Social Justice In South Africa Research Articles

Initial Teacher Education for Social Justice in South Africa: A Higher Education Policy Perspective

The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa envisions a socially just society where all citizens enjoy fundamental human rights. Education is regarded as significant in realizing social justice (SJ). Hence, South African education policy is underpinned by the conviction that teachers are drivers of societal change and instrumental in creating a socially just society. It is therefore expected that initial teacher education (ITE) programs to train prospective teachers will be infused with knowledge, competencies, values and attitudes to develop the dispositions that would facilitate social justice in a democratic and open South African society. In this desk-top study, we investigate the attributes and competencies promoted and advanced through the Minimum Requirements for Teacher Education Qualifications Policy (MRTEQ) (2015) concerning the training of prospective South African teachers for the realization of social justice. We gathered our data through a literature review and a policy analysis, and we drew from critical social theory (CST), which argues for social transformation, human emancipation, and capacitation to make sense of our findings. We found that the MRTEQ (2015) promotes and advances knowledge, contextual awareness, and critical pedagogy as significant attributes and competencies for realizing social justice through education and, more specifically, ITE. The implication is that all initial teacher programmes must be designed to equip prospective teachers with these attributes to contribute to realizing social justice and transforming society. Against this backdrop, specific recommendations are made to develop these attributes in prospective teachers.

Contents of a transformative developmental social work curriculum

ABSTRACT South Africa is recognized as the most unequal society in the world. In the National Development Plan 2030 in 2012 the South African government has called on social workers to participate in transformation by addressing inequality. A pursuit of social justice highlights the need for a social work curriculum that is transformative in nature and cultivates an anti-colonial Global South approach. Transformative developmental social work based on social development theory is a modality of choice when it comes to practicing social work in Global South countries. It empowers social workers to contribute to social justice in societies that are plagued by inequality. Although South Africa has incorporated developmental social work into its social welfare policies, a knowledge gap still exists that hampers social workers in bridging the gap between theoretical training and practicing in Global South countries. It is, therefore, necessary for South Africa to develop social development training, and practice which answers to its own socio-political, cultural, and economic environment. To reach this objective, a curriculum is crucial in which social justice, human rights, and equality are pursued. The aim of the study was to develop a curriculum for undergraduate social work training in transformative developmental social work to enable social workers to contribute to social justice. A multi-method and multi-phased study approach were used for the purpose of curriculum and programme development. In phase one, a scoping review was done about current social development teaching in the Global South. During phase two, a quantitative cross-sectional study with newly graduated social workers was done. They completed the Social Justice Scales of Torres-Harding et al. Phase three was a qualitative descriptive study with young South Africans that were used to describe their experience of social justice in South Africa. These phases were used to gather information to guide the process of curriculum development. Curriculum contents were then verified using the Delphi Technique by social work teaching experts. The research study produced a curriculum for transformative developmental social work training for undergraduate social work students.

Practical Theology and Social Just Pedagogies as Decoloniality Space

Higher education institutions in South Africa are still dominated by colonial traditions, course content, staff with colonial privileges and attachments, and discriminatory structures and systems. Practical theology and theologians are no exception. This article seeks to investigate the correlations between social just pedagogies and social justice. Social just pedagogies consider the role of the students, lecturers, and non-human phenomena as contributing to epistemology and agency formation. Normative pedagogies remain important criteria for knowledge production and graduate attributes within the South African higher education landscape. Within practical theology, the pedagogies that are used to form students and impart knowledge are still dominated by classical teaching methods that are power-centred and biased towards the privileged. The aim of this article is thus not to replace the normative pedagogies but to challenge the normativity and essentialism that has characterised colonial, race-related, and top-down knowledge production. I will introduce a social just pedagogy of teaching practical theology that critically engages and challenges the privileged normative position of classical practical theology. A social just pedagogy will bring the centre of learning and teaching into the structure of the lecture room, a participatory method of knowledge production, students, and the lecturers. The hierarchical structure of the South African university system will be engaged with as an instrument of traditional classical knowledge production systems. Teaching practical theology through social just pedagogies will also contribute to social justice within democratic South Africa. The question that I will address is how teaching practical theology at higher education institutions can contribute to the agency of social justice in South Africa.

Using health information for community activism: A case study of the movement for change and social justice in South Africa.

