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Demobilisation, reintegration, rationalisation and peacebuilding in South Africa
No full textBibliography: p. 173-189
A gendered inquiry into South Africa’s agrarian question and agro-food system trends
No full textA dissertation submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg , School of Social Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2022South Africa’s agrarian question has been shaped by the evolution of racial capitalism for nearly four centuries. Dispossession, commodification, and social stratification continue to characterise the country’s agrarian system and broader social structure. However, these three structural features exist in a 21st century finance-led racial capitalist system, which has decoupled socio-economic development from rural-based agrarian livelihoods and exacerbated uneven spatial development across the country. Sixty-seven per cent of the population resides in urban areas and deagrarianisation continues to expand. The country’s agro-food system is highly industrialised, with strong upstream and downstream linkages to other economic sectors dominated by large corporates along value chains. Yet these structural shifts, created through centuries of dispossession and racially segregated industrialisation, have not totally obliterated the role of agrarian livelihood practices in households or community social reproduction. This study used a gendered lens to explore the agrarian political economy structural changes mentioned above, drawing primarily on the experiences of black African women from low-income communities. The discussions elevate gendered socio-economic and sociological impacts of structural agrarian changes in South Africa, which are often underplayed in agrarian political economy literature focusing on transforming race or class relations. More importantly, the study examined the women’s individual and communal agentic agrarian livelihood practices. The main aim was to explore significant lessons for contributing towards debates on alternative agro-food systems in South Africa. Feminist and extended case methodology framed the overall methodological approach in the study, and data was obtained from semi-structured individual and focus group interviews. I relied on Marxist feminist and black feminist political economy literature to develop the study’s theoretical framework and analytical concepts. The central argument of the study is anchored on the following three points. Firstly, South Africa’s post-apartheid agro-food system structural change logic advances narrow agrarian transformation goals, which seek to change racial ownership patterns and integrate ‘emerging’ women farmers into existing commercial agro-food system market structures. This approach has led to negative gendered socio-economic impacts because it fails to address structural social reproduction dimensions that cause gender disparities in the first place. Secondly, black African women have created dynamic agrarian subsistence practices in response to their structural socio-economic challenges, which form part of multiple livelihood and income sources. Their contribution towards local economic v development through these subsistence livelihood practices is overlooked because it takes place outside formal markets. Thus, it is imperative to examine and study these livelihood practices with the aim of obtaining key lessons on how to support marginalised black African women who view agrarian development as an importance source of social reproduction in their communities. Thirdly, black African women-led agency goes beyond orthodox productivism approaches in studying agrarian and non-agrarian livelihood strategies. This study revealed other essential elements in the women’s agentic practices such as solidarity building, experiential learning, indigenous knowledge sharing and creating spaces for formulating women-led public policy demands.MM202
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Hidden consequences of state violence: Spinal cord injuries in Soweto, South Africa
No full textMany spinal cord injured people in Soweto are victims of direct, repressive state violence, such as police shootings. All of them are victims of the indirect structural violence that is institutionalized against both blacks and disabled people in South Africa. SCI people in Soweto are therefore subject to two sources of disadvantage and exclusion. This paper describes a survey of 88 SCI Sowetans. Their lives are marked by poverty and social isolation. Their experiences bring into sharp focus some of the concrete and hidden results of apartheid as a violent and disabling system.South Africa violence discrimination spinal cord injuries disability
Review of Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk\u27s \u27Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism\u27
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William Cock: Hero of Villain?
No full textThe answer to this question lies in whether the reader believes that the present social order in South Africa is just and sustainable, and how the colonialism contributed to that order. The question that follows is whether the 1820 settlers warrant our contempt or admiration? An honest answer involves discarding the conventional view of them as a homogenous social category. Instead, we need to recognize that they included very different people, some of whom brought indentured servants with them, some were professional people, but the majority of the settlers were the victims of a heartless colonial project
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