Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 79-82).

A wide range of auto/biographies and life stories has narrated South Africa's transition from apartheid to non-racial liberal democracy. However, the vast majority of these works has viewed the transformation process through the eyes of men and women who have lived extraordinary and spectacular lives. Following Ndebele's (1994) recognition of the radical potential of attending to the lives of ordinary South Africans, this thesis shifts the focus from the extraordinary and spectacular to the ordinary and examines the personal life stories of two female rural-to-urban migrants who have lived their entire lives on the margins of society. Viewing 'the margins' and 'the ordinary' as powerful sites for the production of counterhegemonic discourses (ibid; hooks, 1990:145) the thesis also reflects on what the women's life stories can teach us about South Africa's transformation process and post-apartheid freedom twenty-two years on. The thesis documents a halting and ambiguous transformation process and its impact on two black women who have spent their entire lives on the margins of the South African society. Particular light is shed on the limited and uneven impacts of the post-apartheid state's historical remedies and attempts to make a clean break with the past. Tracing how women's agency has played out over nearly four decades, the thesis shows how apartheids' racial, gendered and spatial legacies endure and are reinforced by current neoliberal policies and urban planning. The women's narratives also illustrate a yawning gap between South Africa's ideological and constitutional commitments and the lived realities for women left out of the "liberal promise" of development and prosperity (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2001) By shifting the focus from the spectacular and extraordinary to the ordinary, the thesis ultimately challenges us to rethink the notion of 1994 as a watershed moment in the lives of women of colour. On the one hand, the women's narratives clearly demonstrate the women's great resilience and ability to fend for themselves and their families in the face of adversity. On the other, their narratives also show the importance of confronting one-dimensional images of black women as strong and enduring 'superwomen' with little need for social support and assistance. The thesis concludes by reflecting on the women's ambivalent experiences of post-apartheid freedom. By attending to the women's daily concerns and grievances, the thesis highlights the limits of liberal freedom and democracy in the context of on-going violence, precarity and material lack.

The central goal of this thesis is to explore the underlying theories and concepts that help to explain the step-by-step processes and form the foundations of reconciliation-based programmes in Cape Town, South Africa. In theory, civil society organisations (CSOs) have logical rationales of how their project designs lead to some form of reconciliation, but in practice, the links between project activities and project goals are very ambiguous and are seldom articulated in detail. Through empirical research, this thesis provides the explanation and articulation needed to link the goals and outcomes by applying strategies used in "theory of change" (TOC) discourse to two community reconciliation projects in Cape Town: the Community Healing Project housed under the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, and the Healing of Memory workshops housed under the Institute for Healing of Memories. A TOC framework was first applied to community projects in the 1990s in the United States. The framework was designed to help explain the underlying theories that linked the activities to outcomes of community programmes that were established to tackle social issues on the community level. Seen as a success in explaining these projects, a TOC framework has been applied to several other community organisations, but has not been fully explored outside the Western context. The main goal of this research, then, is to apply a TOC framework to the two case studies and ascertain if it is a helpful tool in explaining community reconciliation interventions. The rationale for this research stems from the superficial engagement of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South African communities, which resulted in a lack of healing and reconciliation at the community level. After the completion of the TRC, CSOs filled this gap in reconciliation by designing programmes to facilitate healing and reconciliation within communities. Years into the construction of such reconciliation projects, more information is needed about how the CSOs explain their programmes. The methodology for this research first involves an inductive approach that allows for observations about the activities and intended outcomes that make up the two case studies, then applies a TOC framework that allows for the explanation of the concepts that link the activities and outcomes. The research concludes that the application of a TOC framework to community reconciliation projects is not only a useful tool in helping to explain how the projects operate, but should be a necessary practice in explaining community reconciliation interventions because of its ability to describe the complicated phenomenon of reconciliation and avoid superficial explanations. By applying a TOC framework, the concepts and theories that lie behind the intervention strategies help to articulate why change happens the way it does.

Bibliography: leaves 125-128.

