Masters Degrees (Sociology and Social Anthropology)

Permanent URI for this collection

Browse

Recent Submissions

Now showing 1 - 5 of 258
  • Item
    “I’ve learnt to not have those kinds of outbursts”: exploring the perspectives of men on a violence intervention programme
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2023-12) Kemp, Nadia; Fakier, Khayaat; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Sociology and Social Anthropology.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: South Africa has the highest reported rate of intimate partner femicide with 62% of intimate partner femicide attributed to intimate partner violence. Studies have shown that offering services and assistance solely to victims of violence will not aid in the cessation of violence against women. There is an identifiable need for programmes aimed at men that address violence towards women. The development of such programmes in South Africa is severely lacking and as such there is a need for research addressing this topic. This study employed a qualitative research design using semi structured interviews with men who are currently enrolled in intervention programmes addressing violence. Subsequent to the interview questions were sent to participants to respond via social media platforms in an attempt to counter potential response bias. The main findings of this study concur with existing studies that found that a variety of factors influence the way in which men respond and experience these programmes. Amongst these are willingness to change, self-narratives, the nature of intervention programmes and how participants enter into these programmes. The study concludes with the recommendation that particular attention should be paid to the factors that affect the way in which men experience and respond to these programmes especially in the development and redesign of future interventions to ensure positive responses from participants and efficiency of the programmes in obtaining their objectives. A ‘one-size fits all’ approach to interventions should be rejected in favour of intervention programmes that consider the broader socio-cultural factors that leave men more likely to perpetrate violence against women.
  • Item
    Small business, mental health and psychosocial disabilities: a critical analysis of the South African National Small Business Policy environment through a political economy lens
    (Stellenbosch University, 2023-12) Booysen, Chantelle; Prah, Efua; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Sociology and Social Anthropology.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Empirical research on evidence of the social, socioeconomic, and sociopolitical realities of persons navigating mental health conditions and psychosocial disabilities in the workplace of small and micro-sized businesses is rare. Thus, this study involves an in-depth critical analysis of issues relating to societal perceptions, employer/employee experiences, macro/micro influences, and national responses as key drivers in addressing mental health problems in the small business policy environment in South Africa. The Political Economy framework approach has been employed, concentrating on the unique realities of small and micro-sized businesses, their employers, and employees. The study draws on the Critical Disability Theory as it relates to the key drivers and expands on the concept of ‘transdisciplinarity’ within which this study is positioned, i.e., Master of Philosophy in Transdisciplinary Health and Development Studies in Africa. The study utilises a three-fold analysis, exposing key deficiencies in the identified policy environment. Firstly, the study presents the social realities of persons with mental health conditions and psychosocial disabilities relating to broader society and the employment cycle. Secondly, it frames the socioeconomic realities of mental health conditions and psychosocial disabilities in the workplace, highlighting employer/employee experiences. Lastly, the study highlights the sociopolitical realities, which include an investigation into legal instruments that influence workplace conditions and practices.
  • Item
    Nuclear legacies: an ethnographic study of the Southern African Faith Communities’ Environment Institute’s anti-nuclear campaign in the aftermath of a court victory
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2023-12) Clapperton, Keilidh Skye Lindsay; Robins, Steven Lance; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Sociology and Social Anthropology.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The Southern African Faith Communities’ Environment Institute (SAFCEI) and Earthlife Africa Johannesburg (ELA) played an important role in halting the South African government’s plan to undertake a R1.2 trillion new nuclear build project through a strategic court case which the two nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) won in 2017. This court victory was the high point of SAFCEI’s anti-nuclear campaign, and the organisation celebrated their successful legal action as an “outright” win for environmental justice. Five years after the conclusion of the so-called nuclear deal court case, its legacy remained central to SAFCEI’s anti-nuclear campaign as well as the organisation’s broader work, identity, and reputation. The anti-nuclear campaign, however, had been dormant since 2018. Nevertheless, SAFCEI staff members felt obligated to uphold the legacy of the nuclear deal court case and, through eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork, I followed the organisation’s attempts to revive its anti- nuclear campaign during 2022. At a time of significant organisational change, SAFCEI’s anti-nuclear campaign remained static. Staff members continuously repeated the story of the nuclear deal court case, and reused the materials and repertoires that had accompanied the earlier campaign as they tried to revitalise it. The legacies of the court case were ever-present and afforded SAFCEI a degree of legitimacy in policy-making spaces and NGO coalitions. However, the campaign had also stagnated in the years