Faculty of Humanities (Research Outputs)

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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.
Addressing artistic research at the Mahatma Gandhi Institute in Mauritius: challenges for a Small Island Developing State in Africa
(Arts Research Africa (ARA), 2020-07) Ramduth, Hans
Can small island contexts, through the extreme simplification of more complex processes that occur on the continents (e.g., ecocide), provide unique insights into binaries such as artist versus researcher, fiction versus non-fiction, and art-making versus writing?
Africanity and Orality in the Films/Videos of Women Filmmakers of the African Diaspora
(Deep Focus: A Film Quarterly, 1998) Ebrahim, Haseenah
In this essay, I consider the role of African cultural heritage and of oral tradition in selected films/videos by women filmmakers of the African Diaspora. for practical purposes, I limit the scope of my analysis to the works of a handful of filmmakers in the United States and the Caribbean: Julie Dash (USA), Euzhan Palcy (Martinique/France), Zeinabu irene Davis (USA), and Gloria Rolando (Cuba).
Afrocuban religions in Sara Gomez's one way or another and Gloria Ronaldo's Oggun
(The Western Journal of Black Studies, 1998) Ebrahim, Haseenah
This paper explores the depiction of Afrocuban religions in two films - Sara Gomez's One way or another(1974/1977) and Gloria Rolando's Oggun: Forever present(1991).A (Western) feminist's analysis of Gomez's One way or another characterizes Abakua and Santeria as "voodoo" - not only collapsing three different Afro-Carribean religious traditions, but also reflecting Marxistbiases that exclude (ironically) a recognition that Gomez's depictions of Abakua and Santeria reflect a gendered perspective.Rolando's Oggun reflects a recent trend in Cuban cinema to celebrate Afrocuban religious practices.Oggun's stunning visuals, compelling song and dance sequences, and fascinating mythology provoke a desire to understand the role and impact of this remarkable religious tradition in Cuban society.
An assessment of skills supply and demand for renewable energy, energy efficiency, and regional energy integration
(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2022) Centre for Researching Education & Labour (REAL); University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
The SADC region relies heavily on energy produced from coal and water and has grappled with an energy crisis over the years, seen through insufficient and inefficient energy supply. This crisis is mostly a result of a changing climate, including droughts, outdated infrastructure, and the depletion of natural resources. These natural resources include coal and gas, and their use for power generation further contributes to climate change, who’s impacts are being faced globally. There has therefore been a desire and a call to shift towards renewable energy (RE) in the SADC region, which has the resources and conditions to make this shift. This is driven by the SADC Protocol on Energy and the various national policies. The SADC Protocol on Energy (SADC 20) identifies a number of strategic plans over the last 10 years which build on previous policies. These include “the Regional Energy Access Strategy and Action Plan 2020 to 2030 (SADC, 2020), the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Strategy and Action Plan 2016 to 2030 (SADC, 2016), the SADC Industrial Energy Efficiency Programme and the development of the Regional Gas Master Plan” (SADC, 1996). Implementation has occurred at different rates in the various member states, and the 2018 SADC Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Status Report states that “Since 2015, SADC Member States have greatly increased their commitment to renewable energy and energy efficiency, including important innovations to stimulate mini-grids and distributed renewable energy” (SADC, 2018). This is also the case in regional integration as per the SADC Regional Indicative Strategic Development Plan (RISDP) 2020–2030 (SADC 2020) and through the Southern African Power Pool (SAPP) and its regional electricity plans, trading platforms, and policy and regulatory alignment initiatives (SAPP, 2017) together with the SADC Regional Electricity Regulatory Association (RERA, 2022). This transition to RE, however, needs to be just, thereby ensuring that the current workforce is protected and that the skills ecosystem is prepared not only to respond to current demands but those required to transition to a more just and resilient energy system.
