An exchange programme involving students and academics from Egoli University in Johannesburg and the University of Athens provides the conduit for the smuggling of Venetian Grossi coins discovered on the Cycladic island of Naxos. Thirty-five year old Delancey James, a Professor of Ethics at Egoli University, stumbles upon events associated with the murder of a post-graduate student. Through her investigation, she uncovers a web of intrigue that links the coin smuggling to corruption at the highest levels of the University, and, in the process, her life is placed in mortal danger.

The kingdom of Sansland situated on the Azanian Peninsula has been ruled by Sorricians, the sky people, ever since they landed on terra firma centuries ago. The indigenous population are forced to engage directly in the social and economic perpetuation of their own domination beneath the Sorrician heel. Until revolution flares in the antipodes, and soon, even the gods themselves seem to take an interest in the inevitable course of events. But all is not what it seems. The revolution appears to proceed too rapidly. The kingdom’s trade infrastructure collapses too easily. The Sorrician rulers are inexplicably and unrealistically confident in their ability to repel an attack on the capital. It will take a man of conscience, a regular soldier and a boy priest to restore appearances back to reality.

My mother had many failings. Her inability to cook. Her inability to work. Her inability to love. But her two biggest failings...those were the ones that had the potential to ruin my entire life, to ruin my brother’s life, to tear a family apart. More than anything, it was her inability to act. Claire is a young woman working in Johannesburg as a PA. She has few friends barring her au pair flatmate Beth and work colleague Marge. Her nights are spent trying to overcome the trauma of her past to find sexual fulfilment in a shallow world of one night stands. Whether she can set herself on a path towards a more normal life comes down to one crucial thing – forgiveness.

A collection of mostly lyrical poems. The poems explore moments of experience and thought relating to longing and belonging, in terms of relations, memory and place. The poems are mostly short and intense. Silence and implied meanings are often as important as what is said; shadows are evoked to recall substance. Though short, the poems are not tightly closed – on the contrary, meanings proliferate in the process of exploration

This is a collection of village narrative poems mainly set in rural Limpopo that searches into the complexity of the past and how historical events impact on the present. Although the poems are imagined along the Marxist dialectic, they’re fresh imaginative creations featuring a strong element of surprise, spiritual mysticism, experimenting with form, delving into unknown poetic avenues, creating new music, exploring new sounds and taking risks. The long and intense poem, Ancestral wealth, which is a tribute to the poet’s father, reflects on death and its impact through the effective application of various stylistic elements and poetic devices, thus immortalising the life of a rural South African. Overall the poems, including retrospective and experimental ones, condemn the free market economic system and all that it seems to necessitate: the degradation of ecology, indifference to human suffering and the alienation of vulnerable social groups.

A collection of narrative and confessional poems. The poems are mostly short, cinematic, physical, imagistic: moments in time. They explore the poet’s own life, body, memories, and family relationships, and the tensions between power, duty, love and faith. Several poems concern the navigation of meaning and belonging in a time when international urban culture often clashes with tradition.

A young woman from a rural village near Kimberley is killed by her husband in a fit of jealousy. Her illiterate mother is summoned to the hospital to authorize the removal of vital organs – eyes, liver, kidney and heart – for organ donation. But some members of the family feel that their child should not be buried with parts of her body missing. Thus begins a story that changes the lives of many people, both black and white, over the following twenty years.

<p>The purpose of this critical ethnographic dissertation research was to explore the multiple and diverse ways in which university student activists in Honduras constructed oppositional political cultures within the institutional constraints and possibilities of the university and the broader neoliberal and authoritarian postcoup context. In this research, I considered studying up and down and anything in between a necessary task to understand the complexity of student activism in relation to the university’s complicity with the coloniality of power and knowledge (Nader, 1972; Quijano, 2000, 2007). Critical ethnography, decolonial, space and place, and collective action theory provided the philosophical, methodological, conceptual, practical, political, and ethical commitments to understand how the University Student Movement’s political culture resisted neoliberal higher education reform. This research, in addition, offers an ethnographic analysis and interpretation of the student movement’s political culture and the role it played in democratizing the university. First, I used a historical perspective to contextualize reemerging student movements in Honduras. After tracing Latin American student movement’s origin to the Cordoba Student Movement of Argentina, I examined the ways in which the student movement of Honduras adopted, reclaimed, and extended the democratic principles implemented in the former. University autonomy, ideological pluralism, democratic governance, academic freedom, and curriculum reform were salient points of analyses. Second, I examined the student movement’s horizontal organization, identified the democratic social practices and political culture that emerged after the coup of 2009, and interpreted student activists’ knowledges born in struggle through a decolonial lens concomitant with a sensitivity to space and place and collective action. Particularly, the direct participation of students in all decision-making processes within the student movement was interpreted as an act of resistance to reclaim democratic spaces within a sociopolitical context increasingly becoming dictatorial. Third, I analyzed the student movement’s impact in democratizing the university’s governance structure and resisting neoliberal higher education reform. Fourth, I shared the knowledge produced collectively by student activists. The way students conceived of the university and its curriculum and governing practices unsettled the authorial individualism still present in educational research. The knowledges born in struggle, I argued, have sociopolitical, cultural, and decolonial implications. In addition to the analytical and interpretive work which included the research, knowledges, and practices student activists shared with me during the 12 months of fieldwork and participant observation in Honduras, I highlighted how the emergence of a heterogeneously articulated student movement slowed down, at the very least, the neocolonial and neoliberal reconfiguration of the university. This dissertation thus addressed the political relationship between the global and the local. The re-localization of politics here must not to be confused with reactionary politics. It means instead to recognize how the particular is enmeshed in a more complex web of power, domination, resistance, and reexistence. To resist locally means that collective actors engage global powers, even if indirectly and unintentionally. Student activists, who were able to put a stop to the series of neoliberal reforms implemented since the coup of 2009, reminded those in power (local, national, and global) that neoliberal higher education reform within a re-politicized autonomous university with an organized student movement will be faced with resistance. This ethnographic account will hopefully reveal the ways in which student activist built a politically culture characterized by alternative forms of organizing to resist what is too often conceived fatalistically as the inevitable neoliberalization of education. These fatalistic perspectives will hopefully be unsettled throughout the dissertation. The significance of this study is that it is oriented toward an ethnographic understanding of higher education reform and student resistance in Latin America, a region with a student population which continues to be engaged in collective action. The educational significance of this work revolves around the need to rethink and rebuild universities in radically democratic terms. This rethinking involves the need to not only democratize access to higher education but rather to democratize governance, curriculum, knowledge, research, and ways of knowing and being. Transforming the university into a democratic place in which students are directly and meaningfully involved in governance and curriculum reform opens a path toward decolonial futurities where knowledge is no longer dictated from above but rather deconstructed and reconstructed from below. This dissertation research, lastly, as it works at the intersections of curriculum studies, decolonial theories, methodologies, pedagogies, and emerging university student resistance in Latin America, offers, I hope, a valuable way to do curriculum inquiry in higher education institutions within international contexts. </p>

Die Dissertation befasst sich mit der Forschungsförderung durch die britischen Research Councils AHRC und ESRC und die DFG. Sie analysiert, ob diese Förderorganisationen von ihren jeweiligen Regierungen gesteuert werden und ob dies in ihrer Arbeitspraxis und ihren Förderentscheidungen sichtbar ist. Darüber hinaus betrachtet die Dissertation die Perspektive der wissenschaftlichen Community sowohl als Empfänger von Fördermitteln als auch als Mitglieder der verschiedenen Gremien der Förder-organisationen. In der Arbeit wird ein vergleichender Ansatz angewandt, der die spezifischen Merkmale des AHRC, des ESRC und der DFG als intermediäre Organisationen untersucht. Das Konzept der Intermediäre basiert auf den Forschungsergebnissen von Braun (1993), Braun und Guston (2003) und van der Meulen (2003). Die Autorin führte Experteninterviews mit wissenschaftlichen Mitgliedern des AHRC, ESRC und der DFG und führte eine Delphi-Befragung unter Wissenschaftlern aus kunst-, geistes- und sozialwissenschaftlichen Fachbereichen an Hochschulen in GB und Deutschland durch. Aus der Analyse der Daten lässt sich schließen, dass die Teilnahme an oder die Durchführung von Programmen und Initiativen, die Ausdruck einer Regierungspriorität sind, dem Image der Fördereinrichtung in der wissenschaftlichen Community schaden kann. Im Rahmen der Prinzipal-Agent-Theorie wurde den wissenschaftlichen Mitgliedern der Förderorganisation eine starke und einflussreiche Rolle zugeschrieben. Diese Hypothese wurde durch die Datenanalyse bestätigt. Die Dissertation bestätigt auch, dass Wissenschaftler ihre Forschung an Förderformate und Erfolgsaussichten anpassen und ausrichten. In ihrer Rolle als Intermediäre unterliegen Förderorganisationen Verpflichtungen gegenüber ihrem Prinzipal und gegenüber ihren Agenten. Die formellen (satzungsgemäßen) Verpflichtungen müssen mit den informellen Verpflichtungen (Vertrauen und Loyalität) in Einklang gebracht werden. Dies ist der Schlüssel zu ihrer Vermittlungsfunktion. / The PhD thesis focusses on research funding by the British Research Councils AHRC and ESRC and the German DFG. It discusses whether these funding agencies are steered by their respective governments and whether this is visible in their working practice and their funding decisions. In addition, the PhD thesis addresses the perspective of the scientific community both as recipients of funding and as members of the different bodies of the funding agency. The thesis uses a comparative approach, examining the specific characteristics of the AHRC, ESRC and the DFG as intermediary organisations in order to uncover their differences and similarities. The concept of intermediaries is based on research by Braun (1993), Braun and Guston (2003), and van der Meulen (2003). The author conducted expert interviews with academic members of the AHRC, ESRC and the DFG and carried out a Delphi survey among scholars from arts, humanities and social science departments at HEIs in the UK and Germany. Concluding from the data, the participation in or implementation of programmes and initiatives which are expressions of a government priority, can easily lead to the impression that the funding agency is being steered by government. For the DFG as well as the AHRC and the ESRC, one challenge was similar: that of finding a balance between short- term political considerations and long-term scientific priorities. Within the framework of principal-agent theory, a strong and influential role was ascribed to the academic members of the funding agency. This hypothesis was confirmed in the data analysis. The thesis also confirmed that scholars adapt and align their research to funding formats and the prospects of success. In their role as intermediaries, funding agencies are subject to commitments towards their principal and towards their agents. Formal (by Statutes) commitments need to be brought in line with informal commitments (trust and loyalty). This is key to their mediating function.

