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Background: South African narratives of and by early childhood development (ECD) practitioners often focus on policies, practices and perspectives in research. While these are important for the development of the field, the voices of ECD practitioners, in this marginalised space, are silent. Aim: This article aims to understand: Who are the ECD practitioners? What are the conditions of their lives and livelihoods? How do they negotiate opportunities for employment, socioeconomic growth and further education and training? Setting: The study describes the marginality of ECD practitioners by narrating the lived experience of work and post-school education and training of one mature woman in the Western Cape. By narrating a single story, the stories of others unfold; working in similar circumstances and negotiating the same opportunities in the harsh reality of poverty and oppression. Employing a narrative methodology is a commitment to decolonising the practice of research, where voices of the 'Other' are centralised and amplified. Methods: An intersectional lens forms the theoretical grounding for this article with life history interviews as its primary form of data collection. Results: Adult women ECD practitioners are mainly poor, black and female. They pursue access into higher education to improve their lives and livelihoods. Conclusion: The intersections that shape their lives limit their opportunities for access and success. Contribution: The power of narrative research, displayed in this article, ensures that voice is used to move the lived experiences of black women ECD practitioners from the margins to the centre.

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent school closures have had profound impacts on learners and their families globally, affecting their psychosocial wellbeing. However, the extent and nature of these effects, particularly in diverse socioeconomic contexts, remain largely under-explored. Aim: This study aimed to investigate the effects of school closures on the psychosocial wellbeing of children and parents in South Africa's Gauteng province. Setting: The research included families from various socioeconomic backgrounds in Gauteng province, South Africa. Methods: Using an ethnographic research approach, diary-style entries via the WhatsApp mobile app were collected from 43 families, and semi-structured telephonic interviews were conducted with 21 families. Results: The study found that children experienced adverse emotions, including loneliness, boredom, anxiety and isolation during school closures. Parents reported elevated stress levels and increased caregiving burden. The severity of impact was influenced by access to resources for online or home-schooling. Conclusion: The findings highlight the multi-dimensional implications of school closures on families and underscore the importance of providing adequate support during such disruptions, taking into account the varying effects across socioeconomic backgrounds. Contribution: This study fills a crucial gap in understanding the psychosocial impacts of school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic on children and parents within diverse socioeconomic contexts. The findings call for equitable access to educational resources, evidence-based remediation efforts, and integrated mental health support services.

Background: Cultural dissonance and exclusion in schools persevere because of a lack of response to diversity. In South Africa, coloniality manifests itself in teaching and learning practices through promoting and privileging selective cultural norms in schools, often to the detriment of poor black children. Aim: Despite the availability of educational scholarships for poor children as a way to promote economic success, these opportunities are often laden with cultural and hegemonic expectations making them challenging to navigate, often rendering the experiences as traumatic rather than developmental. Setting: The article reflects on children's schooling experiences in South Africa. Methods: This qualitative exposition presents insights from a primary school teacher about her own childhood experiences of exclusion, alienation, and cultural dissonance in South African schools. Results: It reveals the pervasiveness of coloniality and how social justice has still not fully permeated schools. The interplay between race and class remains salient. Conclusion: Schools should intensify efforts to promote inclusion by recognising diversity and avoiding normalising singular narratives in diverse contexts. Educational opportunities given to children from disadvantaged backgrounds should be accompanied by psycho-social support to ease the culture shock and alienation they feel when learning in new contexts that differ from their norm. Contribution: The article demonstrates that culture is more powerful than politics because, despite the democratic political context, the 'cultural bomb' of decoloniality is all-encompassing.

Could a transformative, inclusive and emancipatory educational framework like the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) advance academic success for all? Could racism and dis/ableism be dismantled through such an emerging educational trend that offers a redefinition of dis/ability abolishing oppressive pedagogical practices that perpetuate constructed views of special needs, often negatively correlated with racial and intellectual superiority? Could such a framework that foregrounds physical, cognitive and linguistic injustices advance achievement beyond merely meeting academic literacy standards within higher education settings like writing centres in a post-COVID 21st-century South Africa? These critical questions are some of the tensions raised in this paper proposing a compelling, yet controversial attempt at advancing student learning and achievement within an expanded definition of disability offered by the UDL framework developed by Rose and Meyer at the Center for Applied Special Technology at Harvard University. While COVID-19 centred around a pandemic, this global catastrophe accelerated the technological thrust into virtual and blended learning mediums of learning and engagement. Yet, given the technological explosion of the mid- and late 20th century, in many ways education have headed towards this direction. Now more than ever, the awareness of the Universal Design for Learning within the role of the writing centre and academic literacy is especially critical, given the drive for technologically driven approaches to address issues of social justice. This paper seeks to understand the obstacles and opportunities of the UDL framework within the role of writing centres in post-COVID 21st-century South African higher education. Through professional insights as a qualified practising writing consultant both locally in South Africa and in the United States, this reflective critique on the emerging vociferous dialogue around the adoption of the Universal Design for Learning framework at higher education institutions in South Africa, and its implications for the role of the writing centre, are based on this author's pragmatic, commonplace experiences as well as research studies conducted on UDL and the Harvard Review. It is hoped that this reflective paper may make visible some of the inherent juxtapositions Universal Design for Learning may hold for meeting individual students' learning needs principled on its universal approach to learning success for all, affording opportunities for further research and critique.

