Faculty of Humanities (ETDs)

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    Short Cut: A Feminist Reflection on the Postcolonial Uncanny
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023) MILLS, ANGELITA VIOLA; Sakota, Tanja
    This research-led praxis Masters interrogates and explores Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory on the uncanny to realise a short film text, entitled Short Cut. Specific attributes of the uncanny are applied in the film’s attempt to produce a sensibility of the uncanny, in order to convey the anxiety and fear of femicide experienced by women in South Africa on a daily basis. The film is effectively created through the theoretical considerations of the research. Drawing on primary texts from Sigmund Freud, Homi Bhabha and Teresa De Lauretis, the research deliberates on how the uncanny is a critical register through which to articulate conditions of dread and horror shaping the lives of women navigating the spectre of femicide in South Africa. The uncanny is marshalled as an aesthetic-conceptual tool consciously and intentionally used by filmmakers and as an aesthetic and conceptual tool for filmmakers interested in exploring the experiences and traumas of postcolonial women. In so doing, it seeks to provide new possibilities, insights and expressions of representation on film, through the intersectional conceptual lenses of gender, postcolonial theory and psychoanalysis.
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    Understanding Anxiety, and its Implications for Teaching and Learning: A Perspective on Freud and Others
    (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2023-06) Ally, Adila; Aloka, Peter
    This dissertation is conceptual in nature rather than empirically-oriented and explores an understanding of learning and motivational theory in an attempt to study various formulations of the concept of anxiety, dating back to those presented by the foundational figure of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. It is noted that Freud did not develop a single theory of anxiety- but at least three and arguably as many as eight over the lifetime of his career. Such hesitancy and uncertainty is not interpreted by this dissertation as indecision, rather it is read as uncertainty being a core element in the meta-modelling of anxiety itself. Refracted through Lacan -- who performs a reinterpretation of Freud in a way that produces a unique formulation of the concept that seems to invert Freud's own definition -- and through J. B. Watson, this dissertation develops a novel concept of anxiety as being mimetic in nature, relying Girard's concept of mimetic desire for this purpose. Moscovici's social representation theory, Latour's inter-objectivity, Bandura's triadic structure of observational learning, Foot's studies on Double-Effect problems, the Rashōmon Effect in the narrativisation of data and Seligman's learned helplessness are also used in developing the novel concept of mimetic anxiety. Thus after recognising four variants of anxiety -- a unified Freudian "object-loss" anxiety, Lacanian "overabundance" anxiety, Watsonian "commodity" anxiety and the novel concept of "mimetic anxiety" -- this dissertation proceeds to gauge interaction between these and the learning theories of Pavlov, Skinner, Piaget, Vygotsky and Gagné, and the motivational theories of expectancy value, achievement goal, and self-determination theory. In observing a case study of the flipped classroom model of teaching, Gagné and expectancy value seem to predict the emergence of Watsonian anxiety, the only variant of the four which allows for extinction of anxiety. However, the flipped classroom model, expectancy value motivation and Gagné's methodology together continue to address deeper challenges developed by mimetic anxiety and the synetic (not synthetic) demand placed on Girardian interdividual subjects by technology. Further use of the flipped classroom study is made to explore Freud's throwaway comment that economics might explain the concept of anxiety-as-signal, whereupon Hayek is found to introduce the concept of price-as-signal. This synchronicity forms the basis for considering Freud as necessarily heterogeneous and yielding of increased depth if paired with outside disciplines. In conclusion, the Flynn Effect is suggested as a significant driver of Freudian recession into insularity and from digitally mediated interaction, insinuating advocacy for the flipped classroom model.