Doctoral Degrees (History)

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Browsing Doctoral Degrees (History) by Author "Daries, Anell Stacey"

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    The history of physical education at Stellenbosch University, 1937-2019
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2023-03) Daries, Anell Stacey; Swart, Sandra; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of History
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis offers a nuanced dissection of the rise and development of physical education, later reimagined as sport science, as a department and as an academic discipline at Stellenbosch University from its inception in 1937 to 2019. Located within a complex institutional history, the thesis foregrounds the extent to which the university’s ethos of conservativism and traditionalist values influenced departmental shifts over the course of eight decades. In tracing the discipline’s intellectual legacies, the thesis examines the ways in which strata such as race, class, gender and geography shaped the trajectory of physical education, both within the context of the university and on a national scale. At its core, the thesis foregrounds the extent to which the university played a crucial role in the politics of nation-building across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. By analysing the ways in which political and social drivers have influenced institutional decision making throughout the segregationist, apartheid and democratic eras, the thesis presents three key arguments. First, as an established leader in the national physical education standardisation movement of the early to mid-twentieth century, the thesis argues that Stellenbosch University played an integral part in the advancement of Afrikaner nation-building. The second argument traces the discipline’s strategic quest for legitimacy and the scientification of physical education. Here too the thesis foregrounds the political undertows of ‘race betterment’ and how physical education was employed as a tool of ‘citizen making’. Furthermore, the thesis demonstrates that in aiding the national physical education standardisation movement of the 1930s and 1940s, prominent physical educationists based at Stellenbosch University pushed the discipline towards science. The third central contention highlights the state of physical education within the context of the ‘new South Africa’. In the era of democracy, the post-1994 regime did not consider physical education as a matter of national concern in the same way as before. Following South Africa’s readmission into the international sports arena, sporting ‘mega events’ now serve as a means through which to forge the foundations of the new nation.