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This paper provides a history of academic development by examining how a South African institution coped with the potent social forces confronting it before the collapse of apartheid. Theoretically, it draws on the framework of Pierre Bourdieu and engages with a paper written a decade ago by Naidoo, who also used Bourdieu to understand institutional change in South Africa in the late 1980s. Through contrasting the habitus of two professors, it is argued that academic development helps to preserve the autonomy of the university field by refracting forces impinging on it from the economic and political realms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite public outcry, South Africa has decided to roll out comprehensive sexuality education in schools. Currently, however, there are no scripted lesson plans for teachers of learners with visual impairment. Local literature suggests that the current sexuality education curriculum fails to engage with sexuality diversity and is imbued with notions of compulsory heterosexuality and able-bodiedness, perpetuating homophobia, transphobia and ableism in schools and broader communities. The paper sought guidance from disability professionals on how to best address lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and other sexualities' (LGBT+) issues as part of comprehensive sexuality education for learners with visual impairment. Bourdieu's work on doxa, orthodoxy and heterodoxy underpinned the study. Three professionals working with learners with visual impairment were interviewed in a focus group, and one school principal working in a school for learners with visual impairment was interviewed individually. Data were thematically analysed. Pre- and in-service teachers are encouraged not to see comprehensive sexuality education offered to learners with visual impairment as different from that provided to their sighted peers. Professionals urged teachers to accept LGBT+ learners with visual impairment in their dress, expression and embodiment. However, teachers need to be aware of learners' cultural and religious differences. Current lesson plans need to be revisited to safeguard against compulsory heterosexuality and able-bodiedness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The post-apartheid higher education transformation project is faced with the challenge of recruiting and retaining black academics and other senior staff. But when we shift the focus from participation rates to equality–inequality within historically white universities (HWUs), then the discourse changes from demographic equity and redress to institutional culture and diversity. HWUs invoke the need to maintain their position as leading higher education institutions globally, and notions of ‘quality’ and ‘excellence’ have emerged as discursive practices, which serve to perpetuate exclusion. The question then arises as to which forms of capital comprise the Gold Standard at HWUs? Several South African universities have responded to the challenge of recruiting and retaining black academics by initiating programmes for the ‘accelerated development’ of these candidates. The Accelerated Development Programme (ADP) on which this investigation is based was located at one HWU. The paper draws on interviews with 18 black lecturers who entered the academic workforce through the university’s ADP. Employing a theoretical framework of social and cultural reproduction, we examine how racialised, classed and gendered assumptions remain deeply entrenched in the values, norms and practices of historically white measured universities in South Africa. The findings suggest that it is difficult for even the most conscious and personally invested agents to interrupt the naturalised norms and values that form part of the existing institutional culture. Agents struggle to interrupt normalised practices because of the highly valued currency of capital possessed by dominant actors in the form of white-middle-class habitus, disguised as academic experience and ‘excellence’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the media plagiarism scandals in South Africa in 2003 reveal and reflect larger shifts in media behaviour. Structural changes to media employment in the new South Africa and the resulting pressures on writers have contributed to the problems. The article considers problematic areas: the unacknowledged reuse of international material with slight alterations in the local market; whether writers can plagiarise their own work; what the status of public relations material is; when plagiarism becomes an intellectual property issue; what happens when a freelancer changes roles from journalist to public relations practitioner. Most current textbooks on media ethics spend very little time on the problems of plagiarism generally or enter into these complex legal and ethical issues, perhaps because most ethics guidelines are intended for journalists in full-time employment rather than freelancers. The article draws on Pierre Bourdieu's work on the market for symbolic goods to suggest some ways in which the commercialisation of the media and the changing role of the freelancer have influenced notions of intellectual property and intellectual propriety. In particular, the article considers ways in which the struggle for control of intellectual property and the under-valuing of content complicate the symbolic role of the writer and affect our judgment of plagiarism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informed by the theories of Bourdieu and Rancière on aesthetics and the role of the arts and art criticism in society, this article analyses the emergence of the South