How television entertainment programmes producers in Kenya conceptualise audiences is the primary objective of this study. It begins with a brief examination of how the operations of broadcast media institutions in Kenya have been historically linked to government and commerce. Throughout the history of television in Kenya, producers have conceptualised audiences in line with the political, economic and socio-cultural factors that were paramount in the instituting of broadcasting in this society. This historical background continues to shape the character of television entertainment programmes, and therefore how producers conceptualise audiences for these programmes. During their production practices, producers are also influenced by particular communication dynamics within which television programmes are produced and viewed. The dynamics of 'being the audience of television' include that the 'active audience' is autonomous in its various relationships with programmes content, yet the subjectivity of viewers to the institutional systems within which broadcasting happens constrains the audience‘s freedom in how it relates to entertainment programmes. Programme content hails and guides the audience into 'attending' to given shows in specific ways. This study reveals that the audience multi-facetedly relates with entertainment programmes, but the degree to which the audience can exercise its 'will' over the television text is limited. This is because television programmes are constructed meanings, framed and constricted by the elements that constitute them. Also, structures of culture constrain the plurality of the resources audiences have at their disposal as tools for 'reading‘ the programmes. The research-participant producers conceptualised the audience from a 'value-based‘ socio-cultural perspective. Therefore, they attached a kind of magnanimity to television as an institution for influencing in specific ways the segments of society they imagined watched it. Hence, producers of the particular entertainment programmes considered in this case study intended them to represent quality socio-cultural values for the social development of Kenyan society. In agreement with the producers, the audience respondents cited in this study appeared to consider entertainment programmes as important narratives capable of helping them better understand the social world they live in. They saw entertainment programmes as stories that authenticate their world by reflecting that world back to them. Overall, the findings of this case study established that Kenyan producers of television entertainment programmes technically operated within the political economic conventions of television production. However, a strong philosophical, moral-value code appeared to guide the producers‘ sense of purpose and duty to their audience. Apparently, the producers‘ resolve to embed in programmes meanings that propagated particular socio-cultural ideals was as prominent as the institutional political economic objectives for which they were hired to fulfil. This 'extra‘ sense of purpose catalysed the producers‘ unique regard for entertainment programmes as functional narratives, whose primary objective it should be to elevate society‘s moral fabric. Conclusively, the research-participant producers employed an old-fashioned approach to conceptualizing the audience. They saw the audience as congregated in masses of social categories cemented together by a tangible cultural-national identity. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2010.

Sexuality is made relevant in the way language is used as a matter of the identity of a group or individuals. Sex, for human beings, is not merely instinctive behaviour. It is meaningful-cultural behaviour and as such is semiotically loaded with meaning. Listening and talking about sex highlights conventions, taken-for-granted assumptions about the way things have to be done. Language as the most powerful representational system shapes our understanding of what we do and how we do them in relation to sex. Our understanding of sexual scripts about the sexuality of a particular group of people is through language as a signifying practice. The study of listening and talking is not merely an investigation of how sex is talked about, but how respondents enact sexuality and sexual identity vis-à-vis its linguistically loaded forms of representations in a variety of discourse genres. Representation and its inherent process of signification draws on lived experiences and the daily talk of people in interaction. A theoretical perspective is presented not as a model to be tested, but as testimony to the rich literature on the nature and function of language as a political arena, semiotically loaded with meanings that are taken for granted. It is concluded that the appropriation of cultural myths is encoded in language and as such language is a legitimate area of inquiry especially in understanding sexual scripts in the context HIV/AIDS. The study engages reported high risk sexual encounters such as multiple and concurrent partnerships, as well as unsafe sex practices which have been identified in literature as fanning the embers of the epidemic. Ideologies influencing developing communication campaigns in light of these discourses become a serious challenge as the conventional basis for such campaigns is in socio-cognitive theories, few of which can be assumed to apply with regard to the discursive representations of sexual practices and the inherent risks. Drawing on a cross-sectional survey of 1400 students on seven campuses, conceptually triangulated via focused-ethnography, listening analysis and discourse analysis, this research examines perceptions, interpretations, attitudes, and practices of sexuality and HIV/AIDS. The research is a multi-method and inter-disciplinary approach located within cultural studies to interrogate the gap between knowledge, attitudes, beliefs and behaviour modification in the light of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. This research discusses these findings and offers a critical appraisal of sexual behaviour in the context of ABC (Abstain, Be faithful, Condomise) as ideologically encoded in cultural and relational myths. I found that students are sexually active with reported multiple and concurrent sexual partnerships. Postgraduate students were less likely to report having had used a condom at their last coital encounter compared with the often younger undergraduate students. Condom use continues to be a norm in the universities surveyed. This is truer for students who reported multiple sexual partnerships. Amongst the dominant scripts that came out in the ethnographic inquiry are: sex as uncontrollable biological drive; females are responsible for safe sex practices; strong social scripts elevate male sexual prowess and show disdain for female affirmative sexualities, risk is discounted using a form of post modern fatalism (resistance to regulation); and physical status, based on appearance of a possible partner, is used to select ‘sexually safe’ partners. I have concluded that a deeper understanding of the cultural and sexual scripts obtained from students is critical for appropriate design and implementation of interventions aimed at stemming the tide of the HIV epidemic. I have also demonstrated that interventions that only emphasise the rational dimensions of human behaviour are more likely to miss their target audience as sex is more than a choice of Cartesian rationality (linear choice). / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2008.