The slogan "I can't breathe" reverberated in 2020 with the Black Lives Matter movement protests against police brutality and racial injustices in America. As much as there was an uncanny coincidence with that phrase and the root of the COVID-19 pandemic, the immediate association of those words for me, a dance educator in South Africa, was the 2015 #RhodesMustFall national student protests in South Africa. Black students at the University of Cape Town, and eventually across the nation, vehemently protested racism and the suffocating whiteness of their institutions and curricula. Their motto of "We can't breathe" resonated in our dance studios and lecture halls. Through personal narratives the author aims to reveal multiple ways in which racism can permeate dance teaching and learning and the adverse effects of this abhorrent phenomenon on dancers and dance education. A lacuna in the dance scholarship on race and racism are first-person accounts that provide rich descriptions of individual's lived experiences with racism in dance. As a step toward healing and transformation, such storytelling is useful for demystifying a phenomenon that is complex and prone to blind spots and denial.

The South African government continues to work tirelessly to reverse the effects of apartheid by addressing social inequalities and transforming the higher education sector by dismantling structural, cultural, institutional, and interpersonal discrimination. The use of the lowercase "w" for white or whiteness in this article is the author's stylistic act of decentering whiteness to amplify African women's experiences. South African women have fought for the right to access education as well as to pursue higher education to the top levels of teaching in these institutions. Traditionally, the custodians of knowledge have been older white men. Millennial Black women's presence in these spaces of higher institutions is disruptive and continues to be a site of conflict and negotiation for younger Black women academics. This article argues that race, intersecting with gender, age, and class, influences their teaching experiences in universities and how students perceive Millennial Black women in postapartheid South African universities. Intersectionality underpins this qualitative study, which explores nine Black Millennial women's teaching experiences in universities in South Africa. The findings suggest that these women's experiences are influenced by the kind of university in which they teach. The narratives showed how Millennial Black women lecturers at historically white institutions experience more hostility, mostly from students who share their same race and gender. This contrasts with the experiences of Millennial Black women who teach at historically Black institutions. The study has implications for university and government transformation agendas.

Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields have historically been disciplines dominated by white men. The colonial ideology designated Africans as subhuman, inferior intellectually, socially, and culturally to the white masculine norm in STEM disciplines. STEM education and careers were thus constructed to attract white, heterosexual, middle-to-upper class, Christian, able-bodied men. This positioning ensured that STEM environments remained inhospitable to anyone whose identity was outside the constructed somatic norm. The calls and imperatives to transform notwithstanding, the transformation process in STEM disciplines is moving at a snail-like pace. This article argues that what is occurring in STEM disciplines in South African universities is reform not transformation. It is underpinned by the intersectional theory within the qualitative paradigm. Seventy-three African doctoral and postdoctoral women students in STEM were interviewed from five South African universities. The findings highlighted how African women in STEM face challenges based on their racial and gendered identities and that what is presented as transformation is still oppressive to them. The study also found that equity through access to education in democratic South Africa does not equate to transformation. The argument presented is that despite existing policies and initiatives in South African universities to transform, the demographic inclusion of African, female staff and students does not necessarily equate to transforming the STEM environment. What needs to occur is a shift beyond reform and towards transformation through the use of strategic inventions which dismantle the racist, sexist, classist, and xenophobic ideology that permeates these environments.