The anatomy of ‘race trouble’ in online interactions
(Taylor & Francis, 2014-01) Cresswell, Catherine; Whitehead, Kevin A; Durrheim, Kevin
South Africa has a long history of race-related conflicts in a variety of settings, but the use of the concept ‘racism’ to analyse such conflicts is characterized by theoretical and methodological difficulties. In this article, we apply the alternative ‘race trouble’ framework developed by Durrheim, Mtose, and Brown (2011) to the examination of racialized conflicts in online newspaper forums. We analyse the conflicts using an approach informed by conversation analytic and discursive psychological techniques, focusing in particular on the emergence and use of race and racism as interactional resources. Our findings reveal some mechanisms through which the continuing salience of race in South Africa comes to be reproduced in everyday interactions, thereby suggesting reasons why race continues to garner social and cultural importance. Disagreements over the nature of racism were also recurrent in the exchanges that we examined, emonstrating the contested and shifting meanings of this concept in everyday interactions.
Applying upstream interventions for interpersonal violence prevention: An uphill struggle in low- to middle-income contexts
(Health Policy, 2010) Matzopoulos, Richard; Bowman, Brett; Mathews, Shanaaz; Myers, Jonny
In South Africa’s Western Cape province, interpersonal violence was identified among the key prevention priorities in the provincial government’s Burden of Disease (BoD) Reduction project. To date, there are no adequate systematic reviews of the full range of potential intervention strategies. In response, available data and the literature on risk factors and prevention strategies for interpersonal violence were reviewed with a view to providing policy makers with an inventory of interventions for application. Given the predominance of upstream factors in driving the province’s rates of interpersonal violence, efforts to address its burden require an intersectoral approach. Achievable short-term targets are also required to offset the long-term nature of the strategies most likely to affect fundamental shifts. Documentation and evaluation will be important to drive long-term investment, ensure effectiveness and enable replication of successful programmes and should be considered imperative by interpersonal violence prevention policymakers in other low- to middle-income contexts.
Are the "boys" at Pixar afraid of little girls?
(Journal of Film and Video, 2015) Ebrahim, Haseenah
The notion that American animated films are somehow excluded from ideological concerns, that they are “ideologically empty,” so to speak, reflects a widespread perception within both the USA and South Africa that children’s films are just innocent, escapist, fun. Walt Disney himself was known to perpetuate this perception by, somewhat disingenuously, remarking that “we just make the pictures, and let the professors tell us what they mean” (quoted in Bell, Haas and Sells 1). Although sometimes tongue-in-cheek, I examine Pixar’s construction of little girls within the context of a brand image of Pixar’s animator-directors as “boys at heart”--that is, as Peter Pan types who have never really grown up. I explore whether Pixar’s films reflect a certain apprehension about little girls that can, perhaps, be likened to the way young boys often display a notable ambivalence toward girls. Pixar’s little girls—Hannah, Molly, Boo, Darla and Bonnie and Daisy—are not always so “sugar and spice and everything nice,” but rather embody toxicity to varying degrees (though not always seriously), becoming a source of fear, pain, or humiliation to a number of male characters in several Pixar films. What initially appears to suggest an aversion to little girls emerges as a more complex construction of little girls by the “boys” at Pixar.
Artistic research and African musical performance: listening beyond Euro-American canons
(Arts Research Africa (ARA), 2020-07) Pyper, Brett
Are certain forms of African music-making inherently advantaged or disadvantaged through engagement with artistic research? How does the quest to advance decoloniality factor into such efforts? What does such belated recognition mean for African musics and more general African arts practice outside academia?
Artistic Research and the City Space: New Orientations and Collaborations
(Arts Research Africa (ARA), 2022-09-16) Winter, Stefan
This paper explores the evolving relationship between artistic research, architecture, and urban design in the context of shifting paradigms in the understanding of architecture and urban development. It highlights the transition from top-down planning to inclusive bottom-up processes and emphasises the importance of perceiving the city as a habitat rather than just a built environment. The historical precedents of artistic avantgarde movements, such as dérive and psychogeography, are examined, and their limitations in the contemporary context are discussed. The potential of artistic research to contribute to sustainability in ecological, economic, and societal dimensions is explored through various examples. Overall, the paper argues for the transformative power of artistic research in shaping future city spaces.
Artistic Research and the Institution: a cautionary tale
(Arts Research Africa (ARA), 2020-07) Fleishman, Mark
What impact do the specific institutional contexts in which we produce research have on the artwork? What would an ethical approach to the work of art-making entail with reference to these institutional pressures/distortions?
