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Research Publications (Academic Support)

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://ir-dev.dut.ac.za/handle/10321/211

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End date: 2019Subject: search.filters.subject.South Africa

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Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Evaluating black women's participation, development and success in doctoral studies : a capabilities perspective
    (Stellenbosch University, 2016-01-01) Loots, S.; Ts'ephe, Lifutso; Walker, M.
    Although black women show an increased presence in doctoral study, the probability of intersecting gendered and racial disadvantage is often overlooked through relying on separate numerical transformation progress indicators for gender and race. To take a more active approach to furthering social justice for this marginalised group, we need to explore more holistic ways of mapping transformation. In this sense, we argue for the application of the capabilities approach as an evaluative framework which allows for an assessment of freedoms or capabilities students are able to make use of in pursuing the lives they have reason to value. Furthermore, factors impacting on students’ capability formation are also considered, thus providing a multidimensional, ethically individualistic exploration of lives. The experiences of seven black women speak of barriers they have experienced throughout their doctoral journeys, but the data also create a sense of optimism as the potential of capability expansion is addressed.
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    Sputnik from below : space science and public culture in cold war southern Africa
    (Routledge, 2016) Waetjen, Thembisa
    The global space race of the Cold War has largely been written as a drama between state bodies of the northern hemisphere. This essay decentres that narrative by considering the production of popular meanings and local responses of Southern African publics to the 1957 launching of the Sputnik satellites, as articulated in a selection of mostly South African newspapers targeting various linguistic and cultural readerships. Newspapers were the most important points of contact between experts and laypersons, but were also the primary medium through which the authority of expertise could be contested and appropriated. The circulation of space science news occasioned debates about modernity and progress in relation to the issues of rights and racial politics. Cold war science innovations, aligned to projects of state, presented opportunities for publics to challenge discriminatory practices, yet could also be leveraged in local practices of social differentiation, to mark out and delegitimize certain groups or ideas as ‘backward’.
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    Are ‘Albergo Diffuso’ and community-based tourism the answers to community development in South Africa?
    (Taylor and Fancis Online, 2016-05-26) Giampiccoli, Andrea; Saayman, Melville; Jugmohan, Sean
    Conventional mass tourism shortcomings have facilitated the origin of alternative forms of tourism such as community-based tourism (CBT). Lately, another form of tourism known as ‘Albergo Diffuso’ (AD) has also been mentioned as a possible strategy to revive depressed specific local contexts, such as townships, villages and small towns. This article’s aim is twofold: first to contextualise the concept of AD in the South African milieu and secondly to investigate the possible relationship and role that CBT and AD could have. In this context, specific characteristics and similarities between CBT and AD are explored. The article’s main contribution concerns the exploration of the AD concept as an alternative form of tourism related to local community development. This is the first time that this concept has been presented in a South African context.
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    The impact of private game farms on local community development
    (SAIMS, 2013) Giampiccoli, Andrea; van der Merwe, P.; Saayman, M.
    Nature-based and wildlife tourism is a growing economic sector with associated increases in privately protected areas. The history of South Africa suggests a conflicting relationship between privately-owned game farms (PGFs) and their surrounding communities. There is an increased recognition of the contribution of PGFs to issues such as biodiversity and community development. However, few investigations, if any, on the relation between PGFs and community development can be discovered. The aim of this paper is to investigate and understand the current role and contribution of PGFs to community development, using a South African case study. To investigate the topic, telephonic interviews were conducted. The study suggests that PGFs are active in local community development albeit that their involvement is still in its early stages and could be enhanced. The present scarcity of research on the topic posits this investigation as a channel towards further research. The paper will suggest various strategies and projects that could help to facilitate the intervention of PGFs in community development.
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    Research output level at Durban University of Technology (DUT) in South Africa: contributing factors and their implications
    (Business Perspectives, 2014) Cele, Philisiwe Charity; Lekhanya, Lawrence Mpele
    Various factors contributing to the level of research output at the Durban of University of Technology (DUT) are investigated by this research and their implications to the University are also examined. Data are collected from six faculties at DUT. A stratified sample of 60 respondents is used, with the sample consisting of 30 experienced researchers and 30 emerging researchers, selected from the academic staff. Respondents are asked to complete a 5-point Likert scale questionnaire, with the help of an interviewer. Space is provided for each of the questions in the questionnaire, to allow respondents to provide additional, relevant information, which might left out during the formulation of the questionnaire. A mixed approach of both qualitative and quantitative techniques is used, while the analysis of primary data is done using SPSS, version 21.0. Results of the study reveal that the majority of respondents indicates various factors, including individual and institutional elements, as the main barrier to participate in doing research. This paper will benefit University management, academic staff, potential university academic staff, the university’s human resource department, other South African universities, the South Africa Department of Higher Education, the South African Council of High Education and South African education policy makers. The findings are limited by the study’s exploratory nature and only one university is considered. Generalization of this study should be done with care, while it is recommended that further research, with a large sample, should concentrate on the development of an academic workload allocation policy at the Universities and effective implementation of the policy encouraged.
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    South African higher education : at the center of a cauldron of national imaginations
    (Social Research, 2012) Bawa, Ahmed C.
    South Africa's university system is by far the most developed on the African continent. 18 years after the fall of apartheid we must ask whether there is anything approaching a national consensus about the place of university in development. This is still an open question. The legacies of apartheid continue to shape debates about how to think of the place of higher education in this society that is at once an exciting new experiment in democracy and the most unequal society in the world. South Africa's flirtations with the knowledge economy have implications for the way in which we think about its universities. Its status as being 12rd in the world in terms of the Human Development Index has other implications for this. In this paper we examine the tensions that undergird the higher education policy debates - the most often reflect conflictual imaginations of the ‘new’ South Africa.
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    Violence at the end of the rainbow
    (Taylor and Francis, 2013-02-26) Hemson, Crispin
    South Africa presents contradictory images—that of a miracle of reconcilia- tion, the Rainbow Nation, and that of societal decay, evidenced by the police shooting of thirty-six mineworkers at Marikana in 2012. It is important to explore how these threads are connected in South African society, where structural violence is replicated under conditions of major and democratic political change. While the specific case is South African, the interactions are typical of other societies. This case illustrates, however, the nature of what Tani Adams refers to as the “chronic violence” that afflicts certain societies, in which multiple factors—such as racism, social inequality, environmental damage, the migrant labor system, and what Tani Adams refers to as “disjunctive democratization”—work to ensure both the continued reproduction of vio- lence and its role in enabling the enrichment of corrupt elites.