This dissertation is a multi-disciplinary examine at the meaning of a right to basic education in South Africa. It will attempt to better understand the present circumstances in schools and the disparities in educational resource s, both material and human. In order to provide context for an unfamiliar reader, a brief review of the history of education will be provided. Resource disparities between the wealthy (minority) and middle class and poor (majority) will be reviewed and discussed with special focus on the Western C ape, where the research for this dissertation was conducted. The Western Cape is also the site of the ethnographic work collected and arranged in a section of the dissertation. US Legal cases surrounding education, a brief overview of the possibilities and problems of the legal approach are included in order to challenge but ultimately support the notion of the utility of the law as a tool to achieve substantive changes in educational equality. Recent cases in South Africa addressing the right are introduced as indicative of the possible jurisprudential trajectory that lies ahead. Finally, a list of the resources deemed 'basic' and necessary for educational success will be included and fleshed out within the dissertation.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 88-96). / The objective of this paper is to investigate how UNICEF (the United Nations Children's Fund) represents the notion of childhood. A content analysis of 690 photographs as well as an in-depth textual analysis of the most authoritative publications is conducted to decode childhood representations. The methodological approaches are both quantitative (content analysis) and qualitative (textual analysis). The photographic and publications data are obtained from the UNICEF website for the period 1999 to 2003. Inscribed in the visual images are historical western notions of childhood as a blissful stage of life in which passivity and vulnerability are featured. These inscriptions are rooted in technologies of scientific knowledge and myths, which explains therefore their persuasiveness. As regards arguments that development institutions export ideal notions of childhood specific only to western societies, the paper finds that while such ideals certainly are present in the representations, the proper ideal is by no means the sole embodiment of exported notions. Over the last five years, UNICEF has begun to incorporate new views of children as socially competent, valuable social actors in their own right (a school of thought that has begun to be theorised, most notably, by the 'New Sociology of Childhood'). However, the ideas of children as social actors attains a particular meaning in UNICEF texts. Many instances of children's strength and resiliency in third worlds are not represented as constitutive of what the idea of child agency means.

Includes bibliographical references. / This study is an evaluation of a year-long participatory development intervention with the non-governmental organisation (NGO), WAR on Malnutrition Tuberculosis and Hunger (hereafter WARMTH). It looks at the attempts by the organisation to make the ideological and practical shift from welfare to developmental practice, and the impact on their key beneficiaries, the Kitchen Operators (KOs). This process is extremely complex and difficult due to the South African context and a history of welfare and dependency relationship within the organisation.

There have been severe shortcomings in the protection of internally displaced persons (IDPs), and gaps in research with academic and legal focus remaining on refugees instead. These gaps are revealed and correspondingly explored in this thesis through a case study analysis of South Sudan. The main objective of this thesis is to expose the overall protection discrepancies facing IDPs, and the need to re-address international responsibility to protect in cases where national authorities are unable or unwilling to do so. The lack of a clear definition, legal status and institutional framework at an international level is shown to have an adverse impact on protection. The case study of South Sudan is introduced through an overall analysis of key events and displacement trends. Evidence in support of the main argument is presented through an analysis of the injustices and human rights violations facing IDPs in South Sudan. The roles of the two major providers of protection in South Sudan - the national authorities and the international community - are evaluated to ultimately show how a more flexible approach must be adopted by the international community in such cases. Overall, this thesis seeks to bring the displaced in South Sudan to the forefront of the debate about who is responsible for their protection.

Der digitale Wandel wird vielfach zum einen als äußeres und technologisches Phänomen wahrgenommen, welches neue und sich ständig weiterentwickelnde Kommunikationsräume und -möglichkeiten schafft. Damit verbunden ist ein weitreichender Zugriff auf individuelle Lernerdaten und Lernerprofile und eine schnell wachsende Anzahl an unterschiedlichsten elektronischen Hilfsmitteln. Zum anderen stehen die dadurch möglichen neuen lehrund lernbezogenen Verfahrensweisen und die sich verändernden Rollen und Aufgaben der Lehrenden und Lernenden im Mittelpunkt der Aufmerksamkeit. Dabei ist die Entwicklung von einer solchen Dynamik, dass sich sichere Aussagen über ein stabiles neues medial-technologisches Bedingungsgefüge schwer tätigen lassen.

Includes bibliographical references. / What motivates a group of young people from a disadvantaged community spend between 20 and 50 hours every week in a voluntary organisation in their area? This dissertation has studied young volunteers aged between 18 and 28, who are working in a non-govemmental organisation (NGO) operating in a disadvantaged local community on the Cape Flats in Cape Town, South Africa. The aim of this research was to gain knowledge of their motivations for being full-time volunteers for this NGO. This is a qualitative, ethnographic study, which seeks to provide information about the young volunteers and volunteering in a descriptive way. The methods used for data collection have been participative observation, interviews, personal conversations, drawings of social network maps and a questionnaire. The numbers of interviewees are 12 in total, viz. ll volunteers and the Manager of the NGO. Clary et al (1992) created an empirical instrument that can be used to map out an individual's reasons for volunteering, namely the 'volunteers function inventory' (VFI), which suggest 6 main motivations for volunteering. This functional approach for studying motivation applies to volunteers in high-risk communities because it relates the individual’s psychological functions to his/her experiences, current life situation and stage of development. The data analysis in this study indicates that there are several motivations at stake, which can operate at the same time as well as change over time. In Cole's recent study (2004), she found that there does not appear to be any one motivational reason for volunteering. People do volunteer work for different reasons, but for volunteers from high-risk communities, values are very important motivators: "I feel compassion toward people in need" seems to apply to the majority of the volunteers who participated in this study. In addition to value based motivations for volunteering, the following three motivations are to be found in this group of 11 volunteers: the social benefits of volunteering, the personal development of being a volunteer and, last but not least, the love for the work they are doing.