Artistic Research as African Epistemology
(Arts Research Africa (ARA), 2020-07) Stolp, Mareli
Can artistic research be understood as an African epistemology? Through a mapping of the field of African epistemology together with the key notions of artistic research, this paper argues for the decolonising potential of artistic research in Africa.
Artistic research in Africa with specific reference to South Africa and Zimbabwe: formulating the theory of Afroscenology
(Arts Research Africa (ARA), 2020) Ravengai, Samuel
How can artistic research offer the opportunity to create knowledge based on African practice and produced from the African context? This presentation will delineate seven approaches to artistic research and argue for decolonial imperatives.
Artistic research in music as Doctoral Study: challenges and opportunities for Universities in South Africa
(Arts Research Africa (ARA), 2020-07) Sandmeier, Rebekka
What are the opportunities and challenges of doctoral studies in South Africa, in music, through artistic research? What are the definitions of research— specifically artistic research—in the existing educational policies, and how can research and creative practice become one in a doctoral thesis?
Arts Research Africa 2022 Conference - Introduction
(Arts Research Africa (ARA), 2022) Doherty, Christo
In the two years which have elapsed between the first and second Arts Research Africa conferences, the recognition of creative practice as a research modality in South Africa has increased in leaps and bounds. The question of what to call this research modality, be it practise-based, or practice-led, or artistic research remains unresolved, but these two conferences have gathered together a stimulating array of approaches to this new mode of research, while raising the banner for ‘artistic research’. This second conference, with its focus on how artistic research has transformed pedagogy as well as art practice in Africa, recognises that many academic practitioners, who have themselves completed advanced degrees with a creative practice component, are now looking to pass these learnings to their students through a transformed pedagogy. The 2022 conference thus provides an opportunity to assess the pattern of this development, still largely limited in Africa to the South African arts and education environment. The first ARA Conference was held as a live event on Wits campus in February 2020.1 Unknown to the organisers or any of the participants, the world was on the brink of the Covid-19 epidemic, and the draconian responses to the crisis by national governments, which locked down most of the world for the rest of 2020 and 2021. As a live event, however, the 2020 conference gave the ARA organisers the opportunity to experiment with different formats of presentation, breaking with the conventional mode of paper presentations and instead offering space for workshops and what we called ‘lecture-performances’ or ‘lecture-demonstrations’. The second conference, planned during the uncertainty that followed the waning of the pandemic in 2021/22, was initially envisaged as an entirely online event; but as the effects of the pandemic began to subside, we chose to offer the first two days as a purely online event to facilitate international engagement, and a third, final day, again on Wits campus, as a live face-to-face event. Sadly, as a result of this structure, the bulk of the 2022 conference presentations were conventional textual outputs, albeit often reporting on creative research that was embodied or performative in nature.
Arts Research Africa 2022 Conference Proceedings - Full
(Arts Research Africa (ARA), 2022) Doherty, Christo
In the two years which have elapsed between the first and second Arts Research Africa conferences, the recognition of creative practice as a research modality in South Africa has increased in leaps and bounds. The question of what to call this research modality, be it practice-based, or practice-led, or artistic research remains unresolved, but these two conferences have gathered together a stimulating array of approaches to this new mode of research, while raising the banner for ‘artistic research’. This second conference, with its focus on how artistic research has transformed pedagogy as well as art practice in Africa, recognises that many academic practitioners, who have themselves completed advanced degrees with a creative practice component, are now looking to pass these learnings to their students through a transformed pedagogy. The 2022 conference thus provides an opportunity to assess the pattern of this development, still largely limited in Africa to the South African arts and education environment.
Beyond ‘supply and demand’: moving from skills ‘planning’ to seeing skills as endogenous to the economy
(2022-11) Allais, Stephanie Matseleng
This article questions the notion of supply and demand of skills, and, accordingly, the rules and tools that have been developed for skills anticipation in South Africa. I argue that there is nowhere ‘outside’ of the economy where skills are produced. Rather, a society and an economy need to be seen as an organism, where skill formation is a complex set of moving parts. The concept of supply and demand is unhelpful to think about skill formation because it directs our attention towards specific moving parts in isolation from the broader factors that shape them. This explains why, despite the existence of extensive tools and institutions for skills anticipation, and numerous institutions for social dialogue and stakeholder engagement, researchers and policy-makers argue that South Africa has an inadequate supply of the skills that are needed in the workplace and concomitant skills mismatches. The article also presents more specific problems with the rules and tools, particularly in the way the systems and institutions for understanding labour market demand interact with the systems and tools for the supply of skills – especially those tools that govern and shape skills provision. It argues further that, whereas there are real problems with these rules and tools, and while they can certainly be improved, the broad goals that they are intended to achieve will not be attained even with better tools, but that different conceptual lenses are required instead.