Background: The presence of African women in mathematics has been nearly invisible. The underrepresentation of African women in this field is a result of their historical socio-political marginalisation. The mathematics discipline is politicised, racialised, and gendered to systematically oppress African women. The mathematics fields continue to be a masculine and white male dominated field, which reinforces and preserves masculine culture which is hostile and unwelcoming to women. African women mathematicians are further oppressed because of their racial and gendered identities in fields that are ideologically founded on proving the racial, gendered, social, cultural, and intellectual inferiority of Africans. Aim: The article aims to exemplify the lived experiences of African women doctoral students in the mathematics disciplines in South African universities. The article critically interrogates the factors that influence the participation, progression, and retention of African female doctoral students in the mathematics disciplines. Setting: The article comes from a larger study which investigated the reasons why African doctorate students do not become academics after they receive their doctorates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines in South African universities. This paper focuses on the experiences of 10 African female doctoral students at five universities in South Africa. The universities were selected because they ranked in the top five in South Africa. Two of the institutions are historically Black universities and the rest are historically white institutions, with one historically Afrikaner-speaking university--between 2019--2021. Methods: This article employed a qualitative research methodology, where semi-structures interviews were conducted with 10 African female doctoral participants in mathematics disciplines in five South African universities and is underpinned by the theory of intersectionality. Results: The findings reveal how interlocking systems of oppression continue to influence the recruitment, retention, and progression of women in the mathematics discipline, thereby providing insight into the mechanisms that need to be altered and/or put in place to actively recruit African female doctoral students and retain them in academic positions. Conclusion: The article concludes that despite the mathematics field proclaiming neutrality and objectivity nevertheless, African women still experience racism, sexism, and classism. The experiences of African women in mathematics are vital to understanding the reasons why there is a high attrition rate of African women in the mathematics discipline in academia and why they do not become academics when they could transform this discipline.

The advent of COVID-19 and the consequent imposition of a national lockdown from March 2020 in South Africa spurred South African universities to introduce new remote ways of delivering their curricula and offering extra-curricular activities. Some of these new modes of delivery tended to disadvantage already socio-economically disadvantaged black students whose lack of access to appropriate equipment, tools and data prevented them from properly accessing and fully utilising the new forms of e-learning on offer. In this context, this article considers the challenges faced by student affairs professionals at the University of Pretoria in offering new, inclusive forms of online leadership-development training to students in leadership positions at the institution. It analyses data collected from student leaders between 2016 and 2020 at the university which indicated that there had been a lack of leadership development among disadvantaged black students at high school level compared with that on offer to white students in high school. In this context, this article describes how student affairs professionals at the University of Pretoria sought to translate face-to-face leadership training into online initiatives that would ensure that already disadvantaged black students would not be disadvantaged further through differential access to leadership-development training, particularly given their greater need for such support due to their relative previous lack of exposure. This article further places black students' needs for equitable access to leadership training in the context of the individual and structural advantages that can accrue from such training, including in relation to career development and occupying leadership positions in the economy and society.

In the past two decades, we have seen a renewed interest in decolonisation. A proliferation of literature produced on the topic, the establishment of journals on decolonisation, student protests such as the #RhodesMustFall campaign at universities in South Africa and Oxford University in Britain, French President Emmanuel Macron's call for the repatriation of African heritage from European museums, the appointment of a Deputy Minister of Decolonisation in Bolivia, bear testimony to a heightened consciousness on the topic. Moreover, we are witnessing the internationalisation of Indigenous knowledge as colonised peoples across the globe use the spaces that globalisation affords to build solidarities in order to resist the homogenising and normalising effects of globalisation and to decentre western epistemologies. In this article, which contributes to the Special Issue on "Decolonial and Anti-racist Perceptions in Teacher Training and Education Curricula," I do three things: discuss the concept of decolonisation including its meanings produced in different geographies, discuss the connection between decolonisation and anti-racism, present challenges and opportunities for decolonising (teacher) education programmes through the concepts of "currere," complicated conversation and land education. I conclude that decolonisation is not an easy task in the neoliberal university and other institutions offering initial teacher training/education. However, there always exists opportunities for invigorating decolonial desires in such teaching/learning spaces.

In this essay, Jonathan D. Jansen and Samantha Kriger make visible the inner lives of the first Black principals in white-majority schools in South Africa. Through in-depth, on-site, narrative interviews with thirteen principals, and using the lens of interiority, they report on the anxieties, insecurity, and uncertainties experienced by these pioneers in the aftermath of apartheid, as well as their aspirations, commitments, and determination to transform predominately white institutions. Respondents spoke openly and candidly about their vulnerability as Black leaders in white schools, discussing the toll of school-based racism and resentment on their emotional lives, explaining the struggle between advancing and yet holding back change to avoid alienating white parents and teachers, and revealing how the racialized contexts in which they work awakened a reassessment of their own identities and of those they lead.

Considering globalization as part of a post-colonial conjuncture, the examination of the politics of decolonization is essential to understand key conflicts in global civil society. Recently, a global movement for the decolonization of higher education has played a key role in this context, with the #RhodesMustFall movement being particularly important. Starting at the University of Cape Town and spreading to Oxford University, the movement initially protested against the presence of statues of Cecil Rhodes at both sites. We argue that the #RhodesMustFall movement is part of what we call a "global field of decolonial politics." We also demonstrate how movement discourse is necessarily rearticulated when shifting context: the primary characteristic of the UCT discourse is its constitution of "black" subjectivity, while the Oxford discourse is largely shaped by the diasporic situation of formerly colonized peoples within an ex-metropolis, constructing multiple plural subjectivities and recovering issues of race and coloniality from political margins.

