<p> In the South African federal elections in May 2014, over one million born-frees failed to register to vote. This lack of political participation was surprising because this was the first election in which this new generation of voters, who had never lived under the oppressive apartheid regime, was eligible to vote. It was hypothesized that social trust and corruption, as it undermines political trust, were contributing factors to the low rates of youth voter turnout. A pilot study was developed and implemented with a small group of South Africans who were participating in a youth development program at a nongovernmental organization in the Western Cape. Focus group and interview data suggested that corruption, crime rates, and access to adequate services were of large concern in this sample. A survey developed through adaptation of items from the 2012 South African Reconciliation Barometer and the World Bank&rsquo;s Integrated Questionnaire for the Measurement of Social Capital showed a potential relationship between levels of political and social trust and voting behaviour. Due to these results, and the finding that participants were highly engaged with social media, recommendations to increase youth political participation included social media campaigns, using Facebook to create social capital, and promotion of education as a tool to develop interpersonal trust and political participation through enhanced access, quality, and scholarships. One novel finding within this research was that respondents expected the government to be the provider of tangible goods and services whereas the onus of completing education and securing employment was on the individual. This group seems to have a sense of personal agency that, if capitalized upon, could create a generation of politically active young people. Despite methodological concerns and limitations associated with sample size, this pilot study is an important contribution to the political participation literature and opens the door for large-scale quantitative studies to examine more closely the impacts of corruption, political trust, and social trust on voting behaviours in the born-free generation.</p><p>

<p> For decades the occurrences of genocide, war, and conflict have been documented and data have been collected on the numbers of those displaced and/or lost their life. Historically, however, there has been a dearth of research pertaining to the psychological response of those who have survived exposure to these events. Emerging studies are investigating the symptomology and manifestations of the trauma induced by exposure to genocide, war, and conflict events. Nonetheless, there continues to be a lack of research regarding treatment. The present qualitative study, which utilized semistructured interviews as data collection methods, investigated the culturally based manifestations of PTSD and treatment modalities specific to survivors of genocide, war, and conflict currently residing in South Africa. Study participants included a variety of health care workers. Several exposure-specific and culturally relative themes emerged related to the trauma resulting from these events, such as survivors losing their sense of self-identity, having a distrust of others, and feeling as though there is a lack of justice in the world. These themes, along with other interventions and modalities of treatment for PTSD, were employed to create broad clinical recommendations for treatment. The recommendations centered on the health care worker having both a cultural and systemic understanding of clients and their presenting concerns. The results of this study provide valuable information regarding how individuals experience, perceive, and cope with trauma that can be applicable to a broad range of health care personnel. Additionally, these are data that can impact the design of future treatment modalities for PTSD.</p>

<p> There is convincing evidence that effective leadership is a major contributing factor to small business growth and success. However, attention to leadership focused on founding CEOs abounds at the expense of exploring the distribution of leadership across an organization. This study explored the hybridity of focused and distributed leadership enactment in a fast-growing small business situated in South Africa. The first objective was to form a holistic view of how the members of the organization lead, incorporating leadership focused on key individual leaders and that which is shared and distributed amongst and between others. The second objective was to contextualize leadership hybridity to the South African culture and demands of fast business growth. The third objective was to explore how leaders transform as they navigate the terrains of focused and distributed leadership. The overarching goal was to propose a holistic leadership hybridity framework that appreciates these complexities. A qualitative single case study research design guided the study. The case study database was created from in-depth interviews with leaders and followers, focus group interviews, participant observations of organizational activities, and the review of two documents. Themes emerged to suggest that there is harmonious leadership hybridity that occurs through both the behaviors of critical individual leaders at the top (notably, the CEO) and those emerging from outside of formal structures through distributed leadership across multiple leadership actors and factors. The South African culture of ubuntu seems to support post-heroic leadership but does not exclude acknowledging that growing a business involves a collection of heroic acts. And lastly, leaders and followers who performed leadership within hybridity (i.e., those that can fluidly move between being a leader or a follower) benefited from enhanced self-regulation, amongst other psychosocial benefits. The insight gained from this study could inform leadership development initiatives that are more effective in growing leaders and small businesses in Southern Africa.</p><p>

