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A discourse of disconnect?: young people from the Eastern Cape talk about the failure of adult communications to provide habitable sexual subject positions
No full textFace-to-face adult communication with young people about sexuality is, for the most part, assigned to two main groups of people: educators tasked with teaching schoolbased sexuality education that is provided as part of the compulsory Life Orientation (LO) learning area, and parents. In this paper, we report on a study conducted with Further Education and Training College students in an Eastern Cape town. Using a discursive psychology lens, we analysed data from, first, a written question on what participants remember being taught about sexuality in LO classes and, second, focus
group discussions held with mixed and same-sex groups. Discussions were structured around the sexualities of high school learners and the LO sexuality education that participants received at high school. We highlight participants’ common deployment of a ‘discourse of disconnect’ in their talk. In this discourse, the messages of ‘risk’ and ‘responsibility’ contained in adult face-to-face communications, by both parents and LO teachers, are depicted as being delivered through inadequate or nonrelational styles of communication, and as largely irrelevant to participants’ lives. Neither of these sources of communication was seen as understanding the realities of youth sexualities or as creating habitable or performable sexual subject positions. The dominance of this ‘discourse of disconnect’ has implications for how sexuality education and parent communication interventions are conducted
Uncertainties in modelling hydrological responses in gauged and ungauged sub‐basins
No full textThe world is undergoing rapid changes and the future is uncertain. The changes are related to
modification of the landscape due to human activities, such as large and small scale irrigation,
afforestation and changes to the climate system. Understanding and predicting hydrologic change
is one of the challenges facing hydrologists today. Part of this understanding can be developed
from observed data, however, there often too few observations and those that are available are
frequently affected by uncertainties. Hydrological models have become essential tools for
understanding historical variations of catchment hydrology and for predicting future possible
trends. However, most developing countries are faced with poor spatial distributions of rainfall
and evaporation stations that provide the data used to force models, as well as stream flow
gauging stations to provide the data for establishing models and for evaluating their success.
Hydrological models are faced with a number of challenges which include poor input data (data
quality and poorly quantified human activities on observed stream flow data), uncertainties
associated with model complexity and structure, the methods used to quantify model parameters,
together with the difficulties of understanding hydrological processes at the catchment or subbasin.
Within hydrological modelling, there is currently a trend of dealing with equifinality through
the evaluation of parameter identifiability and the quantification of uncertainty bands associated
with the predictions of the model. Hydrological models should not only focus on reproducing the
past behaviour of a basin, but also on evaluating the representativeness of the surface and subsurface
model components and their ability to simulate reality for the correct reasons. Part of this
modelling process therefore involves quantifying and including all the possible sources of
uncertainty. Uncertainty analysis has become the standard approach to most hydrological modelling studies,
but has yet to be effectively used in practical water resources assessment. This study applied a
hydrological modelling approach for understanding the hydrology of a large Tanzanian drainage
basin, the Great Ruaha River that has many areas that are ungauged and where the available data
(climate, stream flow and existing water use) are subject to varying degrees of uncertainty. The Great Ruaha River (GRR) is an upstream tributary of the Rufiji River Basin within Tanzania and
covers an area of 86 000 km2. The basin is drained by four main tributaries; the Upper Great Ruaha,
the Kisigo, the Little Ruaha and the Lukosi. The majority of the runoff is generated from the Chunya
escarpment, the Kipengere ranges and the Poroto Mountains. The runoff generated feeds the
alluvial and seasonally flooded Usangu plains (including the Ihefu perennial swamp). The majority
of the irrigation water use in the basin is located where headwater sub‐basins drain towards the
Usangu plains. The overall objective was to establish uncertain but behavioural hydrological models that could be
useful for future water resources assessments that are likely to include issues of land use change,
changes in patterns of abstraction and water use, as well the possibility of change in future
climates
The developmental impact of non-contributory social grants in South Africa : a study of Ezibeleni, Queenstown
No full textAmartya Sen argued that poverty was the “deprivation” of the capability to lead a “good life”,
therefore ending poverty meant meeting basic physical and social needs, and enabling
meaningful economic and political choices. The principal objective of this research was to
investigate whether (and if so, in what ways) post-apartheid state-provided non-contributory
cash social grants in South Africa reduced “poverty” in Sen’s sense. This thesis used
Ezibeleni, a historically black working class township at Queenstown, in the Eastern Cape, as
