The Internet has evolved as a major medium of information and communication; broadband connection especially enhances Internet's capacity as a virtual platform for social, economic, political and civil activities. The problem is there is a limited and skewed access to the Internet in South Africa. The slow growth of household Internet and fixed broadband is problematic for a country that aspires to be "an advanced information society in which information and ICT tools are key drivers of economic and societal development" (South African Broadband Policy 2010). This dissertation investigates the pattern of Internet penetration in South Africa. Largely, I explore the pattern of Internet penetration amongst university students; data were collected from 10 universities located in both rural and urban areas with other demographic qualities that are representative of the student population in South Africa. Following Mossberger, Tolbert & McNeal's (2008) use of the concept of digital citizenship, I rearticulate the concept as a citizenry with the fulfilled rights to regular and flexible access to the Internet—implicitly individual and household forms of access, the skills to use the Internet, and regular use of the Internet for participation in all spheres of society. I then develop a theoretical framework of digital citizenship by identifying five key elements, namely: citizenship rights, Internet access, Internet use, Internet/digital skills, and policy. These elements are used as measures to investigate the pattern of Internet penetration in South Africa. I conducted a survey amongst students, interviewed officials in government agencies in the communications sector, studied selected policy documents, and carried out digital skill experiments. From the findings, I argue that digital citizenship is largely nonexistent in South Africa, particularly amongst the university students. I claim that most of these students are partially digital . A partially digital person has limited access to the Internet, inadequate skills to apply this technology and as a result cannot efficiently use the Internet to participate effectively as a citizen in society. The study also reveals the skewed access to the Internet replicates the existing pattern of social inequalities in the country, often analyzed in terms of rural-urban inequalities, inequalities based on gender of household heads, family income, racial and population groups. I also claim that students from households that bear the brunt of social inequalities in South Africa are further deprived by the lack of access to the Internet, particularly household access, and the inability to effectively use the Internet. This deprivation means that their rights and abilities to participate in society as citizens using digital means are compromised. In conclusion, I offer recommendations towards achieving digital citizenship.

The problem examined in this research is that South Africa practices a system of education that sorts people in a way that makes Blacks receive unequal and separate education. The closer people are to the white power structure, the better their education and the farther away they are, the poorer their access to opportunities for a quality education on equal terms. In other words, it seems that the more white you are, the more opportunities and benefits you receive. This system of education does not appear to help students, especially black children and youth, learn at high levels of accomplishment. Rather, it creates long lasting problems in people's lives and as such may need to be restructured in a way that permits students of all backgrounds to receive a quality education on equal terms. The purpose of the study was to understand reasons selected black South Africans seem to oppose their education system. More specifically, perceptions of these black people were helpful in suggesting the directions in which educational reform in South Africa ought to go. Specifically, the study was guided by two major research questions: (1) What are the perceptions selected black South African adults in the United States have toward their experiences in the apartheid education system in South Africa? (2) What are the recommendations of selected black South African adults in the United States for improving the education system for children and youth in South Africa? To answer these questions, interviews were used to collect data. Seven black South African adults were interviewed and their responses were analyzed, organized and thematically presented. One finding of the study is that apartheid education seems responsible for making respondents feel inadequate, incapable, less human, unable to think critically, inferior, anxious to venture in life beyond school, helpless, uneasy, and dubious to participate in class related activities. The findings of the study show that the education of black people in South Africa deserves speedy attention and major reform. The study concludes that apartheid education is an intolerable system of education that should be eliminated. The form of education to be created is a matter for intense discussion and wise decision making which may lead to quality education for all South Africans. The study recommends that black people should understand their historical underpinnings to help restore their confidence, to dispel negative fabrications, and to become contributors in the development of quality education in South Africa.

This dissertation positions South African "colored" author Bessie Head as a political novelist. The dissertation also explores the nature of Head's art-form and content situating her achievements in the context of African traditions. The dissertation further highlights elements which distinguish Head as a political writer who both participates in and resists male-defined political discourse. Head's work appears to be an exploration of the possibility of defining "a new code of honour which all nations can abide by." This venture, which she seems to approach from an original angle in every text, leads her to embrace a redemptive kind of politics which is not readily recognizable as "political" writing because of its reliance on African spirituality. A Question of Power in particular, as this dissertation proposes, reveals what I have named the concept of consciousness-invasion, a notion which seems to be informed by African spirituality. Additionally, the thesis analyzes the critical reception accorded Head in the last two decades. It explains two discoveries: that, in general the attempts of Headian scholars to articulate the author's novelistic vision has yielded limited results because they have not seen her work as primarily political; that the view of Head's texts as political exposes the complexity of her canon as represented by her ability to simultaneously depict, with a fine balance, colonialism, racism, sexism, tribalism, and the self-interest which lies in every character who champions these oppression devices. In its redefinition of "political" writing the dissertation further argues that Head's novels exhibit the power dynamics of "macropolitics" in relation to those apparent in "micropolitics" and in "metapolitics". ("Macropolitics" and "micropolitics" are terms adopted from the work of linguist Robin Tolmach Lakoff while "metapolitics" is my own coinage.)