since the nuclear deal court case, and its legacy burdened the staff members tasked with perpetuating it. SAFCEI and ELA deliberately restricted the arguments they made in court to narrow procedural issues, and this case did not have far-reaching effects on nuclear energy governance in South Africa, or produce a popular anti-nuclear movement. Legal action is often an inappropriate tactic in environmental justice struggles, and the nuclear deal court case undermined the sustainability of SAFCEI’s anti-nuclear campaign and, therefore, its ability to realise further-reaching justice in South Africa. SAFCEI’s bureaucratisation, organisational loss of faith, staff shortages, and burnout – themselves legacies of the nuclear deal court case – hindered the organisation’s attempts to revitalise the anti-nuclear campaign through the Legacy Project faith leader advocacy training workshops and restarted anti-nuclear vigils. By the end of my fieldwork, these projects had largely failed to achieve their goals. However, the temporalities of advocacy and justice, like many of the violences against which they stand, are slow. SAFCEI’s anti-nuclear campaign was still in motion, and its effects remain to be seen.
  • Item
    "Not even your own teachers are spared" - an oral history of teaching on the Cape Flats in the 1980s
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2023-12) Johnson, Damian; Dubbeld, Bernard; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Sociology and Social Anthropology.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: During the Apartheid era, education for African, Coloured and Indian students was poorly resourced, and consequently placed a massive burden on teachers. As Wieder (2002: p. 198) demonstrates, teachers in Black schools were often forced to mediate between oppressive state policies and the protection of young students. For some teachers, teaching was not only about presenting a standardised curriculum but also being involved in a pedagogy that fostered an understanding of South African politics and society that contested the version presented by the Education Departments of the Apartheid Government. As teachers became more radical, Kihn (2002: p. 325) suggests that the concept of the “professional” teacher saw a significant shift from the late 1970s, following the resurgence of anti-Apartheid political organisations in the country, abandoning previous notions of the neutral and apolitical professional towards a more critical, politically engaged educator who firmly rejected Apartheid ideology – together with the growth of popular resistance to the Apartheid system in general. In this study, my interest is in tracing what became of a generation of politicised teachers in the Western Cape and using their life histories as a means of approaching the experience of the transition to democracy. This research focuses on men who were teachers during this period and examines their adaptation to the role of educator in the same community in which they were raised. The study focuses particularly on teachers who taught on the Cape Flats, in those areas constructed by the Apartheid state as urban peripheries to restrict Black movement and access to the city centre. The study highlights how these men remember their past teaching, how they envisaged the future at that time, and the disjuncture they feel between their lives – more than 20 years into democracy – and the futures they once imagined. In this way, this research has sought to not only recount what happened in the past, but also present a method of observing the transition from Apartheid and the experience of democracy, of capturing both the hopes from that time that were achieved and those that have been unfulfilled.
  • Item
    The African Zionist Church in East London, Eastern Cape and its response to LGBTQ individuals.
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2023-12) Qinela, Vuyolwethu; Francis, Dennis; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Sociology and Social Anthropology.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This project presents research based on a small sample of a Zion Christian Church (ZCC) and its response to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) individuals generally and specifically to its congregation. This research aims to broaden content written and derived from Africa in the context of troubling heteronormativity and western content published on queerness in Africa - towards a growing trend of support for LGBTQ individuals. Committed members of the ZCC in East London, Eastern Cape, were consulted through qualitative semi-structured interviews to produce a reliable commentary on the ZCC. Drawing from the interview responses of two church leaders, two older congregants (35 years and older) and six younger congregants (21 – 35 years) ZCC members, thematic analysis was used to organise and formulate frequent topics of conversation on the subject matter. Bourdieu’s (1984) theory of power, social habitus and social change and Rich’s (1980) theory on compulsory heterosexuality was used as a structural line of argument for the four main themes that were conceptualised from the research findings: ‘Compulsory Patriarchy’, ‘Alarmist Contentions’, ‘Silence and Queer Invisibility’ as well as ‘Heteronormativity’. This critical exploration of the ZCC and its response to LGBTQ individuals presents a utility of decoloniality that provides a unique explanation of the social formation of African Initiated Churches (AICs) and ethno-spiritual activities that take place in settings such as East London, Eastern Cape and how to think of them within the context of a society that tends to lean on Western features of religious denominations, gender, sexuality and cultural customs. This project argues that the power of patriarchy and compulsory heterosexuality in the ZCC church, though claiming to be separate from Western insulations or dictatorship, exists not only as an extension of Western culture but as a feature of a culture-specific institutional body that prizes and applies heteronormative traditional socio-cultural norms in its theology.