In der vorliegenden Publikation wird die Entstehung der leistungsbezogenen Hochschulfinanzierung im englischen Universitätssektor untersucht. Leistungsbezogene Hochschulfinanzierung wird in vielen Ländern als geeigneter Lösungsansatz für das Problem der gerechten Verteilung von staatlichen Finanzmitteln an individuelle Hochschulen diskutiert. Das englische Beispiel zeigt sich als sehr lehrreich für die Diskussion um die Umsetzung und die Konsequenzen eines solchen Lösungsansatzes. Der größte Teil der staatlichen Finanzmittel wurde den Universitäten seit Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts als globale Zuweisung zugeteilt. Die Entscheidung über die Höhe der Summe dieses Geldes wurde ursprünglich von einem nicht-amtlichen Organ, dessen Mitglieder mehrheitlich Akademiker waren, bestimmt. Veränderungen der Mitgliedschaft und Verfahren dieses Organs und dessen Nachfolger-Organe haben wesentliche indirekte Implikationen und direkte Folgen für die Universitäten in England hervorgebracht. Die Verfahren zur Bewertung der Qualität der Leistung einer Universität sowie zur Verteilung von Finanzmitteln entsprechend dieser Leistung stellen das Instrumentarium für einen neuen steuernden Einfluss des Staates dar. Da die Höhe der staatlichen Finanzmittel für die Universitäten indessen seit Anfang der 80er Jahre stark abgenommen hat, müssen die Universitäten sich gleichzeitig erfolgreich auf dem Markt behaupten können. Die Universitäten müssen also innerhalb eines gestalterischen Raumes agieren, der zwischen Markt und Staat -- als die wesentlichen Einflussgrößen -- aufgespannt ist. Das Grundverhältnis zwischen dem Staat und den Universitäten zeigt sich entsprechend als höchst komplex. Dabei müssen die Universitäten eine Managementkompetenz entwickeln, die eine Maximierung an Finanzierung verspricht, während sie gleichzeitig die Grundaufgaben der Lehre und Forschung vor allzu negativen Konsequenzen dieser Wirtschaftsorientierung bewahren soll. Die Publikation belegt anhand einer Fallstudie, dass nicht alle Universitäten hierzu in der Lage sind und, dass die Implikationen und Folgen des sogenannten &amp;quot;Finanzierungsregimes&amp;quot; für deren Aufgabenerfüllung nachteilig sein können. Es wird deutlich, dass die konkreten Verfahren der Hochschulfinanzierung und, hier insbesondere, leistungsbezogene Ansätze nicht allein als technische Lösungen betrachtet werden können, sondern sie sollen nur im Zusammenhang mit einer Vorstellung von der idealen Universität gesehen werden, denn diese Verfahren beeinflussen die Gestaltungsmöglichkeiten einer Universität in direkter und indirekter Weise. / This publication investigates the emergence of performance-based funding in the English university sector. Performance-based funding of higher education institutions is discussed in many countries as an appropriate solution to the problem of distributing public funding to individual universities in a fair manner. The English example proves to be very instructive to the discussion with regards to the implementation, and then the implications, of such a proposal. From the beginning of the 20th century, the majority of public funding was distributed as a lump sum to individual universities in England. Decisions on the amount of funding were originally determined by a non-governmental body, whose members were mainly academics. Changes to this membership and to the procedures of this body have had a number of indirect implications for and direct effects on universities in England. Procedures for assessing the qualitative performance of universities, together with procedures which distribute funding according to this assessment provide the instruments of a new steering-influence utilised by the State, a new form of Public Management. As the amount of public state funding for universities has been reduced drastically since the beginning of the 1980's, universities have had to strive concurrently for funds on the open market. Universities are thus being forced to act within an area defined by the market and the State - the two strongest influences on the university sector. The fundamental relationship between the State and its universities has accordingly become highly complex. Universities, for their part, must develop management competencies, which promise a maximisation of funding, whilst at the same time aiming to protect a university's vital tasks of teaching and research from the more negative consequences of business-orientation. In a concluding case study, some evidence is provided which shows that not all universities are in a position to do this and that the implications and effects of the so-called &amp;quot;funding regime&amp;quot; are disadvantageous, in such cases, for their fulfilment of this entrepreneurial challenge. It becomes clear that the concrete procedures for funding higher education institutions and, in particular, performance-based models cannot been seen solely as technical solutions, but must instead be seen in combination with an idea of the ideal university, since these procedures influence the strategic options of a university both directly and indirectly.