<p> Transition planning is not an alternative for students with disabilities, but rather a fundamental aspect of their lives upon which educational programs and activities are developed to achieve successful postsecondary outcomes. Unlike developed countries such as the United States, Botswana does not have a transition mandate that guides the preparation of individuals with disabilities for adulthood. In this study, the researcher utilized the United States&rsquo; transition framework, with modifications, to suit the cultural context of Botswana in an exploration of perceptions of secondary and vocational school teachers on effective transition programs for students with disabilities. The study especially focused on students with visual impairments, in a sampling of Botswana&rsquo;s secondary and vocational schools. It examined differences in the beliefs, knowledge, and views of general education teachers, special education teachers, guidance and counseling teachers, and vocational teachers regarding supporting students with disabilities to achieve successful post-school outcomes, as well as participants&rsquo; perceptions about the importance of the academic and functional curriculum in the transition planning process. Teachers expressed diverse views, beliefs, and knowledge levels concerning transition planning practices and principles. Recommendations for practice and future research are discussed.</p><p>

Abstract not available

<p> Nearly 720,000 youth, ages 15 to 24, are living with HIV in South Africa. Black South African adolescents remain disproportionately impacted by HIV and face challenges to their development including issues of stigma, trauma, orphanhood and bereavement, increased poverty, and medication adherence and disclosure challenges. The majority of research on adolescents living with HIV (ALHIV) has only documented negative health outcomes and psychological distress. This study used a mixed methods approach to explore the factors that help South African ALHIV effectively cope with the adversities that they face and that contribute to their well-being and resilience. Participants included adolescents (<i>N</i>=7) from the Katlehong township in the Gauteng province, their primary caregivers (<i>N</i>=6), and their mental health providers (<i>N</i>=3). Photovoice was used to engage the adolescents in a process of taking photographs that represented how they cope with HIV and resources that contribute to their well-being. Adolescents also completed the <i>Child and Youth Resilience Measure-28 </i> to assess overall resilience and their access to ecological resources. To gain an additional perspective, caregivers were surveyed and mental health providers were interviewed. The study found that adolescents had access to protective factors and resources, across the ecological framework, which promoted psychological well-being and resilience. The protective factors were identified at the individual level (self-care, independence, being informed about HIV, and individual peer support), at the interpersonal level (family support), and at the community and contextual level (community support and finding purpose and belonging).</p><p>

This dissertation explores the nature of gender relations and their significance within Transkei society in South Africa. It focuses on how gender inequality is a process embedded in the social, economic and political fabric of Xhosa society in Transkei, and straddles the productive and reproductive realms. The study also looks at the extent to which gender inequality and patriarchal domination are incorporated into all spheres of the Transkei culture both ideologically and practically. A central claim of this study is that gender plays a key role in determining the ways in which men and women participate in economic, social and political activities. Men's and women's lives are socially and culturally structured in different ways and therefore male-dominated state policies and programs affect them differently and provoke different responses from them. In determining the ways in which men and women participate in economic, social, and political activities, a framework that stresses the dialectical interplay between patriarchal ideology in the home and and the labor market is developed. This framework allows me to examine the changes occurring in household and labor market relations, and the resultant contradictions and tensions within Transkei society as both men's and women's actions negotiate, maintain, challenge and redefine existing social structures. At the same time this framework maps Transkei's women's position both historically and in the present, and portrays them not as passive victims, but as active social actors who contribute to the historical changes and are in turn affected by them. Two rural villages in Cofimvaba district, Transkei, were selected for the study: Magwala, a predominantly Christian educated community, and Mangweni, a "traditional" non-literate community. The households in the latter community are the poorest and still practice some of the old Xhosa customs, while the households in the former community vary widely in wealth and economic activity.

