Faculty of Humanities (Research Outputs)

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Browsing Faculty of Humanities (Research Outputs) by SDG "SDG-10: Reduced inequalities"

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    A history of the decolonised African theatre aesthetic: projections of an emergent African theatre practice - Afroscenology
    (Routledge, 2024) Ravengai, Samuel
    With the advent of colonialism and its mission to ‘civilise’ Africans by assimilating them into European culture, some African theatre practitioners responded by aping western theatre, the dominant aesthetic being Aristotelian. The rise of Negritude questioned the inferiorisation paradigm, and impacted African theatre by inspiring work based on African material yet still presented in western aesthetics. Later, as Africans resorted to the armed struggle to dismantle colonialism, African theatre also disbanded western aesthetics to adopt Afrocentric ones. The newly formed independent ministries of culture and higher education encouraged the postcolonial university to either start new theatre departments or to decolonise those inherited from the colonial state. Thus, from the 1960s Africanist artist researchers who worked from the academy or practised community service have run experimental theatre companies not affiliated to the academy to create new practice and theories feeding an African theatre curriculum in the academy. Among the first to develop such an African theatre were Ghana, Nigeria, and Tanzania, where most intellectuals had received western education but worked from African creative modes, with results of a syncretic nature. The processes of decolonisation of theatre in Kenya, Zimbabwe, and more recently South Africa have also had a profound effect on the emergent theatre. This chapter historicises this process and formulates the direction and theory of African theatre of the future.
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    Connecting skills planning to provision
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023) Centre for Researching Education & Labour (REAL); University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
    Skills planning and development for the public sector are intrinsically linked to the state’s capacity to deliver on its social service and development mandates.
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    Digestible memories in South Africa’s recent past: processing the Slave Lodge Museum and the memorial to the enslaved
    (Taylor and Francis Group, 2021-07) Cloete, Nicola
    Given the recent oppressive histories of apartheid and colonialism, the legacies of slavery in South Africa are often overlooked in thinking about aspects of post-apartheid democracy’s discursive formulation of race, nation, and reconciliation. This paper analyses how two examples in Cape Town – the permanent exhibition Representing Slavery at the Slave Lodge Museum and the Memorial to the Enslaved in Church Square – represent the historic event of slavery in South Africa. The paper argues that the museum exhibition and the memorial site are instances of memorialisation and simultaneously function as political processes that offer insight into discourses of race and reconciliation in South Africa during the early stages of democracy.
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    Linking knowledge, education and work: exploring occupations
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2022) Centre for Researching Education & Labour (REAL); University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
    To have an occupational identity is to occupy a social and moral as well as economic position, to have mastered bodies of knowledge (both theoretical and practical), and earned a jurisdiction over practice.
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    Where do competency and competency frameworks fit into building a capable and competent state that delivers?
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023) Centre for Researching Education and Labour (REAL); University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
    In the wake of Cabinet approving the 2022 National Framework for the Professionalisation of the Public Service, the debate has intensified around transforming the Public Service Sector (PSS) to contribute to a professional, ethical and capable developmental state. Therefore, a renewed focus has been on professionalising the PSS with competent and skilled employees. The first question to answer is how the sector assesses whether public servants are competent and performing in line with specific behaviours linked to their roles and functions.
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    Why the South African NQF failed: lessons for countries wanting to introduce national qualifications frameworks
    (Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2007) Allais, Stephanie Matseleng
    This article examines the South African National Qualifications Framework as a case study of a particular approach to the design of qualifications frameworks, which revolves around the specification of learning outcomes separate from educational institutions or programmes. It shows how an outcomes-led qualifications framework was seen as a desirable policy intervention by educationalists and reformers across the political spectrum, as outcomes were thought to be a mechanism for improving the quality and quantity of education as well as its relevance to the economy and society, for increasing access to education, and for democratising education. All these claims are based on the idea that outcomes statements are transparent. The article demonstrates that outcomes-based qualifications cannot provide the clear, unambiguous, and explicit statements of competence that would be required for everyone to know what it is that the bearer of a qualification can do. This lack of transparency leads to a further specification of outcomes. This in turn leads to a downward spiral of specification, which never reaches transparency, and an upward spiral of regulations, which is also caught in the logical problem of the downward spiral of specification. This model is not just unnecessary, but could in fact undermine the provision of education. The article suggests that while this type of model appears attractive particularly to poor countries, it is in these countries that it is likely to do the most damage.