No abstract available. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Durban, 2000.

The high levels of HIV prevalence amongst young people in sub-Saharan African countries, have led to the clarion call for researchers to investigate the determinants to young people's sexual risk-taking behaviour while others are exploring the usage of entertainment education (EE) so that effective prevention and interventions may be developed. One critical aspect is that research efforts so far have been hampered by the adoption of models and perspectives that are narrow and do not adequately capture the complexity associated with young people's sexual experiences. The distinctiveness of this study is therefore grounded in the focus on the risky sexual practices students engage in and their underlying risk and protective multisystemic factors and their response to the EE interventions, in particular the Scrutinise Campus Campaign. Thus, using the Problem Behaviour Theory, Reception Theory and the Social Cognitive Learning Theory, this study investigates the phenomena of students' sexual risk behaviour and their response to the Scrutinise Campus campaign. The study is situated within the interpretative paradigm. It used a hermeneutic phenomenological methodology underpinned by in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, participant observation and field notes to draw data for this study. The study sample included students and the Scrutinise Campus Campaign officers. Findings of this study sustain the conclusion that students' sexual risk behaviour is influenced by interrelated, interactional and transactional factors from the multisysternic factors: biological, environmental/social, behavioural and personality domains that either instigate or buffer against students' sexual risk behaviour. However, Scrutinise Campus campaign's messages do not fully address students' sexual risk practices and their underlying factors as experienced by students. It is critical to employ a comprehensive and continuum of EE interventions that are broad in scope arid target factors from multiple systems of influence including the multisystemic factors. Most significantly, sources of protective influence should not be ignored when designing and implementing EE prevention programmes and, to the extent possible, both risk arid protective factors should be addressed in the interventions. This may help to effectively address students' sexual-risk taking behaviour in universities. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2012.

The high levels of HIV prevalence amongst young people in several sub-Saharan African countries, in spite of massive HIV prevention interventions, has prompted calls to investigate the contextual factors that drive the epidemic. A crucial component that often has been missed in the literature is an understanding of the mediation processes involved in HIV prevention communication within cultural contexts. The uniqueness of this study is thus premised in its focus on the structures and processes of meaningproduction within social groups, with regard to sex and HIV/AIDS, and how the produced meanings affect the interpretation and impact of HIV prevention texts. Using Hermeneutics, Reception Theory and the Social Constructionism Theory, this study examines how students at University of KwaZulu-Natal, University of Zululand and the Durban University of Technology make sense of the cultural meanings offered by HIV prevention messages, such as ‘Abstinence’, ‘Be faithful’, ‘Condomise’ and Voluntary Counselling and Testing (VCT). A multi-method approach, involving a questionnaire survey, in-depth interviews with sampled students and HIV/AIDS coordinators, and non-participant observations, was used to obtain data for the study. Findings of the study support the conclusion that the categories of students’ responses to HIVprevention messages were often predicated upon their relationships and participation in the various social groups. Their decisions to adopt/not adopt these prevention options were often based, therefore, on how meanings attached to these options articulated with the social significance of sex and sexual practices. In the context of intersubjective meaning-formation, therefore, the relational categories of abstinence, being faithful, condomise and VCT should not be conceptualised as discreet, frozen categories, but should rather be understood as open-ended possibilities existing concurrently, coextensively and dialectically. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2008.