This study aims to apply critical pedagogy and a participatory approach by including an excluded context, the South African culture, into the curriculum of foreign language classes (EFL) in Turkey because the South African context (SA) has been ignored and excluded from the curriculum of global textbooks and EFL in Turkey. This comparative educational and cultural study is based on a descriptive single case study and critical reflection in a contextualized manner. 15 undergraduates majoring in translation and interpreting in a Turkish university were involved in the study. An open-ended questionnaire of 10 questions was used to elicit their views. The questions involved topics regarding social, political and linguistic contexts. The findings show that the participants were hardly aware of these excluded socio-political issues in the SA context in the curriculum and developed a pessimistic perspective toward the solution of some socio-political and linguistic problems in both contexts because of their historical background with colonialism and nation-state ideology. While they believed that the sociopolitical and linguistic issues in SA could be included into the curriculum, the inclusion of the same issues in Turkey into the EFL curriculum seemed unlikely for them because of the oppressive political atmosphere that has engulfed Turkey for a long time. This study can be used as an example in that it can contribute to the inclusion of the excluded cultures with their socio-political issues into the curriculum by using critical pedagogy.

In 1994, South Africa's political governance changed from being a White minority-controlled apartheid state to a democracy--a relatively peaceful transition underpinned by a social cohesion and reconciliation ideology, namely, that all (both perpetrators and the oppressed) were victims requiring healing in the new proverbial "rainbow nation." Reconciling racial fractures, anti-Blackness and unevenness of the higher education landscape, however, remains elusive. In this paper, we engage narrative inquiry to reflect as academics of color on our experiences in the last two and a half decades, of negotiating a mutating higher education space still haunted by residual racial hegemony and anti-Blackness in almost every sphere of the fraternity. We draw on Grosfoguel's Fanonian-inspired constructs, namely, the "zones of being and non-being" and his conception of racism as beyond mere color racism but as a "dehumanization related to the materiality of domination." We argue that color racism as it relates to the traditional apartheid plantation model has morphed into a neoliberal plantation in the higher education space with new colonial masters (managerial elites in the zone of being) and that Black students and Black academics continue to experience the university as alien as they assimilate hegemonic western Eurocentric culture and epistemology. We consider how we might stand in the cracks, look through and prise open such cracks in agentic contemplation of a resistance to emerging new forms of racism and anti-Blackness that present in South African higher education and how we might respond to student activism (the #RhodesMustFall movement) that calls for curriculum transformation and decolonization. An agenda at risk of subversion by the neoliberal grand narrative.

This study analyses international research collaboration (IRC) trends of South African public universities during the 2012-2021 period. While previous studies have explored IRC trends between South Africa and the rest of the world, there is a gap in literature when it comes to the analysis of institutional IRC trends. Using bibliometric data from Scopus, we analyse the internationally coauthored scholarly output of 24 public universities. Our focus is on the annual and overall institutional IRC trends; a comparison of IRC trends between different institutional types; and an analysis of institutional IRC trends broken down by world regions. Our findings show that the inequalities rooted in colonial and apartheid policies continue to be evident in South African higher education, and that most of the scholarly output through IRC is produced by historically white institutions (HWIs). The findings highlight that HWIs prioritise IRC with the Global North while neglecting research collaboration with the African continent and Global South. On the other hand, even though research output at historically black institutions (HBIs) is low, these institutions prioritise intra-Africa and South-South IRC. Our findings highlight the need for the government to move beyond the policy rhetoric and implement programmes that would enable HBIs to develop capacity to produce scholarly output through national and international collaboration. The government also needs to develop incentives for universities which are contributing to the expansion and strengthening of IRC within the African continent and Global South, in line with the national higher education and research priorities.

Gender equity among South African principals remains a compelling issue for research. While post-apartheid governmental policies address gender equality, women continue to experience discrimination in the field. A theory of intersectionality was used to examine three Indian South African women's leadership experiences. The focus was to investigate how the women negotiated obstacles in their work. The project involved semi-structured interviews, and the results yielded a contribution to the small body of literature employing intersectionality theory as well as the research around female principals experiences in South Africa. The findings revealed the impact intersections of gender, class and race had on the women within environments of domination and discrimination among family and their colleagues at work. Themes of family values, class, and Indian culture illustrated how powerful cultural and societal practices continue to promote patriarchal perceptions. Women as leaders were questioned, as the women experienced discrimination, stereotyping, and emotional abuse within family and work environments. In their efforts to overcome barriers to the principalship, the women relied on their leadership styles to promote relational 'power with' models of leadership.

