South African Scholars Research Articles

Positioning resilience science more centrally in affirming LGBTIQA+ persons and communities

Historically, in psychology, there was a tendency towards focusing on the individual and intrapsychic pathologisation of LGBTIQA+ persons. Despite a recent shift to affirmative, systemic, interpersonal, and contextual stances, too much emphasis in South African LGBTIQA+ scholarly work remains on adversity. Adversity derived from historical tensions may have accelerated adaptive problem-solving capabilities and solution-focused behaviours in some LGBTIQA+ populations. Certain solutions have generated creative resilience responses inexorably situated in race, ethnicity, culture, religion, gender, history, political oppression, and social class. Resilience science that has similarly evolved from the individual trait conceptualisation may have an important complementary contribution to make in affirming LGBTIQA+ persons and communities and enhancing the understanding of their resilience. Exploring resilience for wellbeing and survival addresses the infinite streams of human experiences of vulnerability and sustainable adaptive solutions. The multisystemic resilience perspective in this article endeavours to summarise current thinking in resilience science and position its applicability to future South African LGBTIQA+ scholarly work, building on existing systematic and critical reviews relating to the resilience of LGBTIQA+ persons. The aim of this position piece, suggesting the expansion of a ‘resilience’ frame, is to offer an important intervention in the overarching ways in which South African scholars and psychology professionals theorise and conduct research; to inform therapeutic and other psychological services to LGBTIQA+ persons and provide an important counterweight to the more general focus in South African LGBTIQA+ scholarship and psychological practice on adversity.

COVID-19: An alternative approach to postgraduate supervision in the digital age

Universities globally are facing enormous governmental pressure to increase postgraduate output, and in turn, contribute to the knowledge economy. This pressure is transferred to research supervisors, who have to navigate the complexities of research supervision to not only meet postgraduate output targets set by the university in particular, but postgraduate output targets set by government in general. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, research supervision mostly followed the traditional apprenticeship or group model approach to supervision, where engagement took the form of face-to-face interactions. With the COVID-19 pandemic came social distancing, which forced research supervision to move to online platforms. The core objective of this article was to peruse selected research supervision models or approaches to determine which model or approach would be most suited to an online supervision context, if any. This article advances a re-imagined view of research supervision in higher education. The author proposes an argument for an alternative approach to research supervision, most appropriate to the online supervision environment. The ontological stance, from the perspective of constructivism, underpinned the interrogation of selected research supervision models or approaches with the view to engender a different understanding of what the core components of a research supervision framework could be in the context of COVID-19, with due regard to the “pedagogy of supervision”. This article will be of value to emerging South African research supervisors and scholars in the higher education realm. Keywords: research supervisors, research supervision models, online supervision, COVID-19, pedagogy of supervision

A Decolonial (Re)turn to Class in South African Biblical Scholarship

South African Black Theology of the 1960-1980s characterised its primary site of struggle as the racial capitalism of apartheid. Intersecting race and/as class has been a distinctively South African contribution to African biblical scholarship. Less common, but equally significant, is the intersection of culture and/as class. This article analyses this trajectory, reflecting on how three South African biblical scholars (Gunther Wittenberg, Makhosazana Nzimande and Hulisani Ramantswana) have discerned the need for the African decolonial project to recognise and recover the class divisions within a culture. A recurring cultural trope across the three scholars is their use of proverbs to discern class distinctions within culture. The works of each of these three scholars and their dialogue partners in South African Contextual Theology and South African Black Theology are interrogated for how they intersect notions of class and culture.

The management of student success in extended curriculum programmes: A case study of the University of Pretoria’s Mamelodi Campus, South Africa

For three decades, numerous South African scholars have researched the efficacy of access programmes in providing alternative pathways to careers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics through foundation provisioning. In light of this, Extended Curriculum Programmes (ECPs) were designed for talented Black students who could not gain access to tertiary studies due to poor schooling conditions caused by apartheid. As scarce skills programmes that receive dedicated funding from government, ECPs are indispensable for redress, transformation, and socio-economic development. Consequently, they could be characterized as high stakes programmes that require a rigorous, evidence-led student success management approach to ensure effectiveness. This article argues for a customized approach to the management of student success for ECPs based on the Institutional Student Academic Development and Excellence Model. Using specific examples, the customized system, dubbed the Mamelodi Referral System, is discussed as well as the circumstances that led to its development. The article concludes with future areas for development and refinement.

