at gender equality, anti-violence, health and well-being.
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Date Issued: 2015

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South Africa’s Abortion Values Clarification Workshops: an opportunity to deepen democratic communication missed

- Vincent, Louise

Authors: Vincent, Louise
Date: 2011
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/141981 , vital:38021 , DOI: 10.1177/0021909610396161
Description: A rich literature exists on local democracy and participation in South Africa. While the importance of participation is routinely built into the rhetoric of government, debate has increasingly focused on the dysfunctionality of participatory mechanisms and institutions in post-apartheid South Africa. Processes aimed ostensibly at empowering citizens, act in practice as instruments of social control, disempowerment and cooptation. The present article contributes to these debates by way of a critique of the approach used by the South African state, in partnership with the non-governmental sector, in what are called abortion ‘values clarification’ (VC) workshops. This article examines the workshop materials, methodology and pedagogical tools employed in South African abortion VC workshops which emanate from the organization Ipas — a global body working to enhance women’s sexual and reproductive rights and to reduce abortion-related deaths and injuries. VC workshops represent an instance of a more general trend in which participation is seen as a tool for generating legitimacy and ‘buy-in’ for central state directives rather than as a means for genuinely deepening democratic communication.
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Date Issued: 2011

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Bread and honour: white working class women and Afrikaner Nationalism in the 1930s

- Vincent, Louise

Authors: Vincent, Louise
Date: 2000
Language: English
Type: text , Article
Identifier: vital:6205 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1008575
Description: Women have occupied a central place in the ideological formulations of nationalist movements. In particular, the figure of woman as mother recurs throughout the history of nationalist political mobilizations. In Afrikaner nationalism, this symbolic female identity takes the form of the volksmoeder (mother of the nation) icon, commonly assumed to describe a highly circumscribed set of women's social roles, created for women by men. The academic orthodoxy holds that middle-class Afrikaner women submitted to the volksmoeder ideology early on in the development of Afrikaner nationalism but that the working class Afrikaner women of the Garment Workers' Union (GWU) represented an enclave of resistance to dominant definitions of ethnic identity. They chose instead to ally themselves with militant, class-conscious trade unionism. This paper argues that Afrikaner women of different classes helped to shape the contours of the volksmoeder icon. Whilst middle class Afrikaner women questioned the idea that their social contribution should remain restricted to narrow familial and charitable concerns, prominent working class women laid claim to their own entitlement to the volksmoeder heritage. In doing so, the latter contributed to the popularization and reinterpretation of an ideology that was at this time seeking a wider audience. The paper argues that the incorporation of Afrikaner women into the socialist milieu of the GWU did not result in these women simply discarding the ethnic components of their identity. Rather their self-awareness as Afrikaner women with a recent rural past was grafted onto their new experience as urban factory workers. The way in which leading working class Afrikaner women articulated this potent combination of 'derived' and 'inherent' ideology cannot be excluded from the complex process whereby Afrikaner nationalism achieved success as a movement appealing to its imagined community across boundaries of class and gender.
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Date Issued: 2000

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The power behind the scenes: the Afrikaner Nationalist Women's Parties, 1915 to 1931.

- Vincent, Louise

Authors: Vincent, Louise
Date: 1999
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/141795 , vital:38005 , DOI: 10.1080/02582479908671348
Description: The Enlightenment expectation was that political identity based on ethnic nationalist sentiments would gradually give way to more ‘rational’ forms of association. That expectation has, in the late twentieth century, proved somewhat premature. The explosion of ethnic nationalist conflicts onto the international stage in the post-Cold War era has brought with it a renewed intellectual interest in the politics of nationalism and ethnicity. In response to the need for new avenues of inquiry amidst a vast and growing literature, Anthony Smith’s work on national identity appeals for a research agenda which treats nations and nationalism as cultural phenomena as well as forms of politics.
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Date Issued: 1999

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Virginity testing in South Africa: re-traditioning the postcolony

- Vincent, Louise

Authors: Vincent, Louise
Date: 2006
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/141511 , vital:37981 , DOI: 10.1080/13691050500404225
Description: Umhlanga is a ceremony celebrating virginity. In South Africa, it is practiced, among others, by the Zulu ethnic group who live mainly in the province of KwaZulu Natal. After falling into relative disuse in the Zulu community, the practice of virginity testing made a comeback some 10 years ago at around the time of the country's first democratic election and coinciding with the period when the HIV pandemic began to take hold. In July 2005 the South African Parliament passed a new Children's Bill which will prohibit virginity testing of children. The Bill has been met with outrage and public protest on the part of Zulu citizens. Traditional circumcision rites are also addressed in the new bill but are not banned. Instead, male children are given the right to refuse to participate in traditional initiation ceremonies which include circumcision. This paper asks why the practice of virginity testing is regarded as so troubling to the new democratic order that the state has chosen to take the heavy‐handed route of banning it. The paper further asks why the state's approach to traditional male circumcision has been so different to its approach to virginity testing. Finally, the paper asks what these two challenging cases in the country's new democracy tell us about the nature of liberal democratic citizenship in South Africa 10 years after apartheid's formal demise.
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Date Issued: 2006