In response to the call for papers for this special issue and the questions it poses, the authors show how the ontological posthumanist shift of agential realism does not erase but keeps the child human of colour in play, despite the inclusion of the other-than-(Adult)human in its methodologies. Through a montaging technique, the authors explore the philosophical complexity of 'decentering without erasure' by re-turning to data from a large international research project -- Children, Technology and Play (2019-2020). Through an agential realist reading of interview data 'of' 'seven-year-old' Henry when visiting him at home in an informal settlement in Cape Town, they show "what else is going on," and the politically radical and subtle philosophical difference this makes for reconfiguring child subjectivity. To do more justice to the complexity of reality, the analysis bounces around like Henry's sack ball and zooms in on the role apparatuses such as GoPros play in research. The authors 'follow the child' literally but differently, without excluding or erasing the more-than-(Adult)human. In meeting Henry, they also meet Eshal, who introduces the GoPro(blem). By diffractively reading Karen Barad's scholarship through visual and aural texts, the authors respond to the question of how posthumanist research makes a difference to childhood studies. They show how the agential realist move(ment) from Object and Subject to Phenomenon explodes ageist, ableist, racist, extractive and settler-colonial logics in education research.

Context/Background: This article provides an introduction to the special issue. It includes an overview of a collection of articles from scholars across the globe who are committed to deepening an understanding of the experiences of trans students and gender-expansive education in schools. The special issue grew out of concerns about the need to investigate a trans studies--informed approach to addressing trans marginalization that attends to questions of both gender and racial justice in K-12 schools--an approach that is much needed in the field. The special issue also emerges, and needs to be contextualized, in response to the current conditions of resurgent far-right extremism, with its accompanying anti-trans and white supremacist rhetoric. Purpose: The purpose of this article is to provide both an introduction to the special issue and a rationale for its conception. It serves as an orientation to reading of the special issue as a whole, functioning as a "synthesizing introduction": a point of reference and lens through which to situate the contributing articles in a dialogic relation to mark a distinctive assemblage in the field both within and beyond the North American context.

This paper reports the findings of a dialogical narrative analysis conducted by two white academics in distinct higher education contexts -- one based in the United States and the other in South Africa. Through the retelling of actual classroom scenarios, the authors assess their own teaching methods, responses, and classroom practices in order to examine how whiteness has shaped their classroom and teaching practices. As a result of this critical examination, the authors present strategies that centre around reorienting 'habits of mind' (vulnerability, flipping curriculum, collective buy-in, challenging safety, and inter-racial collaborations) to break the cycle of pervasive whiteness that exists in classroom environments and curricular endeavours. In an effort to work against reifying the colonial wound and move towards decolonising teaching practices, the findings of this analysis and the discussion that follows is our attempt of 'stepping back' in order to travel forward in our professional lives.

This paper explores the career experiences of women academics at three South African universities. To understand the experiences of women academics, we conducted an intersectional interrogation of the politics and practices of belonging in departmental cultures. The sample consisted of thirty women academics whose interviews were analysed through a discursive thematic frame. We found that while all participants experienced gender-based discrimination which hinders academic progression, the barriers experienced by black women academics are compounded by the intersections of race, gender, and motherhood. Patriarchal and racist institutional, disciplinary and departmental cultures served as further challenges to belonging. On the other hand, through counter storytelling and refusal, women created alternative spaces of sociality where suffering co-exists with pleasure, refusal and survival. Ultimately, the paper suggests refusal as a generative theoretical lens to surface the complexity of women academics.

This article proposes that participatory museum theatre can provide a platform through which learners studying history can engage a troubled past, specifically looking at South African history, to generate a more complex understanding of it. Through the use of performance, object-work, and creative arts-based responses, such as poetry and drawing, in the museum space, learners are able to connect with the performed historical narratives, characters, and events creating a sensory learning experience. The argument is presented through the example "Beer Halls, Pass Laws and Just Cause" which was performed at the KwaMuhle Museum, Durban, South Africa during March 2020.

There is a body of education scholarship in South Africa that captures the role played by social movements in democratising education in post-apartheid South Africa. However, this scholarship says little about how power dynamics affect learning and intellectual labour in social movements or social movement organisations. In addition, the issue of learning in social movements or social movement organisations is hardly explored in the South African social movement literature. This lack of focus on how activists, especially grassroots activists in working-class communities, learn and produce knowledge in social movements and organisations obscures the complexity of learning and knowledge production in activist settings. This article explores how activists, especially grassroots activists, learn in social movements. Based on secondary literature and interviews, the article advances two main arguments: First, learning in social movements and organisations takes place in non-formal and informal ways. Both these forms of learning take place inside and outside formal educational settings. And they both contribute to the empowerment and critical consciousness of activists in social movements and organisations. In addition, informal learning takes place inside and outside popular educational spaces. However, it is not inevitable that non-formal and informal forms of learning in activist settings will generate critical knowledge and activist practices that disrupt the status quo. Second, power relations based on "race", social class, gender, and sexuality, among other axes of social division, impact on how learning takes place in non-formal or popular contexts of education. This article seeks to understand how power relations shape the learning and knowledge production process in social movements and organisations.