This dissertation explores the potential of theatre studies to develop a pragmatic and relevant pedagogy for South African students and adults. The contention is that the dominant paradigm as conceptualized in the discipline ‘Speech and Drama’ is outdated. Section One offers a critique of this paradigm and an analysis of the premises that supported its foundation and consolidation in English-language South African Universities. Following this a search is instituted for a methodology of theatre studies which is both appropriate to present circumstances and which could encompass all South Africans. In Section Two, a survey of theories of performance is undertaken because a methodology of theatre studies is, of necessity, linked to performance theory. The pioneering contributions of some South African scholars are explained and evaluated as part of a larger body of theoretical analysis in both the humanities and the social sciences. In Section Three, the search for a methodology is approached from a different angle. The researcher offers a detailed descriptive analysis of her own work in the Department of Speech and Drama at the University of Zululand both among students and in a nearby rural community. This serves to explore the kinds of learning that occur through practical involvement in drama, theatre and specifically playmaking. These learning processes are related to the distinctive functions in drama and theatre, namely the heuristic, communicative and interpretative functions. The work is connected to progressivist trends in education and participatory research in the field of adult education. One of the intentions behind the work was, indeed, to challenge commonsense perceptions and discover the extent to which individuals are ‘victims of their own biography’. This challenge is specifically related to anti-feminist, racist and class perceptions. The dissertation concludes with recommendations for a learner-centred approach to theatre studies that is rooted in personal experience and consciously mediated through refined and extended conceptual categories. The tension between the development of students’ analytical powers and communicative skills is explored and a semiotic approach to analysis is posited. The importance of extending university work into the wider community is discussed and related to a rural development project involving playmaking, undertaken to research the potential of learning through drama for adults. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1987.

This thesis uses racial stereotyping as a critical approach to the analysis of television advertising commercials broadcast by the SABC during the period of Reform in South Africa, 1978-1992. Due respect is given to theoretical debates about the ideological role of consumer advertising. In the light of various possible causes, such as an increasing importance of blacks to the consumer market, government co-option in terms of 'Total Strategy', or calls by the business sector for a strong black middle class, particular attention is given to the underlying dynamics of black middle class depiction in advertisements. The Introduction outlines the main arguments of the thesis, key theoretical moves, and discusses research sources. Chapter 1 clarifies the concept of stereotype, the nature of racial stereotyping, and proposes a category framework for the analysis of racial stereotyping in a reformist apartheid context. Chapter 2 marries a racial stereotyping critical approach of consumer advertising in South Africa with theoretically-informed advertising criticism in terms of a conception of consumption as a means of hegemony. Chapter 3 outlines aspects of the post-World War II political economy which have underpinned the ensuing forms of South African racial stereotyping. Chapter 4 examines the basis of the SABC-TV broadcasting dispensation and its influence upon the forms of racial stereotyping in commercials. Chapter 5 examines the use of political and public service advertising during the P.W. Botha era, in consideration of what influence such political dimensions of Reform might have had upon the ideological content of advertising in general. Chapter 6 examines advertising production practices during the period of Reform in order to assess the position of the advertising industry with regard to the changing forms in racial stereotyping. Chapter 7 applies the preceding theorisation and assessments about the relationship between the political economy and changing forms of racial stereotyping in SABC-TV commercials in a case study based on the advertising commercial 'history reel' for Castle Lager. Chapter 8 gives further verification in a case study of the history reel for Rama margarine. The Conclusion sums up the preceding chapters and reassess earlier observations. Appendices in Volume II of the thesis provide 830 shot-by-shot descriptions and 890 stills for 41 commercials that comprise the two case studies. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1998.

This research project focuses on the application of a structured inclusive approach to the use of ethnography for the interpretation of rock art. The geographical research location is the Upington area north of the Orange/Gariep River. Both tangible and intangible heritage are explored using a multiple intelligence theoretical framework including auto ethnographic, ecosystemic methodology. The study is embedded in constructivist educational theory, which builds on the researcher and others' previous knowledge and research. The intangible heritage is made up of oral narratives about a Water Snake told by a group of women of a mixture of cultural backgrounds. The tangible rock art, made up of various rock engraving styles is situated at Biesje Poort. Contemporary indigenous as well as various academic interpretations of the site are included in the research. Secondary sources relating to theory and methodology on myth and ethno archaeology, specifically on rock art, are used in the first section of the research in order to convey the research context. The second section of the research concentrates on the application of various dominant intelligences in regard to the analysis of primary sources. Experiential, intrapersonal and interpersonal encounters with the subjects are included. Synthesis of the primary and secondary sources plus new and prior research is included in the presentation through written text and visual representation and imagery. The research is conducted in order to include and expand on present museum practices which emphasize inclusion and ownership of heritage research and representation. As such this research process emphasizes the ethical implications of participatory research and aims to maintain an empowering partnership with the research informants. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2006.

This research presents a reception analysis of LoveLife's 'HIV: face it' billboards by youth aged 12 - 17 years old, LoveLife's target audience for the campaign under scrutiny. The study sought to find out whether the intended audience derived the same meanings from the billboards as they were initially intended by LoveLife; whether the target youth regard themselves as audience of the communicated campaign; and to assess whether LoveLife billboard producers have succeeded in communicating the intended message to the readers of the billboards. To achieve this, the study adopted a qualitative method of data collection by conducting two focus group discussions. One focus group was selected from a rural school in KwaZulu Natal and another one from an urban school of the same province. Participants were all youth between the ages 12 - 17 years old. The circuit of culture was used as the theoretical framework. The circuit of culture is a composition of certain moments in the communication process namely: representation, identity, production, consumption and regulation [see diagram. 1]. For the purpose of this research only one moment of the circuit, namely representation was adopted. Representation is an essential part of the process through which meaning is produced and exchanged between members of a culture. It involves the use of language, signs and images that stand for or represent things. Findings from the study show that respondents assigned different meanings to LoveLife billboards. LoveLife's messages are not being decoded by the target audience in the initially intended manner. A majority of the respondents negotiated meaning in an attempt to understand what LoveLife is trying to communicate because the billboards' objectives are not straightforward. The study also found that urban dwellers identified more closely as audiences for the LoveLife billboards than rural dwellers. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2007.

Since the 1950s, various paradigms of development have aimed to achieve improvement in the living conditions in the developing world (Africa, Asia and Latin America). Today the effects of globalisation have increased the gap between the information and technology haves and have-nots and development practice (born out of the paradigms developed over the last fifty years) now seeks to address issues such as access to Information Communication Technology (ICT) and the need for developing countries to participate in the global economy. The practice of development has and continues to raise debate, as Friberg and Hettne (1985 in Melkote and Steeves, 2001:19) note "there is no universal path to development. Each society must find its own strategy". Thus development projects have ranged in approach and focus. This research project examines the first year of the joint venture between the Media in Education Trust (MiET) and the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Education (KZNDE) to develop Education Centres Supporting Rural Development in KwaZulu-Natal. These education centres aim to address a number of development issues for rural communities in KwaZulu-Natal. Through these centres access is provided for schools and communities in the area to Information Communication Technology, teacher development programmes, educational materials (including textbooks), library services, skills development programmes (including Adult Basic Education and Training), youth programmes and HIV/AIDS education and support. This research examines the Education Centres project in relation to Development Communication Theory and the local and global development context. The local context focuses on the challenges faced by South Africa as a developing nation and the urban-rural divide. The global perspective is gained through examining the centres project in relation to the Millennium Development Goals. In order to examine the Education Centres, this research project examines three centres in KwaZulu-Natal and their objectives in relation to the issues of participation, access, sustainability and the economic and socio-economic impact of the development project. These issues relate not only to the local and global context for development but to the relationship between technology, education and development. This Education Centres project is still in the early stages and thus the challenges faced could still be resolved during the course of the project. The key challenges identified when examining the three centres in relation to the issues of participation, access, sustainability and the economic and socio-economic impact of the development project are the lack of physical resources currently available in the centres and the lack of Internet connectivity in two of the centres. These two factors restrict the centres from fully achieving their objectives in the context of access, participation, sustainability and the socio-economic impact of the project. The Education Centres project is scheduled to establish these Education Centres over four years. This research presents an analysis of the first year of the project, thus there is opportunity for additional research as the project progresses and this future research can more accurately examine if the Education Centres project is meeting its objectives in relation to the issues outlined in this research - those of access, participation, sustainability and the socio-economic impact of the development project. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2006.