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Interpreting press coverage of South Africa’s post-apartheid “obesity epidemic”:

- Vincent, Louise, Malan, Chantelle

Authors: Vincent, Louise , Malan, Chantelle
Date: 2016
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/141866 , vital:38011 , DOI: 10.1080/21604851.2015.1015397
Description: This study examines news reporting on South Africa’s alleged “obesity” epidemic between 1997 and 2012. Results indicate that fatness is equated with disease, crisis, and dysfunction and the fat black body is singled out for particular attention as a social problem. News reporting on fat in South Africa uncritically takes up the views of sources with commercial interests who are presented as “experts” on fat. Their interpretations of the fat black body as a social problem are influenced by the imperative of new markets for products that are to be found principally in the ranks of the post-apartheid black middle class.
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Date Issued: 2016

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‘Unnatural’,‘un-African’and ‘ungodly’: homophobic discourse in democratic South Africa

- Vincent, Louise, Howell, Simon

Authors: Vincent, Louise , Howell, Simon
Date: 2014
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/141570 , vital:37986 , DOI: 10.1177/1363460714524766
Description: On 28 November 2006, South Africa’s legislature passed the Civil Union Act (No. 17, 2006), which legalised same-sex marriages or civil partnerships. While South Africa was fifth in the world to recognise the right of people of the same sex to marry, the country is by no means free of homophobic attitudes. However, we argue that an examination of the discourses embedded in the public discussion of gay marriage shows that the post-1994 period has not simply been a case of homophobia as usual. The altered context has given rise to the need for new ways of homophobic discourse to position itself. The rights enshrined in the Constitution represent a powerful set of ideas about the distinction between the democratic state and its apartheid predecessor. These ideas provide the dominant framework for political debate in the current context and it is therefore within this overarching framework that anti-gay sentiments must find a way to express themselves that has legitimacy. Our finding is that the reinscription of homophobia in an era of the ascendancy of human rights discourse has been chiefly in terms of three potent legitimising tropes – homosexuality as ‘unAfrican’, ‘unGodly’, and ‘unnatural’. It is only by deepening our understanding of the terms in which homophobia is being articulated in the current period that we can develop effective counter discourses.
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Date Issued: 2014

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Labouring to love: romantic love and power in the construction of middle-class femininity

- Vincent, Louise, McEwen, Caryn

Authors: Vincent, Louise , McEwen, Caryn
Date: 2006
Language: English
Type: text , article
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/141783 , vital:38004 , DOI: 10.1177/097152150501300102
Description: South Africa is 10 years into its new democratic order. An aspect of the country's political transformation has been an official political commitment to gender trans-formation. While great strides have been made towards greater gender equality at the institutional and legal level of society, the present article suggests that highly unequal power relations between men and women continue to be perpetuated in unexpected ways among those whom we would most expect to be capable of resistance. This paper is about how subtle yet deeply embedded ideologies and practices within heterosexual relationships serve to keep highly educated, apparently empowered and liberated women ‘in their place’, ensuring that they do not fulfil their potential. Traditionally women were socialised into assuming their positions in the home as caregivers and unpaid household labourers. The hope of feminism was that education, economic empowerment and an ideology of ‘can do’ independence would liberate women. However, for many women, it is in the most intimate aspects of their lives—in their sexual relationships with men—that this hope continues to be thwarted.
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Date Issued: 2006

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'Tell us a new story': a proposal for the transformatory potential of collective memory projects

- Vincent, Louise

Authors: Vincent, Louise
Date: 2015
Language: English
Type: text , book
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/${Handle} , vital:38046 , ISBN 9781869142902 , https://books.google.co.za/books?id=49o8rgEACAAJanddq=Being+at+home:+Race,+institutional+culture+and+transformation+at+South+African+higher+education+institutionandhl=enandsa=Xandved=0ahUKEwiPgsa6mpjjAhXNN8AKHbNwAtoQ6AEIKDAA
Description: This edited work has gathered together contributions on how to transform universities in South Africa; as many are struggling to shift their institutional culture. In a South African context, transformation means to attempt to change higher education institutions such that they no longer reflect the values promoted by apartheid but rather reflect the values embodied in South Africa's 1996 Constitution. Institutional culture is the main subject for discussion in this book. In order to transform South Africa's universities, the contributors begin by analyzing the idea of what a university is, and relatedly, what its ideal aims are. A second theme is to understand what institutional culture is and how it functions. Moreover, transformation cannot occur without transforming the broader cultures of which they are a part. Related to this theme is a general concern about how contemporary moves towards the instrumentalization of higher education affect the ability to transform institutions. These institutions are being pushed to conform to goals that are outside the traditional idea of a university, such as concerns that universities are being 'bureaucratized' and becoming corporations, instead of a place of learning open to all. In conclusion it can be said that the contemporary South African academic community has an opportunity to recreate itself as the end of apartheid created space for engaging in transformative epistemic projects. The transformation of the tertiary sector entails a transformation of institutional cultures.
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Date Issued: 2015

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