3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions
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Item Trespassers? A narrative study of black women academics in science at a South African Universit(2023) Ramafalo, FeliciaThis study explores the narratives of black women academics in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) related fields in order to understand their experiences since their post-apartheid inclusion in higher education. The aim of the research was to explore the stories that black women academics in science tell about their early lives, and careers, and to understand how they negotiate the raced and patriarchal cultures of science disciplines and to study the disruptive possibilities they enable in the sciences. The study follows a narrative approach and uses intersectionality, Critical Race Theory and habitus as theoretical frameworks. Snowball and purposive sampling were used to recruit 10 black women academics between the ages of 25 and 65 who had worked as academics for at least three years and the data was analysed using thematic analysis inflected through the narrative lens. The findings indicate that despite most of the women growing up in working class homes, their parents valued and advocated for the pursuit of education. Some of the participants also attended Model C/private school which allowed them to build their cultural capital which they would later use to navigate the academy. Second, we found that black women academics experience hardships such as bullying, micro-aggressions, gendered and racist interactions that often lead to feelings of isolation, lack of support and limitations on other roles that they have. Lastly, we found that women academics disrupt through an insistence that the future has got be different and by remaining hopeful that attracting more black women into the science field and academia and epistemic rupture will alter the academy. This research extends studies on space, race and gender in higher education.Item The tailored suit : a reimagining of Can Themba's The Suit(2011-09-22) Lelliott, Kitso LynnThis research report examines the period of 1950s Sophiatown and its socio-‐cultural legacy pertaining to race and gender. Though the establishment of a cosmopolitan black identity was significant in its undermining of Nationalist Party segregationist ideology, the struggle for equality was predicated on a racial struggle that subsumed a gendered agenda. The work of Can Themba and Drum magazine, which have become mythologized in the contemporary South African imaginary, are interrogated with particular emphasis on one of Themba’s iconic pieces, The Suit. Through engagement with Themba’s text, this research report foregrounds the processes through which black women have been subjected to multiple, compounded subjugation. In response to the representations of black femininity in The Suit, the film component of this report, The Tailored Suit, privileges the black woman, Matilda’s, articulations. It thus functions to foreground the agency of marginalised subjects. In articulating from the periphery, the subjugated destabilise the hierarchical social structures that would subordinate and objectify them. By engaging the representations in The Suit, part of an iconic historic moment prefiguring the contemporary socio-‐cultural milieu, the reimagining in The Tailored Suit offers a fragmented frame of reference, positing an alternative to a homogenising masculine discourse on history.