Suchergebnisse

This study uses critical race theory to examine interviews with university tutors, during which they reflect on teaching experiences with first-year students. These tutors are responsible for helping students to conceptualise racism as structural in the context of an introductory module in literary studies. The analysis maps the discourses tutors mobilised to assign meaning to the challenges and successes they experienced during their interactions with students. Analysing such interviews can contribute to critical race theory by illuminating how knowledge about racism is developed during tutor–student collaborations. The results elucidate how tutors attempt to make sense of an unforeseen measure of reluctance from students racialised as Black to discuss systemic racism and its impact on their lives. More specifically, the psychoanalytic concept mentalisation grounds my exploration of the various ways tutors engage different discourses to account for this reluctance. The same concept sheds light on tutors' capacity to reflect on their own intersectional positionalities and its influence on students' learning. The article concludes by stressing that mentalisation is less fruitful, analytically speaking, when it is used to accuse individuals of falling short of some desired criterion such as critical thinking. Instead, the real danger arises when people are unable to mobilise a wide range of discourses capable of driving sophisticated interpretations. Specific suggestions are made for addressing this danger.

This study combines two discourse analytic frameworks, and explores the utility of this combination for unpacking journalistic opinions written in response to a polarising and racialised event in South African education: the Overvaal High School incident. It uncovers strategic constructions of racism within politicised blame games, in the context of Overvaal, and discloses how blame-assertion and blame-denial became implicated in framings of moral panic. Methodologically, this study relies on the concept race trouble, as well as a practical model of argumentation. In conjunction, these two approaches supply insight into both the calculated construction of racism, as well as the incorporation of these constructions into arguments aimed at rationalising blame-assertion and blame-denial. The results are interpreted within theorisations of moral panic. The findings showcase how arguments are produced to blame an individual politician for escalating racial antagonism around Overvaal, instead of offering a deeply historicised and contextualised account of the incident. Consequently, the arguments that shaped the opinion pieces, and the framing of racism involved in these arguments, ultimately obfuscate inquiry into structural determinants of racial inequity. Implicitly, this framing of racism and its incorporation into argumentation and blame games, produce a form of moral panic, in which South Africans racialised as white are construed as embattled by self-serving (black) politicians. Such politicians are vilified, or rendered as folk devils, and the results indicate how this process evades penetrating analyses of racialisation and its intersection with unequal education.

This study combines two discourse analytic frameworks, and explores the utility of this combination for unpacking journalistic opinions written in response to a polarising and racialised event in South African education: the Overvaal High School incident. It uncovers strategic constructions of racism within politicised blame games, in the context of Overvaal, and discloses how blame-assertion and blame-denial became implicated in framings of moral panic. Methodologically, this study relies on the concept race trouble, as well as a practical model of argumentation. In conjunction, these two approaches supply insight into both the calculated construction of racism, as well as the incorporation of these constructions into arguments aimed at rationalising blame-assertion and blame-denial. The results are interpreted within theorisations of moral panic. The findings showcase how arguments are produced to blame an individual politician for escalating racial antagonism around Overvaal, instead of offering a deeply historicised and contextualised account of the incident. Consequently, the arguments that shaped the opinion pieces, and the framing of racism involved in these arguments, ultimately obfuscate inquiry into structural determinants of racial inequity. Implicitly, this framing of racism and its incorporation into argumentation and blame games, produce a form of moral panic, in which South Africans racialised as white are construed as embattled by self-serving (black) politicians. Such politicians are vilified, or rendered as folk devils, and the results indicate how this process evades penetrating analyses of racialisation and its intersection with unequal education.

In a post-cyber-utopian world, scholars are aware that online discussions emanating from newspaper articles do not automatically exhibit democratic discourse. Against this background, we aim to delineate some of the main attributes of deliberative discourse in an online news site for the South African Mail & Guardian. We are particularly interested in determining how interlocutors justify conclusions through warrants. Warrants are discourse moves that link conclusions with evidence, and we examine their role in contesting the ideological productiveness of opposing arguments. Focusing on race-sensitive discussions, we combine a content- and discourse-analytic framework to identify the deliberative dynamics of warrants in online debates hosted by the Mail & Guardian. We argue that warrants, as a conceptual tool, offer a fruitful purchase on the enactment of deliberation in naturally-occurring settings. Moreover, they seem cardinal for the contestation of ideology, notably when deliberation is suffused with the analysis of power relations in highly-charged topics.