The access to, use, and exchange of health information is crucial when strengthening public health services and improving access to care. However, many health system stakeholders, including community groups are perpetually excluded from accessing and using health information. This is problematic as community groups, themselves end-users of care, are well-positioned to keep the health system accountable, provide feedback on the quality of services, and identify emerging health concerns. Using qualitative, ethnographic methods, this paper investigates different strategies used by the Movement for Change and Social Justice (MCSJ)-a local health activism group-to collect, use and distribute health information to improve health care in Gugulethu, a low-income neighbourhood in Cape Town, South Africa. Through participant observation, shadowing, informal conversations and semi-structured interviews that were analysed using iterative thematic analysis, findings revealed that MCSJ effectively collected, used and exchanged health information to develop short-term health campaigns. To get access to the needed health information, they used innovative strategies, including cultivating allies in the health system, finding safe spaces, and using community brokers to effectively mobilise community members to keep the health system accountable. MCSJ's strategies highlight that stakeholders' engagement with health information is not only a technical exercise, but a complex social process that requires constant negotiation and relationship building. Therefore, to make meaningful improvements to health services and create adaptive and responsive health systems, we need to include community groups as active stakeholders in the health system, provide relevant, up-to-date and locally relevant health information, and facilitate opportunities to socially engage with health information and those who produce it.

Exploring the Realities of Social Justice in South Africa: A Review of the Case of Rural Learners’ Transition to Higher Institutions

Exploring the Realities of Social Justice in South Africa: A Review of the Case of Rural Learners’ Transition to Higher Institutions

Climate Change and a plea for Social Justice in South Africa

Climate Change and a plea for Social Justice in South Africa

Missio hominum for social justice in South Africa: From missio Dei to missio hominum

Decades after the fall of apartheid, South Africa continues to face problems such as racism, heterosexism, sexism, ableism, xenophobia, and gender-based violence leading to feminicide, which undermines all efforts being made to achieve social justice. Every Christian mission begins or flows out from missio Dei and has a common endeavour to achieve its goal. This article examines missio hominum as the new fundamental paradigm from the perspective of Nico Smith. It believes that when Smith saw the need for missio hominum, social justice was thought of as a prerequisite for the accomplishment of missio Dei’s goal. It examines how he developed the missio hominum paradigm with the aim of advocating for social justice in South Africa. It perceives a potential and a fundamental element for social justice in this new paradigm. Significantly, missio hominum represents a fundamental theological paradigm by which human action is integrated or linked with divine action in order to achieve the goal of the missio Dei. It provides an overview of the literature relating to the featured works on Christian mission and social justice. To the best of the author’s knowledge, little or no work has been published on missio hominum as a missiological paradigm on the way to social justice.Contribution: Missio hominum from the perspective of Nico Smith is described here as a new fundamental missiological paradigm aimed at bringing social justice to South Africa. This paradigm integrates the active participation of all people in the broader discourse of the missio Dei and its fulfilment. Adoption of this paradigm will enrich the field of theology in general and missiology in particular as it expands human participation in missio Dei.

‘In the Interest of Reporting the Facts, and Not the Fiction, of South African Sport’: Race, Netball, and the Struggle for Social Justice in South Africa

Despite its national footprint, netball is a largely neglected area of South African sports history. Its intersections with race, gender and apartheid, the black struggle for social justice, international boycotts, rebel tours and local politics in general, remained an unmapped landscape. Unsurprisingly, this aided the construction and persistence of several myths about apartheid netball. This study debunks the existing myths and foregrounds the establishment sport’s past behaviour and the struggle of generations of black players and administrators (male and female) to advance the cause of social justice and the de-racialization of their chosen sport.

Justice versus Social Justice in South Africa: Quo vadis?

This article explores the concept of criminal justice as a formal process in which parties are judged and often adjudged from the paradigmatic perspective of legal guilt versus legal innocence. While this function of a criminal-justice system is important – and indeed necessary – in any ordered society, a society in transition such as South Africa must question the underlying basis of justice. This self-reflection must include an overview questioning whether the criminal-justice system and its rules are serving the community as originally intended or have become a self-serving function of state in which the final pursuit is outcome-driven as opposed to process-driven. The process of reflection must invariably find its genesis in the question: ‘What is justice?’ While this rhetorical phraseology has become trite through overuse, the author submits that the question remains of prime importance when considered contemporarily but viewed through the lens of historical discourse in African philosophy. In essence, the question remains unanswered. Momentum is added to this debate by the recent movement towards a more human rights and restorative approach to justice as well as the increased recognition of traditional legal approaches to criminal justice. This discussion is wide and in order to delimit its scope the author relies on a Socratically influenced method of knowledge-mining to determine the philosophical principles underpinning the justice versus social justice discourse. It is proposed that lessons learned from African philosophies about justice and social justice can be integrated into modern-day justice systems and contribute to an ordered yet socially oriented approach to justice itself.

