Suchergebnisse

This paper interrogates the relationship between South Africa's most important piece of educational policy, the South African Schools Act (SASA) (Republic of South Africa, 1996b), and learner identity. It seeks to understand how this central piece of South African educational legislation foreshadows, intersects with, foregrounds, prescribes and/or disturbs dominant notions of South African learner identity. What does the SASA say about the South African learner and particularly about what it expects the learner to be? The perspective used in this paper is that identity is constructed from history, memory, social and cultural institutions and power apparatuses. The specific interest of the paper is not to look so much at the mediation of identity in its practical forms, as in actual interchanges between subjects in the classroom, but to develop an understanding of the symbols and signifiers that are privileged in the formal and legal prescripts that surround the process of mediation. What significance this holds for the achievement of equality and justice in South Africa is what is explored here.

Male violence among and perpetrated by young South Africans is a major social question for the state and for social analysts. For the state the issue is fundamentally that of prevention. Social analysts concur but also seek to understand what lies behind it. Using as its point of departure contemporary scholars such as Aernout Zevenbergen, who ask what it means to be a man today, this article draws on the work of Slavoj Žižek and Gandhi to ask what place reflection — or, less ambitiously, learning — has in young people's sense of manliness.

The purpose of this article is to attempt a surfacing of the assumptions and discourses surrounding the affirmative action debate in higher education in South Africa. The article draws attention to two dominant discourses – the first being that of the patriotic university, and the second being that of the global university. In terms of the first idea, the argument is made that the university should be a mirror of the society in which it operates and therefore, an instrument for realizing its most important policies and ideals. The second insists that the university as an institution arises out of an international commitment to knowledge production, and that this framework provides it with its legitimacy. The article argues that neither of these discourses is able to fully understand and engage with the complexities of affirmative action and its ancillary challenges of racism and racialisation. The first subsumes the university entirely within the dominant politics of the day, whatever they might be, while the second extrapolates the university from the society in which it finds itself.

The purpose of this article is to understand the significance of Gandhi for the discussion about the African Renaissance. The article begins with the argument that the critical process of self-reflection begun in India about its past as a resource for imagining its future is central to any possibility of a renaissance in Africa. It draws on Gandhi in terms of what an examination of his central ideas might tell us about a future post-colonial Africa. Two of these ideas relate to the role of women in society and the attendant impact this view has on dominant masculinist tropes found in colonial historiography. Using these, the article looks at Gandhi not for the political and strategic choices he makes, but for understanding the kind of ethical identity or, the humanness which Gandhi's life represents.