Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references.

The dissertation argues that, in the attempt to build a shared democratic culture among ordinary citizens in post-apartheid South Africa, insufficient attention has been paid to transformations of interpersonal domains. The dissertation examines the process and effects of the Healing of Memories (HOM) project in Cape Town. HOM is a civil society initiative established in 1996 to facilitate storytelling workshops between South Africans, previously divided on the basis of race and class. Critiquing reconciliation discourses in South Africa, in particular that generated by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the research points the importance of lived, local, ongoing encounters between ordinary people who take cognizance of the apartheid past. Given the context of apartheid's stark socio-spatial legacies, the dissertation argues that there are few spaces in and processes through which ordinary social actors can explore their respective subject positions under apartheid and grapple with the emerging subjectivities of the post-apartheid sphere. HOM offered face-to-face encounters with the former racial 'Other'. In an immediate and participatory process of witnessing each other's personal memories of apartheid, participants' conventional understandings of self, 'Other' and history were unsettled, leading participants to 'make connections' between past and present, between the personal and the political, and between their own and other's expectations and hopes for change. The dissertation argues that this led to the forging of a temporary 'community of sentiment', based on a core set of 'new' social skills: response-ability, conflict-ability and sociability. The fraught experiential-emotional dimension of the encounters revealed some of the underlying 'structures of feeling' and their impact on the 'formations of relationship', which continuously hinder the search for new and meaningful ways of being social. The encounters produced the imaginative ground for new forms of inter-subjectivity in the post-apartheid sphere. Those who engaged in the process regularly were able to make substantial changes in their interpersonal relations. In its discussion of HOM. as a healing intervention in a post-authoritarian state, the discussion also draws on the author's experiences of post-Holocaust Germany and extensive library research in this field.

This study draws on ethnographic research with Somali migrants in Cape Town to explore the intersection of (im)mobility, physical and virtual space and new configurations of belonging in a digital world. It investigates the gendered politics and ethics of being and belonging in a world of mobility and migration where digital technologies have become significant to social organisation and sociality, both within and across borders. The dissertation presented probes the reasons why policies and technologies that were expected to create more fluid movement and more open societies have been met with the hardening of national borders, and a parallel rise in global trends towards anti-immigration, control of identities and fear of difference, which have manifested in South African society. This dissertation concludes that a combination of legal frameworks related to migrants and refugees, public infrastructures and cultural factors exert a strong influence on Somali migrants’ access to rights in South Africa, identity and social reproduction, and transnational belonging. Social exclusion may be a catalyst for Somali migrants’ transnational engagements in which digital technologies are a significant driver of heightened group consciousness and belonging. In many ways, the rise of online social networks and information capital have taken off among Somali migrants because of their tremendous social organising power in the absence of formal institutions, limited political and social belonging in host countries, and in the context of vastly integrated transnational diaspora networks which sustain economic and social lives. As such, Somali migrants live at the margins of (im)mobility – in-between physical and virtual spaces – leading to the navigation of “frontier-ness”, challenging taken-for-granted identities. While most studies about mobility and migration focus on citizenship and belonging from a legalistic or deterministic standpoint – solidifying prescribed notions of “Somaliness” or other factors of identity affiliated with nationhood or citizenship – there is a need to dig deeper to understanding what it means to navigate and, indeed perform, belonging via gendered technologies of mobility. Participation in social life through online networks and in transnational spaces often challenges common assumptions that identity is necessarily linked to particular places. However, this research simultaneously demonstrates the ways in which nations and borders continue to be emphasised in a world of flows. Contrary to popular assumptions that the internet is transnational, borderless and disassociated with place, this research argues that nation-places – enacted through hubs and nodes – continue to be salient. In this context, it is important to understand how digital technologies intersect with identity, culture and socialnorms offline and online among diverse communities to support new configurations of agency and empowerment in an increasingly digital world. In this light, this dissertation looks at how digital technologies, such as the internet, emerge as a force of mobility, situated in contrast to stark forces of immobility which seek to limit the movement of people. Not only does the internet close distance between geographies, it also closes distances in access to information and networks of support, such as financial assistance, social capital and caregiving. Experiences of mobility (offline and online) have been both empowering and liberating. However, mobility is also circumscribed and limited by new forms of social control and manipulation at all levels of society. Despite the profoundly transnational and borderless context of the internet, “traditional” cultural frameworks and identities, such as nationality and gender, continue to be salient markers of online identity, just as they are offline. This study argues that digital technologies are culturally constituted frontier spaces characterised by various layers of (im)mobility through which belonging is navigated and performed.

Summary in English. Bibliography: p. 206-215.

Bibliography: leaves 141-145.

This study centres on the village of Greyton, near Caledon in the Western Cape. It investigates the contemporary and historic changes in its population, residence patterns, relationships and economic activity. It focusses particularly on the effects of the implementation of the Group Areas Act in the village in 1969 and the change from an apparently integrated agricultural settlement to a highly differentiated holiday and retirement resort. This thesis questions the validity of the term "community" within the constraints and contradictions imposed by the establishment of Group Areas. It examines the idea of visible and invisible villagers in the context of separate development and, in the light of the changes which have taken place, it considers the relative importance of a progressive attitude in social and economic planning as opposed to a policy of preservation of the original character of a rural village.

Includes bibliographical references. / This dissertation is based on an ethnographic study with children and young people between the ages of 11 and 19, who attend formerly 'white' state schools in the Cape peninsula, South Africa. Since 1994 these schools have seen an increase in the racial diversity of the student population, but children continue to live in a highly segregated landscape. I take a closer look at the way these schoolchildren work within and around divisions of class and race in this specific place and time in South African history, to understand which factors promote and obstruct the possibility of diversity and integration in their daily lives. How are they negotiating the landscape, discourse and practice around them? And how do they create and verbalise ways of being themselves? Data for the study was collected by a variety of methods, to enable children to express themselves in various ways by engaging them in the research project through visual, group and individual exercises, focus group discussions and interviews.

Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 81-86).

Includes bibliographical references. / In the context of wide-spread, world-wide declines in fish stocks, such as the inshore fishery in the Benguela ecosystem along Gansbaai, fishers in Gansbaai partly rely on the availability of small pelagic fish (sardine and anchovy). However, fishers also hand-line and angle actively, and more recently practiced a range of other fishing techniques. Ten weeks of fieldwork in Gansbaai allowed the intertwined lived reality of fishers’ every- day practices to come to the fore. Regulation of techniques and target species has curtailed fishers through restrictive fishing rights, quotas and more recently the rise of protected areas such as Marine Protected Areas ... This project relates the situation of Gansbaai fishers in the face of a possible experimental closure of the waters surrounding nearby Dyer Island to purse seining, proposed in support of the conservation of African penguins.

This thesis has been indefinitely embargoed, as per the Senate Executive Committee decision on 10 May 2016.