School Governance and Social Justice in South Africa: A Review of Research from 1996 to 2016

In this article, we conduct a systematic review of school governance literature in order to examine the influence of the social justice agenda in South Africa between 1996 and 2016. The review explores the nature and scope of school governance research, the methodologies used as well as the theoretical constructs underpinning the research in the identified period. We used search words related to school governance to identify electronically published academic material. By way of analysis, we employed a combination of descriptive quantitative and qualitative forms of systematic review. The findings reveal a relatively small body of research spread across local and international journals that mostly investigates issues around democratic participation and representation. Although redressing the education system was viewed as one of the major catalysts in restoring the values necessary for a socially just and democratic society, school governance research is not underpinned by the analysis of social justice. We conclude by reflecting on limitations and making suggestions for future research.

Social justice implications for educational psychologists working with orphans and vulnerable children in South Africa

The aim of this article is to discuss the social justice implications for educational psychologists working with orphans and vulnerable children (OVC) who comprise 3.7 million of the population in South Africa. The author begins with a global conceptualisation of social justice and then discusses the nature of social justice in South Africa. This is followed by an exploration of social justice within the discipline of educational psychology and how it would apply to the contexts of OVC, especially taking their psychosocial and educational challenges into consideration. These challenges allude to the point that educational psychologists have to be active agents of social justice who advocate for better learning and development opportunities for OVC to succeed in life. Thus, the social justice implications for educational psychologists working with OVC are discussed. In concluding, the author points out the global value of this article noting that OVC and educational psychologists are prevalent across the globe.

Decolonizing the school curriculum for equity and social justice in South Africa

The starting point of decolonizing the curriculum is in the schools and classrooms that I regard as the formal education laboratories for equity and social justice in a just society. Unfortunately, many South African public schools’ curricula are not yet decolonized and thus continue to perpetuate the preparation of learners for leading western lives in a continent that is not western by nature. The South African school curriculum does little to address decolonization for equity and social justice in the South African public schools. This article argues for the decolonization of public school curricula for equity and social justice in South Africa. Background information is provided. Key terms will be decoded, followed by an outline of the frame of reference, method of research and a discussion of the process of decolonising the curriculum. The importance of decolonizing the school curriculum for equity and social justice in South Africa will be discussed. Threats emanating from not decolonizing the curriculum for equity and social justice in South Africa will also be discussed. Conclusions will be drawn.

A Critical Investigation of the Relevance and Potential of IDPS as a Local Governance Instrument for Pursuing Social Justice in South Africa

Unlike the situation in the past, when local government’s role was limited to service delivery, local government is now constitutionally mandated to play an expanded developmental role. As a “co-responsible” sphere of government, local government is obliged to contribute towards realising the transformative constitutional mandate aimed at social justice. South African scholars and jurists share the view that social justice is primarily concerned with the eradication of poverty and extreme inequalities in access to basic services, and aims to ensure that poor people command sufficient material resources to facilitate their equal participation in socio-political life. In order to enable municipalities to fulfil their broad constitutional mandate, the system of integrated development planning (IDPs) came into effect in South Africa in 2000. Each municipality is obliged to design, adopt and implement an integrated development plan in order to achieve its expanded constitutional mandate. The IDP is considered to be the chief legally prescribed governance instrument for South African municipalities. The purpose of this article is to explore and critically investigate the relevance and potential of IDPs in contributing towards the achievement of social justice in South Africa. This article argues inter alia that the multitude of sectors that converge in an IDP makes it directly relevant and gives it enormous potential to contribute towards social justice because, depending on the context, municipalities could include and implement strategies that specifically respond to diverse areas of human need. In this regard, the legal and policy frameworks for IDPs provide a structured scheme that could be used by municipalities to prioritise and meet the basic needs of especially the poor. Despite its potential, it is argued that the ability of IDPs to respond to the basic needs of the poor is largely constrained by a series of implementation challenges partly attributed to the underlying legal and policy framework.