This paper explores the profound connection between race, gender, and culture in post-apartheid education at a public Afrikaans dual-language school in South Africa. Illustrating how the residues and remnants of apartheid legacies propagate arcane constructions of whiteness through interwoven racial and gendered stereotypes, this research maps the dynamic motility of local regimes of power that erase students' individuality, discipline their agency, and influence their identities through their everyday school experiences. Using a critical race theory approach, Foucauldian theoretical frameworks and Bourdieu's notions of cultural capital, this critical ethnographic case study draws on observations and interviews with students and teachers. Written from the positionality of a US researcher, with the critically reflexive view of an outsider to the Afrikaans culture and the South African educational system, this paper considers the power of remaining constructions of whiteness to dominate, reproduce and fortify demoded and baneful gender regimes and racial hierarchies in educational spaces.

Due to the unestablished ongoing debate on Black women's leadership development, present research challenges the current discourses on the structures and processes of epistemology and opportunities in South Africa. The discussion guided research questions development and conceptualization. As a case study and based on research questions, content analysis was used for interpretation. Regardless of the difference in position and experience, the conclusions were that Black women's ascension to top positions in higher education space is shaped/influenced by leadership stereotypes, gender, race, and ethnicity. These influencers also contribute to low self-esteem when contesting for top positions, even though there is neither established nor confirmed evidence that male leadership styles supersede those of women in general and Black women in particular.