<p> With the goal of eliminating mother-to-child transmission by 2015, a wide range of governmental and other efforts within low- and middle-income countries have sought to provide services for the prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV (PMTCT) to the estimated 1.2 million pregnant women in need. In support of this goal, the World Health Organization (WHO), as the leading normative international body in the area of evidence-based clinical guidelines, issued policy recommendations on the use of antiretroviral drugs for PMTCT. Through various mechanisms, including guidance notes and dissemination workshops, WHO supports countries to adopt and adapt the guidelines within their national policy frameworks. Through three analyses, this dissertation examines the diffusion of WHO PMTCT guidelines in five Eastern and Southern African countries over a 16-year period (1998-2013) and estimates the effect of PMTCT policy adoption on delivery of key services. </p><p> <b>The first analysis</b> of the adoption of specific PMTCT guideline updates between 1998 and 2013 seeks to ascertain which internal factors may explain why and when countries decided to adopt new technical guidance. The policy analysis shows that the five countries adopted a majority of the key international PMTCT technical guidance updates. It can be concluded that international to national policy diffusion was taking place and that national policies converged to be more similar and more in line with international guidelines over the time period studied. Variation in adoption and in the internal determinants at play in each country was minimal, making it difficult to assess the influence of determinants qualitatively. The three internal determinants that appeared to most influence adoption of key PMTCT updates were: 1) the severity of the MTCT problem 2) governance effectiveness, and 3) prior PMTCT policy adoption. The lag between adoption and implementation in these countries is discussed. The findings indicate that in the countries studied, policies promoted by WHO and other international bodies can play a critical role in supporting national policy adoption for program advancement in the area of PMTCT. </p><p> <b>The second and third analyses</b> investigate whether the completeness of a country&rsquo;s body of PMTCT-supporting policies was associated with the delivery of two key PMTCT services &ndash; the offer of an HIV test and the receipt of HIV counseling as a part of antenatal care (ANC) &ndash; in four of the five countries included in the first analysis. Two nationally representative surveys per country were used to conduct a quasi-experimental fixed-effects analysis of the role of policy in predicting a woman&rsquo;s probability of being offered an HIV test or receiving HIV counseling in ANC, controlling for other key individual- and country-level covariates. </p><p> According to the &lsquo;testing&rsquo; model, a one-unit increase in policy score was associated with a 0.042 (p&lt;0.000) increase in the probability that a woman was offered an HIV test as a part of antenatal care. According to the &lsquo;counseling&rsquo; model, a one-unit increase in policy score was associated with a 0.014 (p&lt;0.001) increase in the probability that a woman received HIV counseling as a part of antenatal care. In both the testing and counseling models, the policy/education interaction was statistically significant in the final model, with a greater policy effect estimated at among those with higher education levels. Time statistically significantly influenced the probability of the outcome, as did government health spending, governance effectiveness, and donor health spending. Further study is needed to identify the policy elements that have the most impact on improving service delivery. </p><p> <b>The three analyses</b> presented here support the premise that international health policies influence national-level policy adoption, and that national-level policy adoption in turn influences national service outputs. As countries and their development partners mobilize for the Sustainable Development Goal era, policy adoption at the international level will continue to be an important influence in national policy adoption in the area of PMTCT. This research has described a number of potential internal and external determinants that will influence national adoption in this next round of global health policy advocacy. Looking forward, this study shows that countries and their development partners should continue to invest in the work of policy adoption to complement other efforts to reach health goals, including increased government health spending.</p>

