Magister Artium - MA / This study explores the lives of Kanana residents, an informal settlement in Gugulethu Township on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa. It pays particular attention to their everyday lives to dispel negative and simplistic representations of informal settlement residents when they collectively take part in protests. Although there are extensive reasons for the protests in the informal settlements, the media and the South African government have reduced these protests to portraying them as demands for “service delivery”, and furthermore as criminally induced protests. I point out that this problem is partly due to scholarly work that does not engage these misleading representations and illustrate the lives of shack residents in the ordinary, when they are not protesting. Thus the focus of this thesis is life beyond protests. I argue that the lives of shack residents who participate in the protests are complex. As opposed to negative and simplistic representations, this thesis illustrates that one needs to be immersed in the lives of shack residents so as to understand them as identifiable human beings who make meaning of their lives. I explore their lives in the shack settlement further and argue that these human beings live their ordinary harmonious lives centred on the practice of greeting. To highlight the complexity of life of protesting informal settlement residents this thesis makes a point that there exist unsettling realities in the shack settlement; unsettling realities that make residents feel to be less of human beings. Kanana residents, therefore, draw from these perpetual unsettling realities to organise and protest. This thesis is based on ethnographic research, which was conducted between September 2015 and February 2016. During fieldwork, I observed and interacted in informal conversations with Kanana residents. With the main co-producers of this work, I carried out their life histories and further in-depth interviews.

Este ensaio se dedica à tarefa sempre insuficiente de descrever e analisar a criação literária a partir de algumas circunstâncias específicas que podem amparar o ato de escrever. De um lado, a circunstância do escritor que conquista uma disciplina e se deixa absorver pelo devaneio da criação. Do outro, a do autor viajante, que se dissipa nas condições de errância e redescobrimento da própria língua, buscando abolir o destino e criar um estado de consciência estimulante para a própria literatura. Na tentativa de compreender o fenômeno nestes dois contextos, recorremos a dois conceitos da psicanálise freudiana: a fantasia dos sonhos diurnos e o inquietante familiar nas condições de exílio e de viagem / This essay focuses on the always-insufficient task of describing and analyzing literary creation from some specific circumstances that support the act of writing. On one hand, the situation of the writer who conquers a discipline and is absorbed by the reverie of creation. On the other, that of the travelling author, who dissipates himself in the conditions of wanderlust and rediscovery of his own language, seeking to abolish destiny and to create a stimulating state of consciousness for literature itself. In an attempt to understand the phenomenon in these two contexts, we use two concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis: the \"fantasy\" of daydreams and the \"uncanny\" in the conditions of exile and travel

Este ensaio se dedica à tarefa sempre insuficiente de descrever e analisar a criação literária a partir de algumas circunstâncias específicas que podem amparar o ato de escrever. De um lado, a circunstância do escritor que conquista uma disciplina e se deixa absorver pelo devaneio da criação. Do outro, a do autor viajante, que se dissipa nas condições de errância e redescobrimento da própria língua, buscando abolir o destino e criar um estado de consciência estimulante para a própria literatura. Na tentativa de compreender o fenômeno nestes dois contextos, recorremos a dois conceitos da psicanálise freudiana: a fantasia dos sonhos diurnos e o inquietante familiar nas condições de exílio e de viagem / This essay focuses on the always-insufficient task of describing and analyzing literary creation from some specific circumstances that support the act of writing. On one hand, the situation of the writer who conquers a discipline and is absorbed by the reverie of creation. On the other, that of the travelling author, who dissipates himself in the conditions of wanderlust and rediscovery of his own language, seeking to abolish destiny and to create a stimulating state of consciousness for literature itself. In an attempt to understand the phenomenon in these two contexts, we use two concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis: the \"fantasy\" of daydreams and the \"uncanny\" in the conditions of exile and travel

This thesis explores the phenomenon of Indigenous/non-Indigenous allyship. In this thesis, Indigenous child welfare leaders were interviewed regarding their perspectives on allyship and were asked to identify non-Indigenous leaders whom they consider allies. Through a storytelling methodology, these non-Indigenous leaders were interviewed regarding their journeys to allyship. As the researcher I employed thematic analysis of the interviews conducted to determine if there are patterns that suggest a process through which a non-Indigenous person becomes an ally. Analysis of the literature and the interviews conducted suggest critical processes that non-Indigenous leaders have undergone, and comprise a series of steps, in the journey to allyship. The research questions addressed in this thesis are: (1) Are there process patterns or themes that emerge with the phenomenon of allyship? (2) Is there a framework that can be identified that can inform a settler leader’s journey to becoming an ally? The research findings suggest that there are essential process patterns that emerge with the phenomenon of allyship. Further, the findings suggest there is danger in suggesting a sequential or linear process for this journey of head, heart and spirit. / Graduate / 2020-12-19

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Museums as colonial institutions and agents in nation building have constructed, circulated and reinforced colonialist, patriarchal, heteronormative and cisnormative national narratives. Yet, these institutions can be subverted, resisted and transformed into sites of critical public pedagogy especially when they invite Indigenous artists and curators to intervene critically. They are thus becoming important spaces for Indigenous counter-narratives, self-representation and resistance—and for settler education. My study inquired into Cree artist Kent Monkman’s commissioned touring exhibition Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience which offers a critical response to Canada’s celebration of its sesquicentennial. Narrated by Monkman’s alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, the exhibition tells the story of the past 150 years from an Indigenous perspective. Seeking to work on unsettling my “settler within” (Regan, 2010, p. 13) and contribute to understandings of the education needed for transforming Indigenous-settler relations, I visited and studied the exhibition at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta and the Confederation Centre Art Gallery in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. My study brings together exhibition analysis, to examine how the exhibition’s elements work together to produce meaning and experience, with autoethnography as a means to distance myself from the stance of expert analyst and allow for settler reflexivity and vulnerability. I developed a three-lens framework (narrative, representational and relational/embodied) for exhibition analysis which itself became unsettled. What I experienced is an exhibition that has at its core a holism that brings together head, heart, body and spirit pulled together by the thread of the exhibition’s powerful storytelling. I therefore contend that Monkman and Miss Chief create a decolonizing, truth-telling space which not only invites a questioning of hegemonic narratives but also operates as a potentially unsettling site of experiential learning. As my self-discovery approach illustrates, exhibitions such as Monkman’s can profoundly disrupt the Euro-Western epistemological space of the museum with more holistic, relational, storied public pedagogies. For me, this led to deeply unsettling experiences and new ways of knowing and learning. As for if, to what extent, or how the exhibition will unsettle other visitors, I can only speak of its pedagogical possibilities. My own learning as a settler and adult educator suggests that when museums invite Indigenous intervention, they create important possibilities for unsettling settler histories, identities, relationships, epistemologies and pedagogies. This can inform public pedagogy and adult education discourses in ways that encourage interrogating, unsettling and reorienting Eurocentric theories, methodologies and practices, even those we characterize as critical and transformative. Using the lens of my own unsettling, and engaging in a close reading of Monkman’s exhibition, I expand my understandings of pedagogy and thus my capacities to contribute to understandings of public pedagogical mechanisms, specifically in relation to unsettling exhibition pedagogies and as part of a growing conversation between critical adult education and museum studies. / Graduate