Browsing by Author "Sutherland, James Andrew"

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    Transformation at Stellenbosch University: Facebook and the framing of the everyday
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2022-12) Sutherland, James Andrew; van der Wal, Ernst; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of Visual Arts.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This thesis responds to the ongoing project of transformation in South African higher education. I am specifically interested in the visual representation of institutional transformation, with Stellenbosch University and its Rooiplein serving as the focus for this investigation. In the broader sense, this thesis investigates how the idea of transformation is presented by a historically advantaged white Afrikaans university in the wake of the South African Fallist movements. My own research focuses on the visual and discursive representation of ‘the everyday’ on the Rooiplein, which is a prominent public space at Stellenbosch University. I am interested in the role that photographs and text play in the framing of ‘the everyday’ (of the ‘commonplace’, the ‘standard’, or the ‘ordinary’), and how this is represented on the university’s Facebook page. My engagement with the images and text published by Stellenbosch University on social media (in the years 2014-2018) explores the complex discourses on inclusion/exclusion as well as belonging/alienation on which the university was founded. As this thesis demonstrates, Stellenbosch University communicates an idealistic perspective that, on the face of it, has embraced and enacted a transformative model with some success. This study engages critically with this framing of a transformed university by looking to various realities that escape the university’s visual framing and normative understanding of transformation that is represented on social media.