Faculty of Humanities (ETDs)
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Item Fostering commitment as a tool in environmental education to alleviate littering in rural schools(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024) Maunatlala, Phoko MarthaLittering is a major and leading cause of environmental degradation, and a widespread form of waste is plastic. Plastics are useful material which present numerous advantages in the daily lives of people; however, they are a problem for society and the environment. Plastic can have dire implications for both plant and animal species inside and outside water. Its presence can be seen in soil, water and air, and is covered in school subjects such as life sciences, agricultural sciences, geography, life orientation and economics. Despite the recognition of plastic pollution as an environmental issue, littering of plastic is still pervasive in some rural schools in South Africa. Learners do litter, as educators do not put outdoor activities of environmental education into practice. To break down the barriers to practising environmental education in outdoor activities, a behaviour change is necessary. This study applied qualitative, quantitative, observation and interview methods to investigate barriers to anti-littering before and after intervention in two rural schools. Litter education was also employed using photographs of littering in different locations of the two schools. The pictures of the impact of plastic litter on animals living on land and in the water, as well as solutions were taught to both learners and educators. Litter education was coupled with a school environmental policy drafted by the educators of both schools to instruct learners on how to properly dispose of waste. A behaviour changes commitment pledge tool was introduced in both schools as an intervention measure, which encouraged learners to participate in the circular economy, which also encouraged them to treat their environment responsibly. Hence, they pledged to protect animals from being fed plastic. Dustbins and other anti-litter measures such as recycling, reusing and reducing plastic were used to prevent plastic pollution from affecting birds and animals. At school A, learners were introduced to a public and written commitment pledge. At school B, they were introduced to a private and written commitment pledge as an intervention tool. The learners were observed, engaged in sorting, disposed of waste appropriately and practiced the circular economy for four weeks, including follow-ups. The researcher observed that learners who wrote public pledges sorted waste more than those who made written and private pledges.Item Car Culture and Masculinity as Resources for Understanding Road Rage(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024) Mabongo, Qhawekazi Khazimla; Ncube, VuyolwethuAggression on the road and aggressive driving are detrimental to other road users. Road rage may be expressed in multiple behaviours on the road such as violence, tailgating, overtaking when it is not safe to do so, and brake checking. This behaviour poses a threat to the lives of people on the road. The objective of this study was to investigate the existence of masculinity and car culture principles in the way men perceived incidents of road rage. Further, the study aimed to understand how the features of masculinity and car culture are presented in the perceptions men had of road rage. The rationale for this study was motivated by the high prevalence of road accidents, where young men were the most vulnerable to road accidents and road fatalities. Aggressive driving behaviour was the focus of this study as young men were identified as the most common culprits of performing behaviours of this nature. The study adopted a socio-cultural approach to road rage and proposed the use of socio-cultural factors, namely masculinity and car culture, as a framework for the exploration of the psychological experiences related to road rage. The data was collected using nine in-depth interviews structured around three vignettes in the form of videos. The interviews were audio recorded and transcribed. Thematic analysis principles stipulated by Braun and Clarke were utilised to guide the analysis and reporting of the data. The findings of this study were intended to inform interventions for violence and road rage by providing a nuanced understanding of the relationship between risk factors and violence as well as providing insight into the underpinning perceptions of road behaviour and, consequently, road accidents. The main findings indicated that the road is a site for social interactions that are informed by the tenets of masculinity and car culture. Both masculinity and car culture intersect and create complex social dynamics between road users. These identities influence the experience of men on the road as they are a lens for perceiving behaviour, and they also influence the behaviour of men on the road. Additionally, the research demonstrated that masculinity and car culture are related and the fundamental characteristic that underlies both concepts is power.Item Assessing how an alternative waste management system may facilitate subaltern and environmental justice: a thematic analysis of a zero waste pilot case study in South Africa(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024) Van Biljon (née Swart), Johanna Yvonne (Jani)Waste is socio-political – a symbol of our economic and consumerist society. Since the Industrial Revolution, our manufacturing processes and materialist lifestyles produced more hazardous and nondegradable externalities than we were prepared to deal with. With environmental and consumer pressure building, we are at a crossroads between continuing with business-as-usual and justly transitioning over to a systemically different, zero waste society where the focus on waste management shifts to waste prevention so that, like Karl Marx, it challenges and eventually changes production processes, ownership, consumption, and ultimately, our connection with the natural environment and each other. South Africa’s waste landscape is characterised by two things: its reliance on landfills and the thousands of informal waste pickers reclaiming the value of discarded goods. So, what could a zero waste system that is just toward the environment and the subaltern look like in South