a reference area. Using in-depth interviews, it found that social grants did help reduce
poverty, both in terms of helping meet basic needs and enabling grant recipients to make
more choices, including facilitating job searches and small businesses. However, it was also
found that grants fall short of ending poverty, as the grants were too small to adequately
cover basic needs in the context of large family sizes, a serious and long-term lack of
resources, persistent unemployment, and high indebtedness, and could also enable only a
limited expansion of choices. The grants played a positive role, but were inadequate to
remove the “unfreedoms” facing the poo
"Why Persephone?" investigating the unique position of Persephone as a dying god(dess) offering hope for the afterlife
No full textPersephone’s myth is unique, as it was the central narrative of one of the most prominent ancient
mystery religions, and remains one of the few (certainly the most prominent) ancient Greek myths
to focus on the relationship of a mother and her daughter. This unique focus must have offered her
worshippers something important that they perhaps could not find elsewhere, especially as a
complex and elaborate cult grew around it, transforming the divine allegory of the changing seasons
or the storage of the grain beneath the earth, into a narrative offering hope for a better place in the
afterlife. To understand the appeal of this myth, two aspects of her worship and mythic significance
require study: the expectations of her worshippers for their own lives, to which the goddess may
have been seen as a forerunner; and the mythic frameworks operating which would characterise the
goddess for her worshippers. The myth, as described in The Hymn to Demeter, is initially interpreted
for its literary meaning, and then set within its cultural milieu to uncover what meaning it may have
had for Persephone’s worshippers, particularly in terms of marriage and death, which form the initial
motivating action of the myth. From this socio-anthropological study we turn to the mythic patterns
and motifs the story offers, particularly the figure of the goddess of the Underworld (primarily in the
influential Mesopotamian literature), and the Dying-Rising God figure (similarly derived from the
Near East). These figures, when compared to the Greek goddess, may both reveal her unique appeal,
and highlight the common attractions that lie in the figures generally. By this two-part investigation,
on the particular culture’s expectations and the general mythic framework she exists in,
Persephone’s meaning in her native land may be uncovered and understoo
Barriers to and enablers of climate change adaptation in four South African municipalities, and implications for community based adaptation
No full textThe focus of this study is on understanding the multiple and interacting factors that hinder or enable
municipal planned climate change adaptation, here called barriers and enablers respectively, and their
implications for community based adaptation. To do this I developed a conceptual framework of
barriers to and enablers of planned climate change adaptation, which informed a systematic literature
review of barriers to planned community based adaptation in developing countries. In this framework
barriers were grouped into resource, social and physical barriers. I then conducted empirical case
study analysis using qualitative research methods in four South African municipalities to understand
what barriers and enablers manifested in these contexts. In light of the reflexive nature of my
methodology, my framework was adjusted based on my empirical findings, where contextual barriers
were found to better represent the empirical results and subsumed physical barriers. I found my
framework useful for analysis, but in the empirical cases, barriers and enablers overlaid and interacted
so significantly that in reality it was often difficult to separate them. A key finding was that enablers
tended to be more about the way things are done, as opposed to direct opposites of barriers.
Comparison of barriers and enablers across the case studies revealed a number of key themes.
Municipalities struggle to implement climate change adaptation and community based adaptation
within contexts of significant social, economic and ecological challenges. These contextual barriers,
when combined with certain cognitive barriers, lead to reactive responses. Existing municipal systems
and structures make it difficult to enable climate change adaptation, which is inherently cross‐sectoral
and messy, and especially community based adaptation that is bottom‐up and participatory. Lack of
locally applicable knowledge, funding and human resources were found to be significant resource
barriers, and were often underlain by social barriers relating to perceptions, norms, discourses and
governance challenges. Enablers of engaged officials, operating within enabling organisational
environments and drawing on partnerships and networks, were able to overcome or circumvent these
barriers. When these enablers coincided with windows of opportunity that increased the prioritisation
of climate change within the municipality, projects with ancillary benefits were often implemented.
Analysis of the barriers and enablers identified in the literature and case studies, informed discussion
on whether municipalities are able to implement community based adaptation as defined in the
literature, as well as the development of recommendations for how municipal planned climate change
adaptation and community based adaptation can be further understood and enabled in the future.