<p> This is a study of contemporary jazz culture in post-apartheid South Africa. It demonstrates that the significance of jazz can productively be understood from the perspective of listeners, complementing the necessary attention that has historically been afforded to the creators and performers of the music. It describes the rich social life that has emerged around the collecting and sharing of jazz recordings by associations of listeners in this country. In these social contexts, a semi-public culture of listening has been created, it is argued, that is distinct from the formal jazz recording, broadcast and festival sectors, and extends across various social, cultural, linguistic and related boundaries to constitute a vibrant dimension of vernacular musical life. South African jazz appreciation societies illustrate that collecting may be a global phenomenon but that recordings can take on quite particular social lives in specific times and places, and that the extension of consumer capitalism to places like South Africa does not always automatically involve the same kinds of possessive individualism that they do in other settings, and might even serve as a catalyst for new forms of creativity. The study demonstrates, moreover, that what is casually referred to as "the jazz public" is an internally variegated and often enduringly segregated constellation of scenes, several of which remain quite intimate and, indeed, beyond the view of the "general public." The study foregrounds how one specific dimension of jazz culture &ndash; the modes of sociability with which the music has become associated among its listening devotees &ndash; can assume decidedly local forms and resonances, becoming part of the country's jazz heritage in its own right and throwing into relief the potential breadth, range and contrasts in the ways that jazz writ large can be figured and recontextualised as it is vernacularized around the world. The study recognizes the significant role that jazz appreciation societies play in creating culturally resonant grassroots social settings for this music, documents and analyses the creativity with which they do so, and considers the broader implications of their contribution to the musical elaboration of public space in contemporary South Africa.</p>

This dissertation investigates labor demand constraints and labor supply barriers to informal employment opportunities in Johannesburg using a micro-macro linkage methodology. Existing literature often characterizes the “informal sector” as voluntarist, or as the result of rationing due to labor market imperfections. Such models acknowledge no explicit role for macroeconomic factors to affect employment outcomes. I argue that, far from being structurally disconnected, both formal and informal employment conditions, including those in street trading, are shaped by the macroeconomic environment. The results highlight mechanisms through which conditions in the informal economy, in which traders operate and make decisions, are shaped by macroeconomic policies, and how these policies affect employment security. Based on qualitative field research on self-employed street traders conducted in 2008, I develop an analysis of trading from the level of the macroeconomy, through the retail sector, to traders and their households. The macroeconomic analysis estimates a consumption function to model impacts of alternative fiscal policy to that adopted in the post-apartheid years. The analysis uses an input-output model to isolate the impact of deficit spending on consumption by industrial sector and assess earnings and employment effects in the retail sector. Interview-based survey data enrich and contextualize the analysis, incorporating traders’ experiences and perceived challenges to self-employment. I find evidence of multiple interacting constraints on labor demand and labor supply, which helps make sense of the South African paradox of high unemployment coincident with a small informal economy. Street traders have limited profitability due, in part, to constrained consumption demand, which provides some explanation for the persistence of the paradox despite low barriers to entry. Further, constraints have disproportionate impacts on certain groups: female traders perceive their self-employment as significantly more threatened by demand constraints because their households tend to rely more on trading income than do male traders' households.

This study traces the evolution of the anti-apartheid movement from its emergence in the radical diaspora politics of the 1940s through the civil rights and black power eras and its maturation in the 1980s into a national movement that transformed US foreign policy. Chapter one traces the emergence of this counter-hegemony discourse in the radical African Diaspora politics of the 1940s and its repression through government intervention. Chapter two takes a close look at the government's efforts to reestablish discursive hegemony in the United States by co-opting African-American leaders and organizations through “enlightened paternalism” that included covert and overt CIA funding and the establishment of anticommunist journals. Chapter three examines the re-emergence of anti-apartheid sentiment during what became known as the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Chapters four and five look at the radicalization of the black freedom movement and the development of an anti-apartheid discourse and culture in the 1970s. Chapter six examines the emergence of TransAfrica—the black lobby for Africa and the Caribbean and its challenge to Reagan's “constructive engagement” policies. Chapter seven examines the Free South Africa Movement and the revival of direct action to pressure Congress to pass anti-apartheid sanctions. Chapter eight looks at role of the Congressional Black Caucus in passing sanctions against South Africa over President Reagan's veto. And finally chapter nine examines the impact of sanctions on the release of Nelson Mandela and his colleagues from prison and his eventual election as the first democratically elected president of South Africa.