Editorial

The last issue of 2013 consists of fourteen contributions dealing with a potpourri of topics. The first two articles are both by the same author. In the first one, André Louw addresses the recent, sometimes deplorable conduct of intellectual property (or IP) lawyers, and in the second one, André Louw explores the proper role and meaning of good faith (or bona fides) in contract law, and the approach of our courts to the application of this principle in individual cases involving claims of unfairness and the like. The third article, by Rufaro Mavunga, critically assesses the Minimum Age Convention 138 of 1973 and the Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention 182 of 1999. Nicholas Orago, in the fourth article, discusses socio-economic rights in Kenya and proposes that if the entrenched socio-economic rights are to achieve their transformative objectives, Kenyan courts must adopt a proportionality approach in the judicial adjudication of socio-economic rights disputes. The fifth article, by Oliver Fuo, explores and critically investigates the relevance and potential of integrated development planning in contributing towards the achievement of social justice in South Africa. Next, Michaela Young discusses the fate of informal fishers in the context of the Policy for the Small-Scale Fisheries Sector in South Africa. The second-last article, by Hermanus van der Merwe, provides a historical and teleological overview of the crime of direct and public incitement to commit genocide under international law, as well as the definitional elements thereof as interpreted and applied by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, before he continues to examine it in contemporary South African law. The last article, by Chuma Himonga, Max Taylor and Anne Pope, explores the scope and content of the ever elusive concept of ubuntu, as pronounced on by the judiciary in various cases, and demonstrates that its fundamental elements of respect, communalism, conciliation and inclusiveness enhance the constitutional interpretation landscape.
 

Ubuntu as a Tool for Resilience: Arts, Microbusiness, and Social Justice in South Africa

Ubuntu is a complex concept, but at its simplest is “human‐ness,” the notion that individuals’ well‐being is intertwined with that of others in the community. This article examines how ubuntu s multiple meanings offer a potential tool for resilience in South Africa, both for arts organizations and for micro and small businesses. Artist Proof Studio offers a sustained working example of how creativity can make a contribution towards a more just society using a hybrid arts/business model. The arts are particularly important in South Africa for offering the space to address deep wounds, using artistic collaborations to contribute to resilience and wellbeing. Ubuntu can offer an alternative vision to financing micro and small business to the one currently proposed by international lending organizations that seek to import Western‐style models of shareholder primacy, short‐term profit, and privatization of public goods. Ubuntu allows for creative new approaches to business, encouraging hybrid models that are socially focused and economically sustainable. The arts have the potential for a significant role in conceiving of ubuntu as a tool for resilience of micro and small businesses and as a way of conceptualizing being human in the business context, helping to envision productive and sustainable activities that advance greater economic sustainability.

Human genetic engineering and social justice in South Africa: Moltmann and human dignity

The realities of social injustice in the present South African context, with its great and growing gap between rich and poor and unequal distribution of wealth and resources, are also acutely visible in the health-care sector. Genetic engineering would lead to some children having the cards stacked overwhelmingly in their favour, raising the concern for the justice or fairness of this type of biotechnology. In this contribution, I argue that the notion of justice as fairness, put forward by Rawls, and the focus on human dignity in Moltmann’s theology can help address the bioethical challenges of genetic engineering in the context of inequality, specifically in South Africa.

Social justice in South Africa

A Africa do Sul e o pais mais desigual do mundo. A pobreza e a desigualdade, agravadas pelo desemprego, sao os desafios mais importante do pais. O atual governo tem feito progressos significativos em relacao a prestacao de servicos basicos e ampliacao dos beneficios sociais. No entanto, a triste realidade e que a desigualdade cresceu desde o advento da democracia, mais de vinte anos atras. Esta evolucao e contraria aos compromissos da Constituicao Sul-Africana e a provisao de politicas sociais, tornando assim mais graves as questoes de direitos e justica social. A continuidade, profundidade e amplitude da desigualdade, incluindo os custos financeiros e sociais extraordinarias, estao ligados ao legado do apartheid. A desigualdade e estruturalmente condicionada, espacial e economicamente. Fundamentalmente, a desigualdade e resultado do acesso diferencial a oportunidades e produtos do desenvolvimento humano. O artigo apresenta uma discussao teorica sobre a relacao entre a desigualdade, a pobreza e o desemprego; identifica tambem algumas barreiras para mudancas; e apresenta abordagens experimentais de reducao da desigualdade.

"Our roots began in (South) Africa": Modelling law clinics to maximise social justice ends

This article explores the ways in which law clinics can be organised to maximise their impact on social justice in South Africa. Such impact can be both direct in the form of the actual legal services offered to those in need or indirect in the form of encouraging law clinic students to commit to assisting those most in need of legal service after they graduate either through career choice or other forms of assistance. The article develops a decision-making matrix for clinic design around two dimensions, each with a number of variables. The first, "organizational" dimension relates to the way clinics are organised and run, and involves choices about whether: (1) clinics emphasise social justice or student learning; (2) student participation attracts academic credit or is extra-curricular; (3) participation is compulsory or optional; (4) clinics are managed and run by staff or students; and (5) there is one "omnibus" clinic structure covering all clinic activities or a "cluster" of discrete clinics conducting different activities. The second, "activities" dimensions involves choices about whether services are: (1) specialist or generalist; (2) exclusively legal or "holistic"; (3) provided only by students or qualified legal professionals; (4) located in community neighbourhoods or on campus; (5) provided by students working "in-house" in a university clinic or in external placements; (6) designed to benefit the wider community rather than just the individuals directly served; and (7) designed to remedy existing problems or educate the public on their legal rights and duties. While not intending to set out a blueprint for existing law clinics, the article argues that, if South African are motivated to enhance their impact on social justice and level of community engagement, they can learn much from the first law clinic to be established in South Africa, at the University of Cape Town, which was entirely student-run, optional and solely focused on ensuring access to justice rather than educating students. Drawing on his experience in adapting this model for use in Scotland, the author looks at the advantages of combining the volunteerist and student owned nature of this clinic with some formal teaching and staff involvement to maximize both the direct and indirect impact of clinics on social justice.

Diffracting the present through the past: Engaging socially just art history pedagogies in the context of #RhodesMustFall

ABSTRACTThis paper describes a process of classroom encounters where art history, current awareness and students’ lived experience come together to co-construct a learning space in which students’ emerging conceptions of social justice in South Africa are explored. Located in the Design Foundation course at Cape Peninsula University of Technology, the case study describes an interdisciplinary approach whereby difference is explored through the material engagement with artefacts within and across space and time. The students come from diverse and unequal backgrounds that span urban/rural and race/class/gender divisions, as well as cultural and language barriers and differing educational experiences and needs. Focusing on a series of lectures that link ancient Mesopotamian cultural production with the #RhodesMustFall campaign at the University of Cape Town, the chronological and the thematic interconnect in a non-hierarchical web in which the relationship between art and power and how art functions as a symbol of power, are explored. By diffracting the contemporary through the ancient a space is opened up for students to identify themselves as generators of knowledge while they reflect on complex notions within the context of their own lives as young adults in South Africa (Haraway 1988). Following a post-constructivist perspective of the living curriculum (Roth 2014) and the becoming curriculum (Sellers 2014), the classroom becomes a space in which students engage materials, materiality and meaning in a matrix through which teaching and learning co-emerge in an ongoing state of becoming (Ettinger 2006). Intra-action between my practices as a teacher of higher education and visual artist give rise to pedagogical strategies aimed at empowering students to respond to the challenges of becoming designers in a differentiated and changing South Africa. Moving beyond the binary, the fixed and the linear, the paper examines how the educator’s task moves from the epistemological and ontological (Barnett 2009) towards that of onto-epistemological (Barad 2007). Through interweaving threads of matrixial theory (Ettinger 2006) and post-humanist agential realism (Barad 2007), new thresholds of interconnection, co-existence and becoming offer ethico-onto-epistemological possibilities for design praxis in a differentiated world.

‘PALE FACE’/ ‘POINTY FACE’: SA criminology in denial

This paper responds to key aspects of Bill Dixon’s article, Understanding ‘Pointy Face’: What is criminology for? It suggests that criminology should unambiguously be ‘for’ social justice in South Africa’s transhistorically unequal context. South African prison statistics are used as a conceptual shortcut to briefly highlight racialised constructions of crime, the criminal and the criminologist. A trans-disciplinary conceptual approach, as a more socially just way to understand violent crime in South Africa, is proposed. A methodological framework,which draws on the notion of cultural-structural-direct violenceand intersectional theory,is presented. These extend Bill Dixon’s call for criminology to include history, structure, human psyche and biography5 and resonates with Biko Agozino’s call for a ‘counter-colonial’ criminology.The paper ends by returning the Eurocentric gaze of most South African criminologists, calling them out on their denial about trans-historical violence that implicates ‘Pale Face’ in the violence of ‘Pointy Face’.