The attacks on African immigrants in South Africa have generated a lot of media attention both within and outside the country. This issue has not yet garnered enough critical attention in the field of literature, especially poetry. The purpose of this research is to analyse selected poems from Epiphanie Mukasano's collection Kilimanjaro on My Lap (2010) that discuss the hardships of African immigrants in South Africa. For the purposes of this study, this research uses migration theory. The research finds that racism and xenophobia are to blame for the country's immigration issues in the poems selected for the study. Asserting that the majority of immigrants are seeking protection due to upheaval in their home countries, Mukasano implores those who commit abhorrent acts of xenophobia and racism to have mercy on the immigrants. Consequently, Mukasano's answers to xenophobic assaults in the selected poems are addressed in this study. Mukasano makes an attempt to persuade the perpetrators of racism and xenophobia in South Africa that Pan-Africanism ought to be seen as a brotherhood rather than an enemy. Poems by Mukasano generally focus on the critical observation of people and their attitudes towards immigrants in general, regardless of their status, as well as the challenging consequences faced by black people. Protest poetry by Mukasano is vocal and engaged in challenging the status quo. Her tone, style, and use of poetic forms, which show how she gets her message across, show that she accomplished this successfully. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the politics of mobility in post-1994 South Africa by paying attention to minibus taxis, which have received little consideration from literary scholars although they are ubiquitous in contemporary South African literature. Attending to the minibus taxis that pervade post-apartheid Black writing, I contend, sheds light onto the ongoing racialization of mobility in the country. Offering a socially situated reading of Thabo Jijana's Nobody's Business: A Taxi Owner, a Murder, and a Secret (2014), I show that the abysmal state of public transport in present-day South Africa is emblematic of larger realities of immobility which continue to structure the lives of most Black South Africans. Motivated by the death of his father, a taxi owner who was murdered at the job, Jijana's searing investigative memoir provides a powerful lens into the underbelly of the minibus taxi industry and the violence that drives it. As it reveals the precarity that continues to characterize not just public transport, but every-day life for the Black majority, Nobody's Business suggests that the politics of mobility in post-apartheid South Africa cannot be understood outside the racism and anti-Blackness that define the democratic dispensation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a concern to study historical forms of racism that usually fall under the radar of histories of racism that focus on the peak moments of regimes such as Jim Crow laws in the United States, Nazi racial politics and the apartheid system in South Africa, this article proposes a definition of the concept of banal racism to be applied in situations where the explanation of racism involves long-standing cultural phenomena and social practices rather than legal norms and official policies. A dialogue is established with concepts borrowed from the social sciences, such as "cordial racism," "prosaic racism" and "benevolent racism," to underline the banality (in Arendt's sense) of these forms of discrimination and social hierarchisation, which can entail a high degree of violence compatible with their declared innocence. Together with the conceptual proposal, a case study is presented as an example, in which the racist undercurrent underlying the Gypsyophile discourse of three Anglo-Saxon travellers who visited Spain between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries is analysed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This scoping review describes the available research on the experiences of Somali immigrant parents acculturating within Western countries including the U.S., Canada, South Africa, England, and Scandinavia. A total of 19 studies were identified that focused on Somali immigrant families, discussed parenting, and were written in English. Ten were published in peer-reviewed journals including in social work, mental health, and nursing. The other studies were reported in a book chapter and eight graduate-level theses. The studies were qualitative, and identified several themes related to parental strengths and stressors as they acculturated to Western countries. Stressors included conflicts between Western and Islamic values within racist contexts, shifting from communal to nuclear family parenting, and changes in family dynamics. Strengths included strong ties to spirituality, a deep commitment to family, and a strong love of and pride in their cultural identity. Implications for practice, policy, and research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Phenomenon: Professionalism as a construct is weaponized to police and punish those who do not fit the norm of what a medical professional should look like or behave, more so when medical professionals in training engage in protests for social justice. In addition, professionalism silences trainees, forcing them not to question anything that looks or feels wrong in their eyes. Socialization in medicine, in both the undergraduate and postgraduate training spaces, poses challenges for contemporary medical professionals who are expected to fit the shape of the 'right kind of doctor.' Intersectionality seems to impact how medical trainees experience professionalism, be it intersections of gender, race, how they dress or adorn themselves, how they carry themselves and who they identify as. Although there is literature on the challenges pertaining to professionalism, not much has been written about the weaponization of professionalism in medical training, particularly in the South African context. There is also a paucity of data on experiences of professionalism during or after social upheaval. Approach: This is part of a study that explored the experiences of professionalism of five medical trainees during protests and after protests, extending into their postgraduate training. The main study had 13 participants, eight students and five graduates, who were all interviewed in 2020, five years after the #FeesMustFall protests. For the five postgraduate participants, we looked at how gender, race, hairstyles, adornment, and protests played out in the experiences of professionalism as medical trainees at a South African university. We employed a qualitative phenomenological approach. An intersectional analytical lens was used in analyzing the transcripts of the five graduate participants. Each transcript was translated as the story of that participant. These stories were compared, looking for commonalities and differences in terms of their experiences. Findings: The participants, four males (three Black and one white) and one Black female, were victimized or judged based on their activism for social justice, gender, and race. They were made to feel that having African hairstyles or piercings was not professional. Insights: Society and the medical profession has a narrow view of what a doctor should look like and behave – it should not be someone who wears their hair in locks, has body piercing, or is an activist, least of all if she is a woman, as professionalism is used as a weapon against all these characteristics. Inclusivity should be the norm in medical education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars examining racial stereotyping and prejudice in racially organised social systems have largely focused on how non-White ethnic and racial groups experience racial stereotyping in White-majority national contexts such as the US, Australia and European countries. There is only scant scholarship on experiences of ethno-racial communities in Black-majority countries such as South Africa, a country where Whites are a minority. Even though there is ample scholarly work on racial stereotyping of racial groups in South Africa such as Coloured people, much of it is focused on their experiences during colonial and Apartheid eras. Little is understood about how Coloured people experience racial stigmatisation in post-Apartheid South Africa. This paper addresses this gap. Based on interviews with fourteen Coloured participants from Westbury, Johannesburg, this study found that many interviewees claimed that Coloured South Africans were negatively racially