3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions
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Item The discourses on the right to housing in Gauteng Province, 1994-2008.(2010-05-25T09:15:57Z) Thomas, Christopher GeraldThe post-apartheid government of 1994 is a product of the ‘Age of Rights’. Statemaking processes and the exercise of state powers is managed by the rule of law based on a constitution. Constitutionally recognised rights, and rights protection institutions, animate a transition from a legacy of Black political exclusion and underdevelopment. Intensifying class stratification and inequality constrain Black’s formal realisation of citizenship rights, placing great pressure on creative interpretation of constitutionally legitimated claims. My thesis examines the rights discourse informing the Constitution, particularly issues about the realisation of social and economic rights. I examine the unfolding of discourses on the right to housing between 1994 to 2008, to illustrate of the complexity of the discourse. Episodic housing protests suggest significant degrees of alienation, marginalisation, and disappointment with expectations of citizenship and the non-realisation of social and economic rights. Housing rights is an issue that will affect the democratic consolidation and political stability prospects of the new political order. I examine the interface between macro-economic policies, budgets, and the realisation of housing rights, and assess the impact of an identifiable configuration of forces expected to play important roles in realising a rights culture and broadening the discourse. My study draws on a spectrum of qualitative, interpretive, and analysis of discourse approaches, using data from: published articles, annual reports and archives, speeches, court proceedings and statements, interviews with persons whose scope of activities impact the unfolding of the concerned rights, namely, representatives of government departments, private sector developers, financing institutions, and civil society formations. My main findings are that few actors in the configuration support the view that the Constitution should be changed to make explicit the state’s obligations on the realisation of social and economic rights. Nevertheless, there are isolated cases of people expressing an absolute entitlement sense of rights --- the state should deliver when demands are made. My conclusions are that considerable political unrest about non-realisation of these rights will persist, but will not cause a collapse of the post-1994 political institutions and processes. More likely, political actors, legal scholars and jurists, will persistently engage the prevailing rights discourse and the variety of institutions acting towards their realisation, without effecting drastic changes to these, but always invoking positions about how they still are suited for a post-apartheid transformation project yet need critical interrogation and improvisation.Item Citizenship education in South Africa : a critique of post-apartheid citizenship education policy.(2010-03-04T06:09:45Z) Mathebula, Philemon ThokozaniIt is widely agreed that effective citizenship, whether in well-established democracies or in those in transition to democracy, require some educational preparation. In post-apartheid South Africa, education policy and subsequent curriculum development placed participatory democracy and active citizenship at its centre. Although South African education policy documents have a maximalist tone in places, they collectively reflect a minimalist conception of citizenship and of citizenship education. The focus of my critique of citizenship education policy is the tendency manifest in the state policy documents to undermine democratic participation and active citizenry, conceptions first developed and put into practice in the Greek city-state of Athens. The conception of education for citizenship does not guide the practice in terms accessible to the school’s democratic community. State policy’s concept of students’ democratic participation and representation does not reflect a representative model of democracy in South African schools. Furthermore, extant policy does not envisage democratic citizenship education that is enjoyed by a significant proportion of the South African learners. This minimalist conception of citizenship and of citizenship education is not appropriate for the South African context. This thesis, further, mounts a defence of compulsion, arguing that within the theoretical framework of current theories of the Athenian prototype of democracy, deliberative and representative democracy, compulsory schooling and compulsory citizenship education can be justified on the grounds that they promote individual autonomy and build social cohesion ― towards the common good in South Africa. The recently proposed compulsory citizenship education programmes are not compatible with compulsory citizenship education that is designed to promote active, critical and inquiring South African citizens. These value-based education documents promote obedience, if not unquestioning loyalty, to the South African government. Moreover, neither the Bill of Responsibilities nor the School Pledge offer possible strategies for getting from where we are to where we ought to be. In the final analysis, post-apartheid citizenship education policy’s lack of conceptual clarity, coherence and consistency can be attributed in large part to the conflicting forms and conceptions of citizenship in South Africa. The goals of citizenship education in South Africa would be better served by cosmopolitan ideals, that is, preparing South African learners to act in a local, national and global scale.Item Participation in a community service programme has a positive effect on high school volunteers' empathy.(2008-06-09T05:35:53Z) Barclay, HeatherABSTRACT There is a growing body of research that demonstrates the relationship between identity development, the development of citizenship, and the pedagogy of service learning (Eyler & Giles, 1999; Jones & Hill, 2001, 2003; Rhoad, 1997; Youniss &Yates, 1997). While a review of the effects of community service on elementary and high school participants in the USA provide some indication that participating in service-learning programmes is beneficial to young people, Alt & Medrich (1994) state that there is still relatively little clear, systematic evidence demonstrating the connection between community service and particular affective and educational objectives. It is of concern in the light of the Further Education and Training (FET) Life Orientation (LO) Curriculum’s call for citizenship education (Department of Education, 2003), that no research on ‘community service’ work done by high school learners in South Africa can be located. The studies that link a service- learning or community work pedagogy to the development of empathy have primarily been conducted with college students (Burnett, Hamel, & Long, (2004); Giles, & Eyler, (1993); Jones & Hill (2003); Pratt, (2001); Rhoad, (1997)). Although there is some research with adolescents (Hamilton & Fenzel, (1988); Leming, (2001); Middleton, & Kelly (1996); Yates. & Youniss, (1996), it has primarily focused on social and identity development in community service settings and not specifically on empathy. However Hatcher’s (1994) research with adolescents and college students provides indications that empathy is developmental and can be elicited by environmental intervention and that some aspects of empathy can be taught to adolescents if a developmental shift is caught. Key words: empathy, service learning, community work, identity, citizenshipItem Citizenship Education in Malawi: A critique in defence of maximal citizenship(2006-11-03T08:00:06Z) Divala, Joseph JinjaThis dissertation analyses assumptions about citizenship education in Malawi since the reintroduction of multiparty democracy in 1993 and reveals a minimalist conception of citizenship. It asserts that Malawi’s historical and traditional context require concerted efforts towards participatory citizenship if democracy is to be strengthened and protected. Central to the discussion are conceptual distinctions between minimal and maximal citizenship alongside a discussion of concepts of freedom, human rights and development, which can be attributed to minimal and maximal conceptions of citizenship. The dissertation argues that deliberative and participatory forms of democracy, with their parallel notions of contestatory and republican freedoms and rights, are more attuned to creating an active and strong citizenship while at the same time developing a positive relationship between democratic participation and participation in local and national development, a relationship which representative approaches in Malawi seemingly disavow.Item Social citizenship and the transformations of wage labour in the making of Post-Apartheid South Africa, 1994-2001(2006-10-27T08:00:31Z) Barchiesi, FrancoThis work is an investigation of the relationships between waged labour and social citizenship during the first decade of post-apartheid democracy in South Africa. In particular, I look at the ways in which changing forms of work and employment have affected workers' access to social security, contributory benefits and non-contributory grants. The dissertation analyses two case studies (workers in the glass, paper and metal industry in the East Rand and Johannesburg municipal employees) by focusing on how rising unemployment, job losses, precariousness and casualisation impact on employees' social provisions. The research is connected to theoretical debates that, in the developed and the developing world, have emphasised the importance of the waged condition and of labour movements in expanding social security as part of the broader concept of social citizenship. In classical theorisations, from T.H. Marshall to G. Esping-Andersen, social citizenship defines a generation of rights premised on decommodification, or the provision of social goods (including pensions, unemployment benefits, housing, healthcare and municipal services) as entitlements aimed at minimising individual dependence on the labour market. The concept of decommodification underpins this dissertation. My analysis of the relationships between wage labour and social citizenship in South Africa is ultimately an inquiry of the ways in which wage labour and working class organisations have been able to deepen and widen the decommodification of workers’ livelihoods. This conceptual perspective is particularly relevant to the South African case, especially in consideration of the decisive role played by organised labour both in contributing to the downfall of apartheid and in spearheading post-apartheid democratic institutions and progressive social policies. The historical role of organised labour in the South African transition was not confined to workplace issues and unionised workers' concerns, but it also emphasised broader demands for social citizenship rights, decommodified provisions and a politics of community-based alliances. Influential scholarly works have often characterised these aspects under the heading of "social movement unionism". In a post-apartheid scenario, social movement unionism is increasingly embattled due to rising unemployment and "atypical" employment, and to the adoption of market-orientated socioeconomic policies by the post-1994 African National Congress government. Labour's ability to promote agendas for decommodification and social citizenship are concurrently facing uncomfortable realities and problematic questions. Has wage labour fulfilled its "promise" to be a vehicle to expand the social rights of the working class and the poor? In which ways are employment and labour market changes affecting organised labour's ability to expand areas of societal decommodification? Are alternative identities and social citizenship discourses emerging in response to the crisis of stable employment? I address these questions by looking at workers' responses to the crisis of wage labour as emerging in case studies “from below”, and at the ways in which such responses are framed and elaborated within the post-1994 social policy discourse. A second component of my research, therefore, is based on interviews with policy-makers and documentary analysis on the development of social policy from 1994 to 2001, which emphasise shifting policy discourses on the wage laboursocial citizenship interaction. In the final analysis, social citizenship emerges from this work not merely as a static construct, centred on programmes and institutions, but as a terrain of negotiations and a "contested field of signification", shaped by the encounter of institutional narratives and meanings defined by grassroots agency. The result of the research confirms that concepts of "social citizenship" and "wage labour" are profoundly shaped by contradictions determined by underlying social contestation. In fact, respondents in my case studies clearly perceive the crisis of stable, dignified employment as a structural reality that requires systemic policy interventions. On the other hand, no homogenous discourse is emerging in workers’ narratives to challenge deeply entrenched views of inclusion and the social order as based on waged employment. Decommodification discourses, as for example advanced by new social movements, remain therefore substantially limited. Conversely, the policy discourse of democratic South Africa responds to the crisis, when not the actual disappearance, of wage labour as a social reality with an aggressive reassertion of work ethic and wage discipline as vehicles of social insertion and moral virtue. The ANC government often combines these arguments with a clear rejecton of decommodification, often presented as "dependency" on welfare "handouts", which undermines individual incentives for productive jobseeking behaviours. The contradictions between the crisis of wage labour in social practices and modes of reproduction, and the reasserted centrality of wage labour in the policy discourse as the main modality of social citizenship and inclusion opens new directions for research and interrogates changing forms of social identities, contestation and political legitimacy in the South African transition.