A hole where Ely could be: Democracy and trust in South Africa

Abstract At first glance, Ely’s theory of judicial review in Democracy and Distrust may seem an obviously poor fit for South Africa’s extensive and value-based constitutionalism. South African scholars have indeed mostly paid his theory little attention and, when they do, have mostly done so in support of arguments for judicial review, rather than to impose limits on it. On closer inspection, however, the way Ely has been used in South Africa has much to tell us about South African constitutionalism. The patterns of democratic deference of his theory can be a better fit for actual South African practice than it is for much of the scholarship interpreting that practice. Arguments for trust in democratic institutions, though suggested rather than developed in his book, have a powerful constitutional value in emerging systems like the South Africa one. Finally, though concerns for democracy that underpin Ely’s account have fallen somewhat between the lines of existing South African constitutional talk, the constitutional value of majoritarian democracy has a resonance in post-apartheid South Africa that should be felt more in its scholarship, and may yet be.

Aspects of the concept of theo-logy in the Old Testament: A discussion on J. Gericke

In this contribution, an aspect of the research of one of the more distinct voices in South African theology, Jaco Gericke, is contextualised and outlined. Although Old Testament Theology is an oft-enough reflected on topic by South African Bible scholars, such a theology is never written by South African scholars. However, Gericke’s work tends in this direction. His work on God-talk, theo-logy, is the more important for our time, because it often relates to the kind of ideas popularly related to for instance God as creator in the Genesis texts. Gericke’s work is however also attractive to intellectuals who work from the precepts of modernism or who are engaged in interdisciplinary research or who for purposes of decoloniality explore alternatives to Western scholarship. However, it is initially not easy for many readers to understand Gericke’s contribution in combining philosophy and Old Testament studies, both practised on high levels. To this end, three instances of Gericke’s argumentation are related as examples, with explanatory and interpretative comments made to demonstrate the high heuristic value of his contributions. Contribution: Jaco Gericke’s work can be characterised as theo-logy, in that he takes seriously the implications of modernism for ‘God-talk’. He combines Philosophy and Old Testament Exegesis as academic enterprises, the intellectual productivity of which is demonstrable by means of examples.

A reflective analysis of articles published in the journal of Transformation in Higher Education (2016–2020): Beyond transformation?

Background: The fault lines exposed by the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic and global economic recession unfolding during 2020 in societies around the world, reiterated the need for transforming higher education globally. In South Africa, transformation in higher education has been a priority since 1994. The first article in this journal was published in 2016 during the 2015-2016 #mustfall protests. During the protests, decolonisation and decolonising of higher education were central. Aim: A reflective analysis of articles published in the journal of Transformation in Higher Education 2016-2020. Setting: Transformation and decolonising in global and South African higher education. Method: A reflective analysis is done through a decolonial lens. The contributions of authors are reflected upon through three themes: place (local and global), epistemology and alienation. Results: Although I find the engagement with decolonising substantive, I argue that there is still a lack of publications on specifically decoloniality and decolonial analysis. Conclusion: I argue that the journal of Transformation in Higher Education provides a platform for difficult and robust discussions on decoloniality, transformation, epistemology, issues of sexuality, gender and race, internationalisation and possible pluriversalisation in higher education for South African and international scholars.

Rethinking “Alliances”: The Case of South Africa as a Rising Power

ABSTRACT How does South Africa view international alliances? International relations (IR) scholars have been debating the end of alliances and the relevance of the alliance paradigm itself. South Africa presents an excellent test case for advancing these debates for three reasons. First, it has been committed to nonalignment yet engages in close and complex inter-state collaborations. Second, debates about the alliance paradigm have largely taken place in, and focused on, the Global North. And third, there is a gap in South African scholarship on this subject. This article examines the South African understanding of alliances through a systematic study of its academic and policy landscape including an analysis of 285 articles from South Africa’s five most highly ranked IR journals and key policy documents produced during the post-apartheid period. The article outlines how alliances are conceptualized and operationalized. It finds that the alliance concept in South Africa departs from the traditional understanding in the Global North: alliances are often driven by mutually shared political and developmental objectives rather than an external security threat. These objectives, combined with a perception of new economic opportunities, have led to an increase in the importance of South Africa’s strategic partnerships with rising powers, and reinforced its multi-alignment diplomacy.