These recommendations for practice and research include: (a) To acknowledge and understand the
conceptual framings of municipal climate change work, as these framings inform the climate change
agenda that is pursued, and hence what municipal climate change adaptation work is done and how
it was done. (b) The need for further research into the social barriers that influence the vital enablers
of engaged officials, enabling organisational environments, and partnerships and networks. (c) To
learn from pilot community‐level interventions that have been implemented by municipalities, as well
as from other disciplines and municipalities. (d) To develop top‐down/bottom‐up approaches to
enable municipal planned climate change adaptation and community based adaptation, that benefits
from high level support and guidance, as well as local level flexibility and learning‐by‐doing. (e) To
develop viable mechanisms for municipalities to better engage with the communities they serve
Geotechnical Engineering III: GENG3/0
No full textSupplementary Examination on Geotechnical Engineering III, Jan 201
Error analysis in a learner corpus : a study of errors amongst Grade 12 Oshiwambo speaking learners of English in northern Namibia
No full textName in Graduation Programme as: Nghikembua, Anneli NdapandaHigh failure rates in English as a second language at secondary school level have become a concern
in the Namibian education sector. From 2005 until 2013, the overall performance of the grade 12
learners in English as a second language on Ordinary level in the Oshana region was unsatisfactory.
In fact, only a minority (18.52 percent) of the grade 12 learners obtained a grading in the range of A to
D in comparison to the majority (81.48 percent) of learners who obtained a grading of E to U. The poor
performance was attributed to: poor sentence structure, syllabification and spelling (Directorate of
National Examination and Assessment, 2007-2010). The causes of these low performance rates
however, were not scientifically explored in this region. Therefore this study embarked on an
investigation in order to identify the reasons behind the low performance rates of the grade 12
Oshiwambo speaking learners of English and to determine whether the impressionistic results from
the Directorate’s report correlate with the present study’s findings. In order to understand the
dynamic linguistic system of the learners, a contrastive analysis of Oshiwambo and English was
done in order to investigate the potential origins of some of the errors. An error analysis approach
was also used to identify, classify and interpret the non-standard forms produced by the learners
in their written work. Based on the results obtained from this study, a more comprehensible
assessment rubric was devised to help identify learners’ written errors.
A group of 100 learners from five different schools in the Oshana region was asked to write an
essay of 150 to 200 words in English. The essays were analysed using Corder’s (1967) conceptual
framework which outlines the steps that a researcher uses when undertaking an error analysis
study. The errors were categorised according to Keshavarz’s (2006) linguistic error taxonomy.
Based on this taxonomy, the results revealed that learners largely made errors in the following
categories: phonology/orthography, morpho-syntax, lexico-semantics, discourse and techniquepunctuation.
The study concluded that these errors were most likely due to: first language
interference, overgeneralisation, ignorance of rule restriction and carelessness. Other proposed
probable causes were context of learning and lack of knowledge of English grammar.
The study makes a significant contribution, in that the findings can be used as a guide for the
Namibian Ministry of Education in improving the status quo at schools and informing the line
Ministry on various methods of dealing with language difficulties faced by learners. The findings
can also empower teachers to help learners with difficulties in English language learning, thereby
enabling learners to improve their English language proficiency. The study has proposed methods
of intervention in order to facilitate the teaching of English as a second language in the Oshana
region. In addition, the study has devised an easily applied assessment rubric that will assist in
identifying non-standard forms of language used by learners. The reason for designing a new rubric
is because the rubric which is currently being used is believed to be subjective, inconsistent and
lacks transparency
Ineffaceable
No full textBy referring to established concepts and theories which contemplate our experiences in relation to others and space, this thesis examines the interactions and responses of an audience during various participatory artworks. I draw upon Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and Elizabeth Grosz’ Architecture From The Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space in order to understand our interactions with other people, our interactions inside an environment, and the objects and ceremonies we use during these interactions. I align these experiences with the methods which are employed to anticipate and create the interactions between an audience and a participatory artwork. Our daily interactions can be considered a frame that an artist shapes for their represented situation to allow, provide and guide an audience towards their possibilities for movements and actions within a participatory artwork. The interactions that occur in participatory art are done in relation to others and include groups of people interacting with each other rather than an individual disembodied experience. I refer to Claire Bishop in her book, Artificial Hells, and Nicolas Bourriaud in Relational Aesthetics in order to define participatory art. In defining participatory art I focus on the idea that participation is a social activity without which the artwork does not function or exist. I unravel Brett Bailey’s Exhibit A, Anthea Moys Anthea Moys vs The City of Grahamstown and Christian Boltanski’s Personnes in terms of the frame they use to construct participation and interaction. I refer to my own exhibition Ineffaceable as an exploration of these frames which encourage participation. The inside and the outside are a constant theme throughout this thesis and my exhibition. This thematic re-emerges in relation to a number of opposing and fluctuating dynamics: the self and the other; the object and the subject; familiarity and strangeness; the participator and the spectator; the immersive and the disembodied; and the artwork and the audience. Participatory art has not been sufficiently explored particularly in South Africa with South African case studies and particularly from a practical standpoint that includes methodologies for creating participation. This thesis hopes to enrich and contribute to the contemplations on participatory art by focusing on our interactions with others
