UWC Scholar Publishing Support (University of the Western Cape)
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Degrowth in an African periphery: Recentring decoloniality around circular ontologies
Get PDFIn this article Roland Ngam focuses on Africa and the disarticulated colonial model on which it is built and argues that in order to build a fairer system that works for the majority, the world needs to quickly shift to an ecocentric degrowth ontology that leverages Africa’s rich cultural heritage for the wellbeing of all people
Farming support must switch to black smallholders: Focus on urban elite amounts to rural State Capture
Get PDFJob creation in South Africa is an urgent and paramount project and one of the target areas has to be the agricultural sector. Other targeted economic sectors can deliver jobs for urban matriculants and graduates, but JOHN MATISONN argues farming and agro-processing have the potential to provide hundreds of thousands of new jobs for black citizens in rural areas without advanced education as well as for graduates
As we celebrate, we indict: A personal reflection on 30 years of democracy by a rank-and-file activist
Get PDFThis is a personal reflection of a rank-and-file activist on 30 years of democracy in South Africa. Whilst it celebrates the achievements of democracy, it seeks to indict us all for the crime of ukuxhaphaza nokunyela abantu baseMzantsi Afrika, (abusing and trampling on the dignity of the people of South Africa). SHEPI MATI explores how the fight for democracy impacted on our emotions, our hearts and our experience of living under formal democracy.
This year marks 30 years of democracy in South Africa. April 2024 was 360 months since all South Africans – irrespective of colour, class, gender or creed – cast their votes to choose their public representatives for the first time. If we were to count this in days, it amounts to 10,958 days. I still remember the excitement and the buzz in the long snaking queue to cast our votes on that historic Wednesday at the Salt River Town Hall in Cape Town. I seek to trace my own personal journey as a young person belonging to a generation who, in the words of Franz Fanon, took up the challenge to define their mission and sought to fulfil it
Food systems transformation in Zimbabwe: Effectiveness of participatory monitoring and evaluation
Get PDFThe usefulness of participatory monitoring and evaluation (PM&E) in food systems transformation in Africa remains poorly explored. JOSEPH TINARWO, VAIN JARBANDHAN and AARAM GWIZA explain how PM&E is designed to measure programme effectiveness and is geared towards promoting programme ownership, empowering beneficiaries, enhancing transparency and accountability, and improving the projects and programmes. However, they caution that the effectiveness of PM&E in food system transformation requires adequate budgetary support, rolling capacity-building initiatives, multistakeholder partnerships, policy integration, and indigenous knowledge-sharing and learning practices
Life Esidimeni: Portraits of Lives Lost
Get PDFIt’s hard going, but readers of Life Esidimeni: Portraits of Lives Lost must keep going to the very last page of this book because it is our responsibility as citizens to make sure this tragedy never happens again and that those in positions of authority who abuse their power are called to account. “That is what the inquest has been about – justice through accountability,” Adila Hassim, lead counsel in the Life Esidimeni arbitration and inquest, writes in the closing essay. Hassim reminds us that the Life Esidimeni tragedy would have been avoided if those in charge did what they were supposed to do
Two unlikely bedfellows: Towards a decolonial unconference methodology
Get PDFThis paper examines a specific unconferencing methodology designed for the HELTASA (un)conference, an international online event held in 2021 in South Africa. Drawing from the principles of unconferencing and decolonisation, the description of the unconferencing methodology in this paper is interspersed with collective autoethnographic reflections, collected through individual and collective writing engagements, to engage with our complex narratives as designers, facilitators and presenters/participants of this (Un)Conference. Through selected vignettes of reflective moments in planning and facilitating this (un)conference, we explore opportunities and challenges when adopting both principles of unconferencing and decolonisation in our practice. We end the paper with a discussion of the possibilities of adopting a decolonial unconferencing model in the global South through a colonial matrix of power
South African new academics’ experiences of precarity: Becoming and unbecoming the condition of coloniality through collective reflexivity
Get PDFThe transition into Higher Education can be complex with South African new academics expected to drive institutional change and social transformation. We examine precarity from our situated geopolitical positioning, as a condition of coloniality and neoliberal forces. Our focus on racially marginalised new academics straddling multiple pedagogical roles addresses the challenges of needing to become collective reflexive agents, yet also unbecome conditions of coloniality. Through autoethnography, lived experiences of precarity as affective states are shown to co-produce displaced estrangement, undermine a coherent sense of self, and reinscribe colonial modes of doing and being. We argue that knowledge rooted in African-centred epistemologies offers new academics’ ways to collectively rally together to disrupt the status quo. This approach enriches the minimally understood concept of collective reflexivity. Our findings underscore the value of bringing decolonisation perspectives into conversation with reflexivity theories. We propose collective reflexivity can help new academics navigate their situational challenges
Mathematical meaning construction in language, tables, and images: The potential utility of language proficiency development in numeracy teaching
Get PDFNumeracy entails a facility for communicating mathematical knowledge in diverse contexts. Indeed, large scale standardised assessments have demonstrated that numeracy is associated with both mathematics and language proficiency. And yet, while research in mathematics education in schools has demonstrated the utility of taking a discursive view of mathematics, similar developments in higher education studies are scarce. Moreover, as teaching interventions in numeracy may lead to tensions between mathematical and disciplinary knowledge, the prospect of including language proficiency development is challenging. Taking a discursive multimodal view, this study reports on a pilot teaching intervention that introduced explicit language proficiency development into numeracy teaching activities at a prominent South African university. The study found that the participants produced coherent descriptions of statistics when mathematical concepts were related to vocabulary and grammar. These observations suggest that language proficiency development has the potential to realise the goal of teaching mathematical knowledge within disciplinary curricula
