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Explicating Abjection – Historically White Universities creating Natives of Nowhere?
Get PDFIn Ebrahim Patel’s, the world of Nat Nakasa: A collection of letters, Nathaniel Nakasa’s term ‘Native of Nowhere’ describes Nakasa’s experience of leaving South Africa on an exit permit. Negotiating his classification as an aggressor of the state, Nakasa’s expression signals his confrontation with his expendability as a Native in a country founded on the use of Blackness as Blackbodies that prop up white supremacy and rule. ‘Native of Nowhere’ here details how historically white universities in South Africa perpetuate ontological negations, through denying Blackness in institutions formerly reserved for whiteness. Through an analysis that implicitly posits education as a public good, I argue for the use of education as an emancipatory tool. Using Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and No thing ness to analyse negation, I develop the ‘Native of Nowhere’ to articulate a critical pedagogy, which delivers on the emancipatory potential of education
Offsetting deficit conceptualisations: methodological considerations for higher education research
Get PDFThis paper contributes to the current introspection in the academic development community that critiques the persistent conceptualisations of students as deficient. Deficit discourses are also implicated in many of the student support, curriculum and pedagogic initiatives employed across the higher education sector. The argument developed here, unlike most of the existing debates which focus on pedagogic or institutional initiatives, explores how the research interests and methodological choices of academic developers and researchers could incorporate sensitivity against deficit conceptions and foster more contextualised accounts of students and their learning. This article uses an ethnographic study into the assignment practices of vocational higher education students to show how certain methodological and theoretical choices engender anti-deficit conceptualisations. The study’s analytic framework uses the concepts of literacy practices and knowledge recontextualisation to place analytic attention on both the students’ assignment practices and the influence of curriculum decision making on such practices
Translanguaging as an approach to address language inequality in South African higher education: summary writing skills development
Get PDFLiteracy challenges among the majority of African-language speaking students learning through the medium of English impact on unequal throughput in South African higher education. To address this social injustice issue, academic literacy practitioners have a critical role to play in the inclusion of linguistic diversity in higher education. This requires that the curriculum be revised in such a way that classroom activities and assessments give recognition to students’ African languages. In this paper, we outline how translanguaging as a teaching and learning approach promises to develop literacy in both the students’ African languages and English. The paper describes a summary skills development teaching approach and its accompanying activities which enable the students to move between isiZulu and English. The summary writing activities are followed by a guided reflection note from students on their perceptions and experiences of the new communicative approach that has been introduced to them. The majority of participants express positive perceptions of this approach as they find it familiar to what they are used to doing when learning on their own. It is hoped that the translanguaging approach would contribute to the promotion of equality in language and literacy development in the South African higher education sector
Academic literacies: looking back in order to look forward
Get PDFThis paper argues that we need to reclaim the institutional perspective that was inherent in some of the early work in the field of academic literacies. It offers a brief overview of the emergence of the field and examines some key developments, including an examination of areas of tension with regard to the use of the term academic literacies. It also points to the ways in which the field is drawing in valuable and complementary theoretical and methodological frames, latterly with respect to significant developments in the digital landscape in higher education. The author concludes that academic literacies researchers have ongoing work to do with regard to the changing contexts of higher education and the need to push against the relentless redefinition of the university for its commercial and transfer value as opposed to its intellectual or critical value
Innocence Betrayed: Free Omar Askia Ali After 32 Years in Prison
Get PDFBackground: Growing up as teenagers in the 1950s and the beginning of the 60s was for many of us an infinitely seductive and unstintingly exhilarating experience, because Africa was confidently shaking off the burden of colonialism and was on the march to great expectations. The pulsating pace of the march was irresistibly euphoric, and reading the Evening News in the late afternoons with Oko Addy became a most compelling addiction
Encountering Death
Get PDFBackground: My flight from London Heathrow to New York JFK on April 2, 2004 almost didn\u27t make it. The aircraft, British Airways Flight 183, nearly came down in flames, killing all 220 passengers on board. We took off dead on time at 20 hours, and all seemed normal. As always, everyone seemed to be minding their own business -reading, watching a movie, listening to music, or going straight to sleep
Diversionary tactics on Darfur
No full textBackground:
Diversionary tactics seem to be the order of the day where Darfur is concerned. The real tragedy of Darfur - the suffering of its people - has been forgotten under a sea of pointless initiatives. all of which seem to have only one goal in mind: to create enough confusion and chaos that the status quo will prevail. On the ground - and contrary to prevailing diplomatic speak - people continue to be killed and targeted in the Jcbel Marra area by government forces that now have carte blanche to do what they like. Meanwhile, day after day we are treated to a circus-like environment in which more and more competing initiatives are announced. Of course none of them have a hope of working, but that isn\u27t the point. For most of those involved, self-interest and gee-political gamesmanship have been put before human suffering - a point that is not lost on those living through this nightmare every day on the ground
Haiti: The Hate and the Quake
Get PDFBackground: Buried beneath the rubble of imperial propaganda, out of both Western Europe and the United States, is the evidence which sho11 s that Haiti\u27s independence was defeated by an aggressive North-Atlantic alliance that could not! imagine their world inhabited by a free regime of Africans as representatives of the newly emerging democracy.
Prologue on Garvey
Get PDFBackground: On 10th November 1964, a British Overseas Airways plane from London carrying a casket draped in a Red, Green and Black flag landed at the airport in Kingston: the casket was accompanied by Mr and Mrs Thomas Watson Harvey and Mrs J Alfred Ferguson, all African-Americans and respectively the President-General and his wife and the special representative of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).