Over the last four centuries, South Africa has been shaped by the twinned, dialectical
histories of violence and resistance to violence. However, because both violence and
resistance encompass myriad formations and are underlain with a plethora of ideologies and
hermeneutics, studying each - particularly from within critical community psychology - is
oftentimes necessarily didactic and reductive. Yet, if this kind of research is to retain
emancipatory potential, I contend, it should be both community-oriented and politically
committed. In an attempt to understand how violence moves through Thembelihle, a low income community in South Africa, an expansive lens for conceptualising violence and
resistance is advanced across this research’s four studies. In Study I, I use discursive
psychology to examine how Thembelihle has been constructed in dominant discourse by
analysing newspaper reporting on the community. Following this, in Study II and Study III, I
draw on multimodal discourse analysis to study representations of quotidian life and political
resistance in a participatory documentary film entitled Thembelihle: Place of Hope, which
was collaboratively produced by residents of Thembelihle, professional filmmakers and
myself. Lastly, in Study IV, I harness the narrative-discursive approach to explore how
residents of Thembelihle build community in response to Thembelihle: Place of Hope. It was
found that within dominant constructions, Thembelihle was personified as a monolithic and
an essentially Other geo-cultural space, made newsworthy principally through its engagement
with a broad, often vaguely-conceived, notion of violence. In response to dominant discursive
constructions of this kind, community members who featured in and produced the
documentary advanced a humanistic conception of Thembelihle which did not accept the
different violences to which the community is subject. Following this, audiences of the
documentary engaged the affective and political dimensions of community-building in order to advance a democratically conceived notion of collective will. These findings present
critical community psychologists and violence scholars with a number of considerations
around representation; the multitudinous nature of violence and resistance; psycho-politics; and radical hope. Ultimately, I argue, if such research is to be meaningful, it must be guided
by and subordinated to the emancipatory requirements articulated by community members. / Psychology / D. Litt et Phil (Psychology)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:unisa/oai:uir.unisa.ac.za:10500/27489 |
| Date | 01 1900 |
| Creators | Malherbe, Nick |
| Contributors | Seedat, Mohamed, Suffla, Shanhaaz |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
| Format | 1 online resource (xii, 403 pages) : color illustrations, application/pdf |
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