African Arts Journalism Awards (2013–2014) nearly 20 year after the end of apartheid. The particular research questions are whether the competition can be described as “transformed” in post-apartheid and post-colonial terms, and whether the winners displayed engagement or disengagement with larger socio-political debates. The competition arguably aids the distribution of “cultural capital” in the subfield of arts journalism. Following Rancière, the article also argues that the Awards provide credibility to the political views expressed by the winning arts journalists, in other words to their particular perspective on the “distribution of the sensible”. The methodology includes a brief quantitative comparative overview in search of indicators of transformation, as well as analysis of the entered content and motivational letters of six winners in both years using critical discourse analysis as method. The article found that the winners displayed a high level of political engagement, in contrast to suggestions by previous research that post-apartheid arts journalism has lost direction and purpose. But while male and female involvement in the competition was on a par (except in the list of final winners), the South African Arts Journalism Awards have clearly not been transformed in terms of “racial” and ethnic diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Bourdieu’s theories of field and capital, we examine the limitations that a journalism school at a prestigious university faces in making a meaningful contribution to the field within a developing country. In the postapartheid South African media landscape, journalism is under pressure both from global forces and a political imperative to address social justice. Given the heterogeneity of the journalistic field and the fact that what counts as capital in it is contested, the School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University attempts to redefine the parameters by inculcating a particular approach to and philosophy of journalism practice. While Rhodes wants to educate excellent (professional) journalists, it is guided by an overt political mission to cultivate a journalism that is not necessarily ‘in sync’ with the wider field. Ironically, most undergraduates come from the economic and cultural elite, with specific intentions to accumulate the capital which Rhodes bestows. Students are confronted with their privilege and with alternative ideas about the purpose of journalism, and are asked to make choices and take up positions. We consider whether this critical praxis approach is able to influence the ‘state of play’ – or the distribution of power – within the field. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article deals with the shifting media discourses of nationalism in the South African media in relation to two victories in the Rugby World Cup (RWC) tournaments in 1995 and 2007 respectively. Through an analysis of discourse in three mainstream daily newspapers, the article seeks to establish how media attention to the South African team's performance in the 2007 RWC articulated changing notions of nationhood. While the dominant discourse in 1995 was that of reconciliation and the 'rainbow nation', played out on the rugby field, nationalism in 2007 seemed to be defined more in terms of 'Africanness' and transformation. The article maps this shift from 'rainbow nation' to 'Africanness' by examining key issues and topics that featured in three local mainstream newspapers in 2007, using theoretical concepts from Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. The argument is that commentators in the mainstream press were unable to move beyond their divisive discourses, even when evidence to the contrary emerged in the form of inclusive fever-pitch grass root support for the Springboks during RWC 2007. In closing, it is argued that the gap between popular perception/actions and political discourse in the media can be explained in terms of the fact that in the media rugby has become a symbol of the failure of the 'nation-building' rhetoric in the discourse of the African Renaissance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From a macro-viewpoint, the devastating impact of adult HIV/AIDS mortality upon 1.2 million South African minors cannot be denied. One could be forgiven for excessive pessimism due to the lack of concentrated interventions to assist these orphaned and vulnerable children (OVC). Nevertheless, a foray into the world of a grass-roots programme located in Eldorado Park, Gauteng, namely the Elton John Masibamisane Centre (EJMC), provides room for qualified optimism. Using Bourdieu's theory of practice, as a lens to analyse programme evaluation data, we came to believe that the provision of economic, social, cultural and symbolic capitals could transform the lives of the Eldorado Park OVCs. Nevertheless, the provision of capitals was imperfect and often characterised by shortages that were remedied by 'instrumental disorder'. We interpreted this to be indicative of agency within a blended Western-African OVC empowerment habitus. In reflecting on the findings we commended EJMC for surviving despite constraints. This is, however, a short term view. To ensure longer term sustainability we recommend that EJMC staff extend their agency to pressuring the State for greater assistance as it is unrealistic to allow this community organisation to bear the brunt of Eldorado Park OVC empowerment indefinitely. In deepening understandings of OVC work in South Africa, especially in terms of its operation within a skewed power framework, we recommend that more studies of this nature take place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]