abstract: This dissertation examines cultural understandings and lived realities of entrepreneurship across South Africa’s economic landscape, comparing the experiences of Cape Town’s Black entrepreneurs in under-resourced townships to those of White entrepreneurs in the wealthy, high finance business district. Based on 13 months of participant observation and interviews with 60 entrepreneurs, I find major differences between these groups of entrepreneurs, which I explain in three independent analyses that together form this dissertation. The first analysis examines the entrepreneurial motivations of Black entrepreneurs in Khayelitsha, Cape Town’s largest township. This analysis gives insight into expressed cultural values of entrepreneurship beyond a priori neoliberal analytical frameworks. The second analysis compares the material resources that Black entrepreneurs in Khayelitsha and White entrepreneurs in downtown Cape Town require for their businesses, and the mechanisms through which they secure these resources. This analysis demonstrates how historical structures of economic inequality affect entrepreneurial strategies. The third analysis assesses the non-material obstacles and challenges that both Black entrepreneurs in Khayelitsha and White entrepreneurs in wealthy areas of downtown Cape Town face in initiating their business ventures. This analysis highlights the importance of cultural capital to entrepreneurship and explains how non-material obstacles differ for entrepreneurs in different positions of societal power. Taken together, my findings contribute to two long-established lines of anthropological scholarship on entrepreneurship: (1) the moral values and understandings of entrepreneurship, and (2) the strategies and practices of entrepreneurship. I demonstrate the need to expand anthropological understandings of entrepreneurship to better theorize diverse economies, localized understandings and values of entrepreneurship, and the relationship of entrepreneurship to notions of economic justice. Yet, through comparative analysis I also demonstrate that diverse and localized values of entrepreneurship must be considered within the context of societal power structures; such context allows scholars to assess if and how diverse entrepreneurial values have the potential to make broad-scale social and/or cultural change. As such, I argue for the importance of putting these two streams of anthropological research into conversation with one another in order to gain a more holistic understanding of the relationship between the cultural meanings and the practices of entrepreneurship. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Anthropology 2018

<p> Harmony Christian School in Rustenburg, South Africa is a missionary outreach program of Bethel Gospel Assembly, Inc., New York. The school was founded in 2006 to educate learners and develop in them a close attachment with God even as they attained high academic standard in their school work. However, while there were established measures of academic progress from grade to grade, there was no comparable measure of the spiritual growth of the students in terms of how closely they were attached to God in their relationship as a result of their exposure to consistent Bible Study. The Researcher thus created an intervention study using the Attachment to God Inventory to measure the level of attachment of the adolescent learners to God in the school. The study did show that there was an attachment relationship between the learners and God. The study also showed that as a result of their consistent exposure to Bible study, there was a shift to a closer attachment to God. The level of the shift was minimal but statistically significant at a low level of confidence. The study then offered ministry recommendations. </p><p>

abstract: This dissertation considers the potential of desire to protect humans, animals, and the environment in the biopolitical times of late capitalism. Through readings of recent South African Literature in English from a postcolonial ecocritical perspective, this project theorizes desire as a mode of resistance to the neocolonial and capitalist instrumentalization of communities of humans and nonhumans, where they are often seen as mere "resources" awaiting consumption and transformation into profit. Deleuze and Guattari posit this overconsumption as stemming in part from capitalism's deployment of the psychoanalytic definition of desire as lack, where all desires are defined according to the same tragedy and brought into a money economy. By defining desire, capitalism seeks to limit the productive unconscious and attempts to create manageable subjects who perform the work of the capitalist machine--subjects that facilitate the extraction of surplus value and pleasure for themselves and the dominant classes. Thinking desire differently as positive and as potentially revolutionary, after Deleuze and Guattari, offers possible resistances to this biopolitical management. This different, positive desire can also change views of others and the world as existing solely for human consumption: views which so often risk bodies towards death and render communities unsustainable. The representations of human and animal desires (and often their cross-species desires) in this literature imagine relationships to the world otherwise, outside of a colonial legacy, where ethical response obtains instead of the consumption of others and the environment by the dominant subjects of capitalism. This project also considers other attempts to protect communities such as animal rights, arguing that rethinking desire is a necessary corollary in the effort to protect communities and lives that are made available for a "non-criminal putting to death" since positive desire precedes the passing of any such laws and must exist for their proper administration. These texts often demonstrate the law's failures to protect communities through portraying corrupt officials who risk the communities they are charged with protecting when their protection competes with government officials' personal capitalist ambitions. Desire offers opportunities for imagining other creative options towards protecting communities, outside of legal discourse. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2014

No description available.

No description available.

<p> This dissertation examines how poor black South African women in rural areas organize themselves to address their poverty situations and meet their practical needs &ndash; those that pertain to their responsibilities as grandmothers, mothers, and community members &ndash; and assesses their organizations' effectiveness for meeting women's goals. My research is based on two groups that are members of the South African Rural Women's Movement. They are the Sisonke Women's Club Group (SSWCG) and the Siyabonga Women's Club Group (SBWCG). A majority of these women are illiterate and were <i>de jure</i> or <i> de facto</i> heads of households. Based on interviews and participant observation, I describe and analyze the strategies that these women employ in an attempt to alleviate poverty, better their lives, and assist in the survival of their families, each other, and the most vulnerable members of their community. Their strategies involve organizing in groups to support each other's income-generating activities and to help each other in times of emergency. Their activities include making floor mats, beading, sewing, baking, and providing caregiving for members who are sick and for orphans. I conclude that, although their organizing helps meet practical needs based on their traditional roles as women, it has not contributed to meeting strategic needs &ndash; to their empowerment as citizens or as heads of households. </p>