Africa? In exploring this question, I considered the work of waste pickers, as well as the case of an urban composting initiative for an inner-city market supporting the zero waste philosophy. Synthesising these, I imagine a gradual, deep bottom-up transformation in attitude, behaviour and eventually infrastructure with regard to our relationship with the environment, ownership and use, as well as the revaluation of the material and therefore waste ‘management’. The role and insights of waste pickers and local, informal economies will be crucial and influential. Though South African waste pickers do not yet participate in the organic waste stream on a noticeable scale, the prioritisation of composting by the Warwick Zero Waste project and the National Waste Management Strategy sees the recovery and local, low-tech, low-cost composting of organic waste as a vital starting point in establishing a more regenerative food and waste system that will build solidItem Landscape, Rock Art Recording, Narrative: A Biography of The Harald Pager Archive(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2019) Moodley, Lemishka; Wintjes, JustineIn the early days of the discipline of archaeology, the archaeologist Sir Charles Thomas Newton stated, in a lecture at Oxford University in June 1880, that “the subject-matter of Archaeology is threefold – the Oral, the Written and the Monumental” (Newton 1880, p.3–7). By ‘oral’, he meant expressions of spoken language as a form of patterned communication passed down from the past, which he considered to be as significant as written texts and traces of the built environment. Newton’s statement also resonates with ongoing attempts to make sense of the fragmentary remains of the past by including living sources with links to those remains, often referred to as ‘oral traditions’. I argue that the domain of ‘oral’ could be extended in the contemporary context to refer to the realm of the ‘spoken word’. The spoken word is mobilised in the telling of personal histories of researchers engaged in making sense of the past, consistent with a move towards the study of the production of archaeological knowledge, and the broader context of the history of science. The past, and the investigation of that past, can be easily lost or erased with time, unless it is documented in some form. For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a keen interest in knowing about the world that preceded me. So naturally, movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), The Mummy (1999), Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), 10 000 BC (2008), The Prince of Egypt (1998), Brother Bear (2003) and many others, fascinated and triggered my overactive imagination. These points of inspiration even prompted many crazy shenanigans and adventures that took place in my back yard. Needless to say, my mother was never impressed because her garden was in constant danger of being destroyed through micro-excavations (as I had to find the treasure I buried the previous evening!). However, it was a Pixar animated film — The Croods (2013) — that recently re-ignited my interest in deeper human history. Despite its status as a relatively mainstream commercial animated film, The Croods sparked my curiosity to find ways to visit the past and bring yesterday’s stories into our lives today. After their cave collapses, the first Crood family has to undertake a journey to find a new home. The father, provider and leader of his pack, recounts multiple stories that urge and caution his children to follow the rules described on the cave wall and to not try anything “new”, or generally be curious for that matter. He sees newness as dangerous, with potentially serious repercussions like death. He prefers for them to dwell in the “safe” compounds of the cave in which they live. He develops “cautionary” narratives through visual means by drawing pictures on the cave walls using pigment and dirt he scoops off the ground. The animated film highlights the ways in which a pictorial expression in the form of rock markings could be enlivened in its original context of performance and story-telling, and, also, the ways in which history is forged through personal experience. The film also prompted me to reconsider the academic realm in which rock art is primarily situated in southern Africa, which is archaeology, and the possible perspectives that other disciplines could bring to bear on these materials, such as art history. My understanding of the reasons why rock art (and its copies) can and should also be considered and studied as an art form, ultimately stems from my own experience in art education. The rock art works made by the San people are encoded with “the history and culture of a society” that is “thousands of years old” and “a testament of the displaced ancient African culture and the San presence in the world” (Solomon 2005). By studying these traces as artworks, researchers, historians and archaeologists are reminded to look at the visual features, but also beyond the physical aspects of the work. They begin to consider the processes that contributed to its making, and the various interpretations and meanings that the work had in its context of production, as well as in its subsequent readings. An examination of the process of knowledge production not only draws attention to the development of artmaking and the manner in which different materials were used to create artworks, but also demonstrates the precarious nature of the meaning of rupestrian imagery. An example of this instability of meaning is evidenced by a body of oral histories relevant to the San context, starting with Joseph Orpen’s documentation (1874) of a mountain Bushman called Qing’s account of the meaning behind particular rock art panels. Thereafter, in 1911, Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd produced Specimens of Bushmen Folklore, a book of 87 recorded legends, myths and other traditional stories of the |Xam Bushmen in their now-extinct language (Solomon 2005). These resources integrated the “spoken word” with Bushman ethnographic research and laid the foundation for how we read and write about the art today, and they also provide numerous different ways into the question of interpretation. I have utilised my previous first-hand experience as an intern at the Origins Centre, where Simone Opperman and myself worked under the