Global ETD Search

1	Bridging the divide: an alternate method of learning Pillay, Taswald 27 January 2014 (has links) M.Tech. (Architectural Technology) / This dissertation investigates the establishment of a learning centre in Zandspruit, an informal settlement that is located on the northwest periphery of Johannesburg, South Africa. This study investigates an alternate method of learning as a learning culture, as an alternative to that of closed school campuses. The learning culture provides the community with an architectural space that acts as a platform for open-ended learning and engagement. The architectural intervention proposed here is thus a response to the existing context, addressing education and spatial-social disintegration. The intervention is not an attempt at replicating existing typologies or even the tentative placement of a centre for utopian societal and educational ideals. Rather, it constitutes a radical approach, seen as necessary to achieving social development, acting as a catalyst for social cohesion and spatial synthesis. Existing modes of operation, advances in education through technology, as well as other pertinent networks and connections, are considered in the approach to designing a public interface, which attempts to suggest possible remedies to the difficulties endemic to the context. Further to this, this dissertation suggests how the adaptability of learning spaces can be achieved by addressing time, space, event and programme as concepts for incremental growth leading to the changing needs of a South African learning society. Architecture and society - South Africa
2	Grave rites and grave rights: anthropological study of the removal of farm graves in northern peri-urban Johannesburg Hill, Cherry Ann 02 1900 (has links) Text in English / In a diachronic and multi-sited study that extended from 2004 through 2012/2013 I deconstructed the sociocultural dynamics of relocating farm graves from the farm Zevenfontein in northern peri-urban Johannesburg. The graves at the focus of the study were some seventy-six graves removed from a northern portion of the farm in 2004 for a huge development project that commenced construction in 2010, and other graves removed in the 1980s from portions of the farm developed for residential estates in the 1990s. The study explored the people who dwelt on the farm and created the graveyards, the religious processes entailed in relocating the mortal remains of ancestors, the mortuary processes of exhuming and reburying ancestors, the disputations between and negotiating processes of landowners and grave owners, and the demands and demonstrations by farm workers and dwellers seeking redress for past human and cultural rights infringements. Although the topic of farm graves is well-referenced in land claims and sense of place discourses and is not in itself a new topic, this study provides original and in-depth information and insight on the broader picture of ancestral graves and their relocation, including the structuring of a community and its leaders and followers, it suggests answers to the question as to whether ancestral graves/graveyards can successfully and functionally be relocated. Not only are religious aspects examined in the study, but also the sociopolitical and economic dimensions of relocating graves are fully scrutinised in the context of farm workers and dwellers’ political awareness of and astuteness to the social and economic potential of farm graves and their relocation. / Anthropology and Archaeology / M.A. (Anthropology) Ancestors Anthropology Burial Cultural Dainfern Demonstration Disjunction Dispute Economic Exhumation Farm dwellers Farm workers Followers Graves Johannesburg Leaders Mass graves Peri-urban Political Power relations Reburial Ritual Social Toyi-toyi Zandspruit Zevenfontein 393.10968221 Burial -- South Africa -- Johannesburg Ethnopsychology -- Social aspects

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Bridging the divide: an alternate method of learning

Grave rites and grave rights: anthropological study of the removal of farm graves in northern peri-urban Johannesburg