Thesis (Ph.D. (Education Management, Law and Policy))--University of Pretoria, 2009. / Includes abstract in English. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A. (Political & International Studies)) - Rhodes University, 2009. / A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts.

Thesis (MEd (Education)-University of Pretoria, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references.

This study explores a number of issues relating to the nature and scope of intangible heritage and critically examines some of its salient components in South Africa. It affirms that intangible heritage is socially constructed. Aspects of intangible heritage that seem inherited in the present are social constructs and products of social progression. They present the historical development of the practicing communities. Furthermore, this study affirms that all heritage is intangible. This is expounded in the study by exploring the history of the concept of intangible heritage over the decades which provide its evolution both at international and national levels, and within heritage institutions. Heritage cannot be understood and defined in terms of traditions, indigenousness, pre-colonialism, North and South dichotomies or Western and non-Western dichotomies. This definition would racialise and regionalise heritage, and politics of indigeneity would surface. The separation of tangible, intangible and natural heritage is an artificial demarcation that is for heritage management discourse.

Magister Educationis - Med / Since the 1980s several different forms of privatisation had been introduced into the South African educational system by the De Lange Commission. Since the 1990s a raft of neoliberal policies has been implemented under the banner of "educational transformation" by the post-apartheid state. This qualitative exploration will apply a critical policy analysis approach to analyse the impact of neoliberalism on post-apartheid education policy discourse in the public schooling system in South Africa from a historical, social and critical perspective. More specifically, I will apply the insights of critical education theory to interrogate the impact of the neoliberal orthodoxy and its concomitant values on the public schooling system with regard to the delivery of accessible, quality public schooling in post-apartheid South Africa.

M.A. / 'Writing the city'‘, particularly writing the city of Johannesburg, in post-apartheid South African fiction can be considered as a new approach to interpreting South African culture; a new approach that takes into consideration and reflects the changes taking place in present-day South African society. By means of close textual analysis, this study examines the ways in which the city of Johannesburg is in the process of being re-imagined and reinvented in post-apartheid South African fiction and, therefore, in the post-apartheid memory. Particular attention is paid to narrative techniques utilised in the primary material as a means of not only re-writing the space of the city, but the space of South Africa as well. This is essential in order to reveal how transformation is narrated in post-apartheid, transitional texts and how this narration changes in post-transitional South African fiction. The chosen texts are read and interpreted as a type of cultural history or memory – as a means of constructing South African culture and history through textual production. In particular, this dissertation illustrates how texts written on Johannesburg, such as Phaswane Mpe‘s Welcome To Our Hillbrow (2001), Ivan Vladislavić‘s The Restless Supermarket (2001) and Kgebetli Moele‘s Room 207 (2006) are utilising the subject matter and every day life of the city as an 'idea‘; as a means of expressing societal concerns and other important changes taking place in the country as a whole. This study focuses on how each of the three chosen novels contributes to South African culture and history by narrating its transformative history. Topics such as the depiction of Johannesburg as a palimpsest and as a cultural archive of historical moments in present-day South Africa are explored. In this regard, themes and representations of movement, transition and transformation in the city of Johannesburg, as well as attempts to memorialise this space, are dealt with. In addition, the representation of a 'gendered‘ city as a means of narrating such transformation is also discussed. Here, reference is made to concerns such as the shifting position of men and women in the city, changing gender-related city consciousness, and altered gender discourse surrounding the city. This dissertation identifies and considers how depictions of the city of Johannesburg are being altered and modified in contemporary South African literature and contemplates the ways in which the narratives reveal how transformation is narrated via the Johannesburg landscape.

Magister Psychologiae - MPsych / Although transformation processes are making progress in addressing racial inequality in post-apartheid South Africa, white South Africans are, in many repects, still privileged, economically, in terms of access to services, land, education and particularly in the case of English-speaking whites, language. This study is an exploration of everyday situations of inequality as they have been experienced from a position of advantage. As a qualitative, phenomenological study, the aim was to derive the psychological essence of the experience of being privileged as white English-speaking young adult within the context of post-apartheid South African everyday life. / South Africa

