Making and Shaping Participatory Spaces: Resemiotization and Citizenship Agency in South Africa

Abstract

In South Africa, democratic consolidation involves not only building a new state, but also new interfaces between state and society. To strengthen the agency of citizens at these interfaces, recent approaches to development stress the notion of “participatory citizenship.” The purpose of this article is to explore the links, rarely achieved in practice, between such practices of participatory citizenship and possibilities for literacy and language education. The article draws on a study of a capacity-building program for educators of adults in the Northern Cape Province. It uses the concept of resemiotization to explore the ways in which participants reshaped the multilingual representational resources available to them to legitimize the authority of subaltern actors and mobilize collective agency. Finally, it argues that such semiotic practices can be seen as a form of “linguistic citizenship,” which could promote locally rooted and participatory democracy under a radically reoriented adult basic education system.