stereotyped as people who use drugs, as aggressive and violent people, as alcoholics and as criminals. Many participants also resisted and countered the negative stereotypes by talking about Coloured people in positive ways, which shows their agency. The negative stereotyping of Coloured people which prevailed during colonial and Apartheid times is still deployed by society to describe Coloured people in post-Apartheid South Africa. To capture the continuity of negative stereotyping in South Africa about Coloured people, I developed the analytical term of 'perpetual racial stereotyping'. Many decades after the end of the Apartheid system, negative racial stereotyping of Coloured South Africans still continues in everyday life, and Coloured people are still associated with racist prejudices, narratives, discourses and stereotypes that were invented many decades ago by settler colonialism and Apartheid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early twentieth century M.K. Gandhi articulated Satyagraha as a decentering quest for truth through everyday politics. Satyagraha privileged the "minor" or the marginalized over the dominant and everydayness and dwelling over history. In light of the contemporary criticisms of Gandhi, this paper examines Gandhian Satyagraha as a minor force that may hold him accountable for his entrenchment within dominant race and caste relations. The paper is divided into three sections devoted to "minor" matters of dwelling and ordinariness. I begin with an examination of Gandhi's politics through race and labor in South Africa, between 1896 and 1905. To understand Gandhi's racism in South Africa it is necessary to pay attention to his marginalization of social and legal narratives related to labor, agriculture, rent and places of habitation such as the hut. I then foreground Gandhi's marginalization of architecture in his discourses around Akash (the sky) and his body in 1932 and in 1942 during his incarcerations in Pune. Finally, I focus on the architecture of the huts built for him in Wardha in 1936–37 and the conflict that emerges between his conception of the social reproduction of labor as a minor voice within the self and his embrace of caste through varnashramadharma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Apartheid South Africa remains an important theme in sport history. The study of South African football has produced a handful of monographs and several research articles. In this body of literature, relatively few studies acknowledge the migratory flows of South African footballers to various levels of British football. Often omitted altogether in these studies is the acknowledgment of the hundreds of British players, coaches, and referees who visited South Africa after the introduction of apartheid in 1948. Many of these football migrants moved to the country for employment opportunities and played the game on a recreational and professional basis. Significant numbers also migrated because of the football opportunities offered in the segregated game. Some of these migrants were involved in the burgeoning black and non-racial game in the country too. From the mid-1950s through to the 1980s, hundreds of British football migrants made South Africa their home for varying lengths of time. In many cases, despite the broader socio-political context, this was too good of a financial opportunity to turn down. To appreciate the complexities of apartheid football, cognizance of the British contribution to upholding, challenging, and overcoming the status quo in South African football is necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Siyamthanda (Siya) Kolisi OIG (1992-) is the first black captain of the South African rugby team (Springboks) in its 128 years of existence. The Springboks have long been associated with Afrikaner people and a history of racism. Siya had to navigate a tumultuous upbringing in an environment characterised by various issues such as socioeconomic inequalities, high unemployment among Black people, and lack of resources. Siya was purposively selected for this study as he has become one of the most influential individuals in South Africa. Publicly available biographical data was gathered, analysed, and interpreted using the Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory (PVEST; Spencer, 2006). I used the theoretical lens to understand the role of social and cultural context, meaning-making processes in human development, and the transition between different worlds. The findings indicated a need to consider the role of context as a source of consonance or dissonance in human development. The study also sheds light on the importance of viewing marginalised individuals holistically to facilitate smooth boundary transitions. Furthermore, it underscores the importance of recognising that maladaptive and adaptive coping strategies exist on a continuum. The study contributes towards non-WEIRD psychobiographical studies and understanding culture's role on human development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the potential for online activism to contest hegemonic neoliberal conservation models in South Africa, using the Covid-19 crisis as a window onto discursive struggle. National lockdown measures during the pandemic sent the vital tourism sector of an already fragile economy into deep crisis. Neoliberal and militarized conservation models, with their reliance on international travel, are examined as affected by a conjunctural crisis, the meaning of which was contested by a broad range of social actors in traditional and on social media. In 30 online news videos, racial hierarchies of land ownership and conservation labour geographies are reproduced and legitimated, as is a visual vocabulary of conservation as equivalent with guns, boots, and anti-poaching patrols. Here, hope is represented as residing in the increased privatization of public goods, and the extraction of value from these goods in the form of elite, luxury consumption. In a corpus of posts on Twitter corpus, on the other hand, significant counter-hegemonic resistance to established neoliberal conservation models is in evidence. In their replies to white celebrity conservationist Kevin Pietersen, critical South African Twitter users offer a contrasting vision of hope grounded in anti-racist equality, a rejection of any special human-animal relations enjoyed by Europeans, and an articulation of a future with land justice at its centre. The analysis supports the idea that in the "interregnum" between hegemonic social orders, pathways towards transformed futures may be glimpsed as "kernels of truth" in discursive struggles on social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Phenomenon: Tertiary education in post-apartheid South Africa has faced many challenges regarding class, language, and race. Even though previously white Afrikaans-rooted universities now have a diverse student population, recent student protests have highlighted the ongoing need for decolonization in higher education. In addition, the majority of public hospitals in the country function under significant staffing, infrastructure, and equipment shortages. Although the mistreatment of medical students has been well described internationally, to date no South African data exists. The aim of this study was to identify experiences of mistreatment of medical students by clinicians and academics at a South African university and to describe the type of mistreatment experienced, the perceived mental health effects, and the influence on academic performance, resilience, and students' knowledge of current reporting systems. Approach: A cross-sectional study was conducted through a locally developed online survey of 443 medical students at a South African university in May to June 2018, comprising of both open and closed ended questions. Levels of psychological distress (K10) and resilience (CD-RISC -10) were measured. Chi-square and student t-tests were used for the analysis of associations, and linear regressions were used to assess predictors of psychological distress. Qualitative data were analyzed thematically using the approach described by Braun and Clarke. Findings: Of 800 eligible medical students at Stellenbosch University, 443 students (55.4%) completed the survey. Mistreatment, comprising of being ignored/excluded (83.4%), offensive gestures (75.0%), verbal abuse (65.1%) and discrimination (64.4%), was prevalent and pervasive, and was perpetrated mainly by registrars (46.7%) and other medical staff (43.8%). Mistreatment was associated with psychological distress, which was generally high and more severe for females. