The research reported here evolved from the researcher’s ethnographic immersion in an ICT for Development (ICT4D) project in a deep rural part of South Africa. During ethnographic immersion, three key issues emerged from fieldwork. Firstly, the researcher realised his limited understanding of the worldview of research participants. Secondly, he realised his inability to appropriately and ethically do community entry and implement the ICT4D artefact (e.g. ICT4D training and policy), especially because of his limited understanding of the cultural context, underlying values, emancipatory concepts and interests, as well as incomplete insight into the oppressive circumstances that the people in the research setting find themselves in. The third issue relates to an inability to interpret and explain the collisions and conflicts that emerged from introducing, aligning, and implementing the ICT4D artefact. Through critical ethnographic methods and a critical orientation to knowledge, the researcher shows how these inabilities, collisions, and false consciousnesses emerged to be the result of cultural entrapment and ethnocentricity that he and the research participants suffered from. A key argument throughout this thesis is that the emancipation of the researcher is a precursor for the emancipation of the researched. The researcher thus asks: In what ways should ICT4D researchers and practitioners achieve self-emancipation, in order to ensure the ongoing emancipation and empowerment of the deep rural developing community in South Africa? The study subsequently argues the link between the topic of this thesis, namely the issue of ethical research practice, and the primary research question. A unique perspective on these problems is presented as the study looks at emancipatory ICT4D research and practice in context of a deep rural Zulu community in South Africa, and specifically the journey of social transformation that the researcher himself embarked on. The study retrospectively applies Bourdieu’s critical lineage to reflect on the research contribution and how the researcher was eventually able to construct adequate knowledge of the ICT4D social situation. Building onto the idea of critical reflexivity, the researcher argues that critical introspection should also be part of critical ICT4D research in South African contexts. Through confessional writing, the researcher describes experiential knowledge of the worldview collisions that emerged from ICT4D research and practice. In particular, manifestations of the collisions between the typical task-orientated or performance-orientated value system of Western-minded societies and the traditional loyalty-based value system or people-orientated culture of the Zulu people are described. The research contributes by challenging dominant ICT4D discourses and by arguing for an end to a line of ICT4D research and practice where outsiders with a Western task-orientated worldview, like the researcher himself, make unqualified and inadequate assumptions about their own position in ICT4D practice, and about their own understanding of how to “develop” traditional communities in South Africa through ICTs. Following Bourdieu, the researcher argues that one can only build an adequate understanding of the social situation through critical reflexivity, by making the necessary knowledge breaks, and by allowing oneself to be carried away by the game of ICT4D practice. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / gm2014 / Informatics / Unrestricted

This dissertation considers how refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) are conceived in international relations, and how they are understood in relation to the global refugee regime complex. This research explores how cognitive frames are impeding fair/democratic governance of IDPs/refugees and employs two case studies to investigate how the practice of critical reflexivity can lead to the creation of democratic spaces for refugees/IDPs to enact protection preferences. The first case analysis argues that Sarvodaya Shramadana's Deshodaya initiative in Sri Lanka has enabled IDPs in that nation to embrace critical reflexivity to re-constitute/reimagine themselves as governing agents who can redefine state and international organization-based definitions of their protection. The second case examines asylum adjudications at the Department of Homeland Security and is an exploration of how that agency's responsible officials can employ critical reflexivity to recognize seemingly hidden governance structures that condition their decision-making and limit refugee choices. Finally, this inquiry offers a new, organic model for conceptualizing both refugee/IDP governance and strategies for democratization of refugee/IDP governance institutions and systems. / Ph. D.

No description available.

Through the small-scale and imaginative application of a Speculative Institutional Ethnographical study, fictionalised stories have been created based upon observations in the field at three different Youth Care Home Facilities in Sweden. The locations and characters in these stories are composite narratives comprised of actual details from multiple real life places and people, amalgamated to form fictionalised narratives so as to protect the anonymity of real life people. The researcher’s primary motivation with the research is to develop a better understanding of the way in which individual differences between staff members working at these facilities impact their decision making in an environment which is supposedly value-neutral. It is argued that a multitude of factors will influence staff members perceptions of youths at these homes and that a degree of bias or partiality is unavoidable. An awareness of this and a development of critical reflexivity is encouraged. Through drawing data from real life observations in the field to create credible, realistic fictionalised stories, the research project is combining academic and creative writing processes in an innovative and progressive way. The goal of the research is not to prove or disprove a specific hypothesis but rather to explore an issue and develop a better understanding of the complexity and nuances of working at a Youth Care Home facility in view of Intersectional Gender Studies.

Why has the resurrection once again become the centre point of a new storm brewing in both popular and academic culture? Because of the combination of a realisation of death, and of human beings’ need to interpret its (death’s) mysteries; a question innate to the human experience. In a fear-filled world where war, terrorism, and economic collapse bring the question of death (and the afterlife) to the fore, people are asking – perhaps more than ever – what happens after we die. This popular fascination with the end, with death, and with what (if anything) lies beyond it, has also influenced the theme and the direction of academic work in the theological field. For this reason an informed analysis of the resurrection debate has become necessary – a process of analysing the different strata of understanding as it relates to current resurrection research. Any consideration given to gender or power, birth or burial, money or food is made in an effort to situate the debates being studied. Could a reason for these still varied conclusions on the subject be that those writing on it are not equipped for the task of analysing and interpreting history and historical method? In order to be able to begin answering this question, one of this study's main objectives is to learn and apply the approach of historians – outside of the community of Biblical scholars – to the question of whether Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead; thus providing interaction with philosophers of history related to hermeneutical and methodological considerations. The method proposed here is a combination of historiography and an ethics of understanding, with the use of Correspondence theory (in which history is described as knowable, and some hypotheses as truer than others in a correspondence sense). This study wants to address both the different questions and analyses of the debate by asking: What if we see things differently? What if we were to ask a different set of questions? In order for this to be possible, we need to develop an ethics of interpretation – instead of asking the expected questions, this study aims to ask: What interests and frameworks inform the questions we ask and the way in which we interpret our sources? How does scholarship echo (and even participate in) contemporary public discourses about Christian identity? These questions will be attended to through three intersecting practices – critical reflexivity, complemented by the use of the two related practices of textual re-reading and public debate. However, these are not methodical steps in a linear progression, they are mutually interacting practices that draw on each other; raising new possibilities for the way in which we historically reconstruct the Jesus movement, allowing us to enter into the public debate about Jesus and eschatology in a way that takes the ethical possibilities and consequences of our reconstructions of Christian origins and identity seriously. For, though fragmentary and broken human words may be, they nevertheless possess a capacity to function as the medium through which God is able to disclose himself. Copyright / Dissertation (MTh)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / New Testament Studies / unrestricted