1. Academic Wits Research Publications (Faculties submissions)

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Start date: 2010End date: 2011

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    The shift to outcomes based frameworks: key problems from a critical perspective
    (The Federal Institute for Adult Education (bifeb), 2011) Michael, Young; Allais, Stephanie Matseleng
    This paper takes a step back from the discussions and debates about qualifications frameworks per se, to think more broadly about the role of „qualifications“ in educational reform. The aims of the paper are to locate the reform of qualifications in its broader social and institutional context, to propose a way of conceptualizing the change from qualification systems as they have emerged historically to qualifications frameworks andoutcomes-based qualifications and to explore the tensions involved in the different goals that the introduction of a (National) Qualifications Framework – (N)QF will achieve. We argue that what is at stake in current reforms is the role of educational institutions in the education and training of the next generation, the balance between institution-based education and informal (in some cases work-based) learning, and the ways in which trust in qualifications is established and maintained. Our two-model analysis explores the balance between an emphasis on institutions and outcomes. This paper was written to provoke debate, and help all involved in researching qualifications frameworks to think more clearly about the issues.
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    Gendered transformation in South African jurisprudence: poor women and the Constitutional Court
    (Juta and Co, 2011) Albertyn, Catherine
    Central to the transformative project of the South African Constitution, although not always recognised as such, is the need to address the distinctive forms of poverty and inequality experienced by women. This article explores the extent to which, and how, poor women have been included within the constitutional project, firstly, by describing the complexity of poor women's lives and then through a brief analysis of cases and jurisprudence on equality and socio-economic rights. Underlying these two facets of the article are two key questions: What does the experience of poor women tell us about the meaning of transformation and a transformative Constitution? How can we seek a more transformative (and gendered) understanding of equality and socio-economic rights jurisprudence? The article argues that the lived realities of poor women remind us that the kind of transformation - and transformative legal strategies - that are necessary to generate meaningful change require attention to structure and agency, to redistribution and recognition, to individual and community, to public and private (especially care-giving roles in families), to inequality and poverty. To achieve this through equality and socio-economic rights jurisprudence entails greater care in the choices made by lawyers in selecting and arguing cases, and in advancing critical arguments that push the boundaries of progressive and strongly egalitarian forms of liberalism. It also requires a more gendered jurisprudence in courts where attention to women's socio-economic context is combined with a conscious attempt give meaningful content to the values informing constitutional rights, the gendered interests at stake and the manner in which the application of legal principles, such as reasonableness and fairness, can be shaped to include women. In the end transformation requires the construction of a society in which women and men are afforded equivalent, substantive conditions for exercising the choices that matter to them about how to live their lives, maintain their relationships, raise their children and pursue their aspirations.
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    Legal realism, transformation and the Legacy of Dugard
    (Juta and Co, 2010) Albertyn, Catherine; Davis, Dennis
    John Dugard’s courageous inaugural lecture drew on American realism, modern natural law and South Africa’s liberal tradition to argue that judges might better serve the ends of justice if they recognised their creative role, and replaced their subconscious prejudices and preferences with liberal values of the common law. This turn to legal realism to understand South Africa law was a significant intellectual development. However, its implications remain undeveloped within the theory and practice of law in South Africa. (Critical )legal realism raises significant questions about the nature of law and its role in sustaining public and private power. The lessons of legal realism in relation to the dominant legal method (formalism) and the nature of private law were not really taken up by lawyers and legal academics under apartheid. This meant that South African lawyers were ill-prepared for the challenges of transformation in the legal system, especially in relation to legal method, the form and content of private law and the development of law under ss 8 and 39(2) of the Constitution. Moreover, while progressive lawyers have always recognised the political nature of law – especially under apartheid – this has not always translated into a deeper understanding of how the form and content of our democratic Constitution is contested, and how law and politics seep into one another.
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    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.
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    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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    Public interest litigation in South Africa: special issue introduction
    (Juta, 2011) Klaaren, Jonathan; Dugard, Jackie; Handmaker, Jeff
    Public interest litigation in South Africa. Addresses a diverse range of topics which all fall within a broad definition of public interest litigation in South Africa: refugee rights, environmental rights, inner city as well as informal settlement housing rights, rights to basic services, decent prison conditions and the transnational arena of investor-state arbitrations.
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    Paedophile as Apartheid event: Genealogical lessons for working with the Apartheid Archive
    (DOAJ, 2010-03) Bowman, B; Hook, D
    The narratives that constitute the beginnings of an apartheid archive do well to illustrate the value of collecting, centralising and analysing everyday accounts of apartheid’s subjects. Developing an archive of narratives that give voice to the quotidian experiences of apartheid is a valuable historical strategy. This approach may be usefully mobilised to offset some of the totalising effects of conventional history writing. Notwithstanding this value, an unreflective turn to narrative as a means to reading the socio-historical and political contours of apartheid, risks reducing critique to a symbolic exercise that centres subjectivity and subject positions as the key analytic targets. Such readings may shift the analysis away from the various levels of materiality and power of which these subject positions are both instruments and effects. In an attempt to demonstrate the way that Foucault’s genealogical maxims may be used to counter the danger of centring the subject in history writing, we present some of the key analytic strategies undertaken in a previous study that produced an effective history of the South African paedophile. In so doing, we argue for a re-scoping of the apartheid archive project to include materials required for undertaking histories of the present. This extension would challenge many of the methodological and political constraints implied by limiting the archive to a corpus of memory narratives.
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    Investor-State Arbitration and South Africa's Bilateral Investment Treaty Policy Framework Review
    (Mandela Institute, 2010-01) Klaaren, Jonathan; Schneiderman, David