THE ETHICS OF INTERPRETATION - NEW VOICES FROM THE USA

Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, in her 1987 SBL Presidential Address, argued for a paradigm shift in the ethos and rhetorical practices of biblical scholarship. In this article, recent contributions by four important spokespeople from the USA, all of them with influence in South African scholarship circles, are compared, to show that all of them, although in different ways, emphasize the importance of such a shift, in which the ethos of scholarly interpretation itself comes under focus. Two of them, Thiselton and Tracy, come from the tradition of hermeneutics, and the other two, Wueller and Fiorenza herself, from the tradition of rhetorical criticism. They agree that the ethos of biblical scholarship must not be that of value-free scientism, but that of responsibility, life-orientated human praxis, aware of its own socio-political role and function of power. Acknowledge this would involve nothing less than a revolutionary change of paradigm in many circles, with serious effects for institutionalized biblical scholarship itself.

The life stories and experiences of the children admitted to the Institute for Imbecile Children from 1895 to 1913.

BackgroundSouth African scholarship on intellectual disability has produced a sizeable body of research, yet there are numerous areas where there is a paucity of research. One area in which there is a conspicuous paucity of research is historical studies of people with intellectual disability (PWID). The existing works devoted to the history of PWID in South Africa are primarily focused on the legal provisions and institutions for the protection and care of PWID. Missing from these works are the life stories and experiences of PWID.ObjectivesThe article offers a study devoted to the life stories and experiences of the children with intellectual disability (CWID) who were admitted to the Institute for Imbecile Children from 1895 to 1913. The institute opened in April 1895 in Makhanda (formerly known as Grahamstown), South Africa. The institute was the first of its kind in the Cape Colony for CWID.MethodThe study presents a qualitative investigation of the life stories and experiences of the children that were recorded in the institute’s casebook. The entire set of 101 cases contained in the casebook was analysed by adopting a Gadamerian approach to hermeneutics.ResultsThe examination of the institute’s casebook identified several broad themes relating to the children’s admittance, daily life at the institute and their routes out of the institute. The study also extols the individuality of each child’s life story to provide an awareness and richer appreciation of the humanness and personhood of the children.ConclusionThe article contributes a positive narrative to the identity and the history of South African children with intellectual disability living in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Innovation in Communication and Media Studies: Reflections from South African Academics

This article discusses the possibility of a discipline of communication and media studies that is innovative, pluralistic and open in ways that conduce to development. Based on a set of in-depth interviews with a select group of South African communication and media studies scholars, the article discusses critically how, and if, communication and media studies as a field is innovative. Innovation here talks to a discipline that is imaginatively open to a myriad of different, diverse and divergent contributions relevant to the human endeavour of understanding the world in ways that better humanity. In doing this, the authors critically explore how the discipline is perceived variously by the scholars interviewed as enabling, encompassing and embodying innovation in research, teaching, curricula, theory, methodology, resourcing, and community outreach. As such the article addresses a span of issues that either support or inhibit innovation.

Fitting in, Standing Out, and Doing Both: Supporting the Development of a Scholarly Voice

What scholars call “writing” actually involves writing, reading, talking, thinking, and engaging. Yet how academic writing develops through this recursive, social process, is imperfectly understood. Although participating in academic gatherings like colloquia and international conferences can help researchers find a scholarly voice, not all new scholars have the opportunity to participate in such gatherings and the learnings they offer. Especially for those scholars, their academic writing must be consciously developed. We examine the process by which a new South African management scholar, supported by his writing coach, developed an academic voice. Analyzing their 15-month long communication (emails and summaries of conversations), we find three interweaving processes. Coaching guides the new scholar first to learn to fit in by becoming aware of genre conventions through practical writing-to-learn and show-and-tell coaching tactics. Then the challenge is to stand out by forcing tough trade-offs and intensifying the focus on novelty. Ultimately the scholar must do both, negotiating the tension between them. Our article provides evidence of how the emergence of self-reliant scholarly writing can be supported. This process is especially salient in developing country contexts with few enculturating opportunities, but we suggest that it applies more broadly, opening avenues for future theorizing.

A Man of ‘Ubuntu’: A South African Colleague’s Tribute to Stephen Ellman

Professor Stephen Ellmann and I founded and co-hosted the South Africa Reading Group at New York Law School in 1994. Since then we have hosted hundreds of South African and international scholars, judges of the Constitutional Court and other courts in South Africa, practicing lawyers and civil society advocates. Steve passed away in March 2019. This essay is a reflection on his scholarly work on South Africa and his impact on those connected to the South Africa Reading Group and beyond.

Investigation of South African Black Theology and Its Lessons to Other African Christian Liberation Theologians

The Paper discusses South African kind of liberation theology called South African Black Theology showing that it is a unique liberation approach which has crucial lessons to other African Christian liberation theologians just as it too learns from them in mutual enrichment. It will explicate that liberation theology in this region of Africa concerns itself with the struggle and reaction against apartheid and the after effects of it together with other oppressive factors with the finality of emancipation towards freedom and re-establishment of life in Christ as the Liberator par excellence. This will mainly be done using secondary sources in libraries to get insights from renowned South African Black theology scholars like Boesak, Moore, Buthelezi, Tutu, Sebidi, Motlhabi, Mosala, Tlhagale, Goba and Mofokeng and a few others from North America like Conn and Wilmore. The term “black consciousness” will be accentuated as the key concept in their theologizing illumined by North American related slogans like “Black is Black,” “Black is Beautiful” and “Black Power.” It will be pointed out that the concept is further triggered by blacks’ “ontological” music with exponents like the legendary James Brown’s soul music of “I am Black and I am Proud”, Martin Luther King Jr of “I have a dream” and Marcom X- among others. It will further be elaborated as founded on socio-religio-cultural belief that Jesus is the “Black Messiah,” a title they attribute to Him functionally not ideologically hence its specificity. In this regard, a brief exposition of Mofokeng’s Black Christology will come in handy. The Paper will then end by drawing out SABT lessons to other African Christian liberation theologians. The Paper has two fundamental objectives. The first one is to explore and verify that South Africa has a unique mode of liberation theology which when properly perused has significant teaching to other African Christian liberation theologians. The second objective is to discuss South African Black Christology, with Mofokeng’s Black Christology as a model, to find out whether there are useful lessons to other African scholars. The main hypothesis is that South Africa has a unique mode of liberation theology which when properly perused has significant teaching to other African Christian liberation theologians. The second assumption is that South African Black Christology whereby Jesus is viewed as the “Black Messiah,” as exemplified by proponent Mofokeng, provides both positive aspects and shortcomings to learn from. The procedure the paper will follow to realize the above is: introductory remarks; distinctiveness of SABT; operationalizing key concepts in SABT; brief historical setting of SABT; black consciousness as the key concept and its meaning; six main sources of SABT; Jesus the “Black Messiah”; Mofokeng’s liberation black Christology within the context of SABT; SABT lessons to other African Christian liberation theologians; concluding remarks followed by references. Among the findings is that of intrinsic employment of an African title “Black Messiah” analogically attributed to Jesus in specifically liberational orientation since the other African titles analogically attributed to Jesus are fundamentally in Inculturation approach.

From the earth of Africa: Q research in South Africa

As the title indicates, this article traces the history of Q research in South Africa. It focuses on South African scholars who have made worthwhile contributions to our understanding and knowledge of the Sayings Gospel Q. An attempt is ultimately made to detect some trends in this regard. One significant finding perhaps worth mentioning in the abstract is the undeniable influence of Andries G. van Aarde on Q scholarship in South Africa.

Scientific knowledge in South Africa: information trends, patterns and collaboration

South Africa has made remarkable progress in science and technology. In the production of scientific information it is a leading country not only in sub-Saharan Africa but also in Africa as a whole. Given the achievements South Africa has made in the production of scientific information, it will be of interest to examine the characteristic nature of science in the country. This has importance for South Africa and also for other African countries. As science is evident in the publications that are produced, this paper examines the characteristic features of scientific information produced by South African scholars. Drawing on the publication records stored in the Web of Science database, the paper examines the distinguishing features of scientific production including collaboration, visibility and impact. The paper also deals with the relationship between visibility (citations) and the characteristics of South African publications.