guidance of Steven Sack and Lara Mallen. In working towards the exhibition titled, The Origins of Walter Battiss: “Another Curious Palimpsest”, we worked closely with the Rock Art Research Institute (RARI), and my interest in rock art and its archive grew immensely. Here, I learned of the Harald Pager archive, which is physically located at RARI. After speaking to my supervisor, Dr Justine Wintjes, and listening to the way in which she briefly recounted the story of Harald Pager, who was an active rock art recorder and researcher during the 1960s and 1970s, I wanted to learn more about the man who seemingly died for his craft. Wintjes mentioned that Pager recorded San rock art in the Drakensberg area along with his wife for many years. The Pagers relied heavily on their personal resources in order to keep the recording and documentation process going, and ended up incurring financial debt. Harald Pager was passionate about archaeology and sought to understand the rock paintings he discovered in his travels across the region, which also included what was then South West Africa (now Namibia). In one of the conversations held in the course of my Masters research, Neil Lee explained that Pager dwelled for months on end in a shelter in order to finish the copies of rock paintings he sought to record. Pager’s adamance and determination, and even his belief that he could change his metabolism, apparently led to ill health while recording rock art in the Brandberg in 1985. He died a short time later in Windhoek (Neil Lee 2018, pers. comm.). 7 Given the scale and meticulousness of Pager’s archive, and in light of the conversations I had about him, it seemed strange that his work and story are engaged with so seldom within academia. Nevertheless, Pager’s vast archive lives on in the storerooms of RARI, and now also in the digital world. His recordings were recently digitised during the course of the South African Rock Art Digital Archive (SARADA) project, which sought to scan and make more accessible the content related to southern African rock art at RARI and other institutional and private archives. With the rapid rate at which technology is developing and progressing, physical archives are being turned into digital databases, while also being supplemented by newly created digital materials. However, like all archives, digital archives are not ‘permanent’. They have their own kind of media-specific fragility. The digital archive also has the potential to become obsolete and demonstrates a different kind of limited lifespan. Although digital files are also not physically present in the same way that a physical copy or photograph is, and “lose” a particular kind of materiality and stability, they gain a virtual presence and potentially greater accessibility. As with the ‘original’ archive of rock art that exists in the landscape, the traditional paper archive and the digital archive represent different kinds of longevity and fragility, and have a complex relationship with each other. While being subject to changes and deteriorations of various kinds, the archive is important as a record of archaeological materials in the landscape, but is also a site where knowledge is produced, and the practice of science is conducted. Thus, I set out to devise a project that would address some of these interests and problems, to find connections between the present and the past, and to focus on ‘process’ across the rock art archive in the broad sense of the term. I also wanted my project to address absences and silences within the archive, embedded within the documents and copies as well as the rock art itself. I approached the archive as a layered domain that extends beyond the strictly ‘documentary’ archive, and adopted a ‘personal histories’ approach as a way of forging connections across that archive. I explain this working strategy in more detail in the ‘Methodology’ section below, but first I explore some of the conceptual elements that frame the project.Item Water Grabbing?: Water Struggles over the Water Regulation of the Water Use Licenses of Coal Mines in Delmas, South Africa(University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024) Loate, Lesego Lester; Wafer, AlexIn various international contexts, attention has been given to the impact of the water use of extractives on water bodies. Some of these discussions are on the role of water regulation of the water use of extractives in the impacts on water bodies contributing to water scarcity for other water users and thus extractives based water struggles. Literature teases out the dynamics of the regulation of the water use of extractives through the three elements of water struggle that mirror elements of water regulation. These discussions focus on the allocation of water rights, the diverse forms of (non)recognition of water users in regulatory rules and participation in regulatory processes and exercise of rules. This study contributes to this literature focusing on coal mining water struggles in Delmas, South Africa. Despite an extensive history in mining, a leading country in coal reserves, as well as a country often touted as water scarce; research in South Africa on extractives based water struggles, in general, and coal mining water struggles in particular is limited. This study uses a case study approach using three coal mines in Delmas to address this gap in discourse. The study is based on interview and focus group data from key informations. The thesis focuses on the role of water regulation in the water problem behind coal mining based water struggles. The study also interrogates the mechanisms water regulation’s in6luence on the water problem behind coal mining based water struggles in Delmas. This study 6inds unfair and unequal regulatory practices in allocation enabling extra-legal water use by coal mines and the failure to enforce the water use of coal mines. Water regulation inequitably bene6its coal mines whilst burdening agricultural water users with pollution. Thus the study argues the water regulation is central to the resultant normalisation of the potential of future water scarcity. Water regulation exposes agricultural water users to structural and future reality. The (dys)function of water regulation of coal mines is the outcome of coal-centric socionatural relations of water that facilitate the water use of coal mines and normalise water scarcity.