Magister Artium - MA / Intercultural communication (ICC) is one of the most relevant fields for investigation in post-colonial Africa and post-apartheid South Africa, given the movements between people from African countries and the wide range of attractions, both economic and social, that South Africa holds for people from other African countries. This study reports on intercultural communication in post-democratic South Africa in an era marked by what Appadurai (1990) calls 'flows'. Greenmarket Square in the heart of Cape Town, well known as a hub for informal traders, local people and tourists, was chosen as the site for this study, because of the rich cultural diversity of the role-players. The principal aim of this research is to examine how people from different cultural backgrounds in this particular space of Greenmarket Square communicate with one another, and where the'intercultural fault-lines' (Olahan, 2000) occur, keeping in mind how ICC could be improved in such a space. My position as a trader in the market placed me in an ideal 'insider' position to do the research. The theory of spatiality (Vigouroux, 2005; Blommaert et al. 2005) was used to show how the space of Greenmarket Square affected intercultural communication. Discourse analysis was also applied to the data to show how the various roleplayers were socially constructed by others. Saville-Troike's (1989) ethnography of communicative events was also used to bring out other barriers that were not identified by spatiality and discourse analysis. Aspects like scene, key, message form and content, the observed rules for interaction and where these rules were broken and to what effect as well as the norms for interpretation were considered during the analysis of this qualitative data. The analysis showed that spatiality, social constructions of 'the other' and other factors like nonverbal communication and differences between communicative styles in high and low context cultures (LCC/HCC), had a major impact on intercultural communication at Greenmarket Square, frequently leading to complete breakdowns in communication. Many of the traders interviewed acknowledged that they needed to improve their competence in intercultural communication. The study concludes with a number of recommendations on how people can become more 'interculturally competent' (Katan, 2004) in a globalized world. / South Africa

Magister Artium - MA / This thesis examines how multilingual spaces in South Africa are imagined and reconstructed through the use of scripted codeswitching in 7de Laan. It explores how the socio-political discourses and other ideologies from the broader South African context shape and influence the ways in which the soap reconstructs multilingual spaces and the identities that exist within these spaces through language and language practices. In the literature presented in this study I explore various theories and case studies that examine Afrikaans and its indexicality in our contemporary society, the conventions of soap opera in representing reality to society, the role of codeswitching in multilingual mass communication, the policies and ideologies that govern post apartheid television and finally the link between ideology, the media, language and imagined identities.. These five overarching themes often overlap throughout this thesis. My investigation of the main questions set in this thesis is based on a triangulated analysis of (a) a five episode transcript of the soap, (b) solicited viewer perceptions gleaned from questionnaires and (c) unsolicited social media commentaries. This analysis is framed by a poststructuralist critical analysis with a specific focus on how social practices and contemporary ideologies manifest in the discourse of the soap. This approach views discourse as the juncture where identity, stereotypes and power are negotiated, enforced, imagined and challenged. In this thesis I argue that the conspicuous absence of indigenous African languages and the use of standard white Afrikaans as the lingua franca in the soap creates an unrealistic utopian portrayal of the new South Africa that naturalises white Afrikaans culture and marginalises other indigenous cultures and languages. I argue that the soap puts middle class white Afrikaners at the epicentre of South African society thus enforcing the idea that non-whites still need to conform to white Afrikaans standards and norms at the expense of their own culture and languages despite the inception of democracy. The soap offers no depictions of resistance to this dominant white Afrikaans culture, thus misleadingly portraying it as the uncontested dominant culture of the new South Africa. / South Africa

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / This thesis undertakes an analysis of how six published works by the South African writer Ivan Vladislavić form the perspective of writing the city – Johannesburg – into being. Beginning from the basis that Vladislavić’s writing constitutes what I have coined dialogic postcolonialism, the thesis engages with both broader contemporary urban and postcolonial theory in order to show the liminal imaginative space that the author occupies in his narrations of Johannesburg. Underlining the notion of postcolonialism being a “work in progress” my thesis problematises the issue of representation of the postcolonial city through different aspects like space, urbanity, identity and the self, and thus locates each of the texts under consideration at a particular locus in Vladislavić’s representational continuum of the continually transforming city of Johannesburg. Until the recent appearance of Mariginal Spaces – Reading Vladislavić (2011) the extant critical literature and research on the writing of Ivan Vladislavić has, as far as I can tell, not engaged with his work as a body of creative consideration and close analysis of the city of Johannesburg. Even this latest text largely consists of previously published reviews and articles by disparate critics and academics. The trend has therefore largely been to analyse the texts separately, without treating them as the building blocks to an ongoing and perhaps unending project of imaginatively bringing the city into being. Such readings have thus been unable to decipher and characterise the threads which have emerged over the period of the writer’s literary engagement with and representation of Johannesburg. I suggest that, as individual texts and as a collection or body of work, Ivan Vladislavić’s Missing Persons (1989), The Folly (1993), Propaganda by Monuments and Other Stories (1996), The Restless Supermarket (2006 – first published in 2001), The Exploded View (2004) and Portrait with Keys: Joburg & what-what (2006), are engaged in framing representations of the postcolonial city, representations which can in my view best be analysed through the prism of deconstructive engagement. To this end, the thesis examines contemporary South African urbanity or the post-apartheid metropolitan space (as epitomised by the fictive Johannesburg) and how it is represented in literature as changing, and in the process of becoming. As a consequence, the main conclusion I arrive at is on how the irresolvable nature of the city is reflected in the totality of Ivan Vladislavić’s writing. In that way, it was possible to treat every text in its own right (rather than forcing it to conform to an overarching thesis). This central insight allowed for the effective application of urban theory to the close readings of the texts.