Document Wars and the Local Archives: The Case of Mogalakwena Local Municipality

In this article, I explore the flows of official paperwork in the troubled Mogalakwena Local Municipality in the Waterberg District of Limpopo Province from 2009 to 2015. The documentary environment of this municipality exhibits many of the challenges identified in existing scholarship on contemporary records management in the state. In this paper, I raise another aspect which has not been interrogated sufficiently by South African archival scholars: the role that divisive political conflicts play in shaping records practices. This study takes cues from the work of scholars of paperwork elsewhere, who have called attention to the social and political climates in which state functionaries write. What lies beneath the gridwork of generic terminology that letters the documentary productions of the state is a world of competing human designs, of antagonistic strategies, and, in particularly contested settings, of emotional distress and bitter fights for political survival. In Mogalakwena, an intensifying political conflict came to directly influence documentary practices in the institution, resulting in a ‘war of documents’. This study offers another reminder to both archival practitioners and historians to consider the document in context, and understand it as an instrument of power through which broader social struggles are refracted.

True versus False Transformation: A Discussion of the Obstacles to Authentic Decolonisation at South African Universities

South African tertiary institutions have supposedly been in a transitional state for decades. The country's universities profess the merits of the transformation occurring within their walls. Despite this purported embrace of decolonised scholarship, the reality is that there is great ambivalence towards it. The highly publicised reports of tensions and inequalities shatter the illusion of this intellectual utopia. Consequently, this article interrogates the major issues that are impeding this supposedly seamless transition to a decolonised higher education system. It presents the criticisms that are regularly raised by decolonisation advocates. Significantly, a notorious public dispute between two respected scholars is utilised as a case study. The incident illustrates institutional hypocrisy and validates the criticism levelled against South African universities. Essentially, the article's overarching objective is to highlight the discrepancy between the idyllic fantasy of a decolonised university and the reality being experienced by South African scholars.

Canadian and South African Scholars’ Use of Institutional Repositories, ResearchGate, and Academia.edu

Since their initial development in the early 2000s, institutional repositories (IRs) have proliferated around the globe. Due to low faculty participation, however, content recruitment has often posed a significant challenge for librarians and others promoting their use. Through the last decade, academic social networks (ASNs), such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu, have become popular among scholars as a means to communicate with each other and share their research. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with sixty scholars at six universities in Canada and South Africa to explore their views and practices pertaining to IRs and ASNs. Interviews were transcribed and coded to elucidate trends and themes in the data. The study found that few participants were active supporters of their local IRs. Lack of awareness, time limitations, and concerns regarding copyright remain some of the main obstacles to increased faculty participation. Conversely, more than half of the interviewees were active users of either ResearchGate or Academia.edu. These users valued ASNs both as a means of sharing their work and as tools facilitating connections with their colleagues internationally. Though IRs need not compete with these networks, proponents of open access repositories should be prepared to explain to faculty why they should consider having their research made accessible in a repository though they may already actively share their work through ResearchGate or Academia.edu. Significantly, both ASNs and IRs were more popular among South African than Canadian researchers. It is hoped that the results of the study will be helpful in informing the understanding and decisions of librarians and others working to develop and promote IRs and green open access more broadly.

Emergent structures in faculty hiring networks, and the effects of mobility on academic performance

This paper is about the South African job market for Ph.Ds. Ph.D. to first job mobility involves the preferences of both the hiring institution and the candidate. Both want to make the best choice and here institutional prestige plays a crucial role. A university’s prestige is an emergent property of hiring interactions, so we use a network perspective to measure it. Using this emergent ordering, we compare the subsequent scientific performance of scholars with different changes in the prestige hierarchy. We ask how movements between universities of different prestige from Ph.D. to first job correlates with academic performance. We use data of South African scholars from 1970 to 2012 and we find that those who make large movements in terms of prestige have lower research ratings than those who do not. Further, looking only those with large prestige movements, those with higher prestige Ph.Ds or first jobs have higher research ratings throughout their careers.