Bridging risk and enactment: the role of psychology in leading psychosocial research to augment the public health approach to violence in South Africa
(2014) Bowman, Brett; Stevens, Garth; Eagle, Gillian; Maztopoulos, Richard
In the wake of apartheid, many in the South African health and social sciences shifted their orientation to understanding violence. Rather than approaching violence as a criminal problem, post-apartheid scholarship surfaced violence as a threat to national health. This re-orientation was well aligned with a global groundswell that culminated in the World Health Assembly’s 1996 declaration of violence as a public health problem. In response, researchers and other stakeholders have committed to the public health approach to violence in South Africa. Despite some unquestionable successes in applying this approach, violence remains a critical social issue and its recalcitrantly high rates signal that there is still much work to be done. One avenue for more focussed research concerns understanding the mechanisms by which upstream risk factors for violence are translated into actual enactments. We argue that South African psychology is well placed to provide greater resolution to this focus. We begin by providing a brief overview of the public health approach to violence. We then point to three specific areas in which the limits to our understanding of the way that downstream psychological and upstream social risk factors converge in situations of violence, compromise the theoretical and prevention traction promised by this approach and chart several basic psychosocial research coordinates for South African psychology. Steering future studies of violence by these coordinates would go some way to addressing these limits and, in so doing, extend on the substantial gains already yielded by the public health approach to violence in South Africa.
Building capacity for green, just and sustainable futures – a new knowledge field requiring transformative research methodology
(2020) Rosenberg, Eureta; Presha Ramsarup; Sibusisiwe Gumede; Heila Lotz-Sisitka
Education has contributed to a society-wide awareness of environmental issues, and we are increasingly confronted with the need for new ways to generate energy, save water and reduce pollution. Thus new forms of work are emerging and government, employers and educators need to know what ‘green’ skills South Africa needs and has. This creates a new demand for ‘green skills’ research. We propose that this new knowledge field – like some other educational fields – requires a transformative approach to research methodology. In conducting reviews of existing research, we found that a transformative approach requires a reframing of key concepts commonly used in researching work and learning; multi-layered, mixed method studies; researching within and across diverse knowledge fields including non-traditional fields; and both newly configured national platforms and new conceptual frameworks to help us integrate coherently across these. Critical realism is presented as a helpful underpinning for such conceptual frameworks, and implications for how universities prepare educational researchers are flagged.
Children, pathology and politics: a genealogy of the paedophile in South Africa between 1944 and 2004
(South African Journal of Psychology, 2010) Bowman, Brett
By the early 1990s the paedophile as a ‘type’ of child sexual abuse (CSA) perpetrator was prioritised for study and intervention by the South African socio-medical sciences and cases of paedophilia featured prominently in the media reporting of the time. Drawing on the genealogical method as derived from Michel Foucault, this study aimed to account for this relatively recent emergence of the paedophile as an object of socio-medical study and social anxiety within the South African archive. Based on an analysis of archival texts against the backdrop of international biopolitics and local conditions of political possibility, the genealogy contends that the early figure of the paedophile was an instrument and effect of apartheid biopolitics. The paedophile was prioritised for research and escalated as social threat in the public imagination as part of the broader apartheid project aimed at protecting white hegemony through the ongoing surveillance of and health interventions directed towards South Africa’s white children. While the apartheid project constructed black children as posing fundamental threats to white supremacy, discourses beginning in the mid-1980s repositioned them as vulnerable victims of apartheid itself. It was from within these discourses that child sexual abuse (CSA) as a public health concern began to crystallise. By locating blackness within the fields of discipline and desire, the material conditions for an ever-expanding net of sexual surveillance were established. The study thus demonstrates that even the paedophile cannot be effectively researched without considering the historical co-ordinates that so powerfully contoured its emergence as an important object of study and social intervention within South Africa’s highly racialised systems of thought.

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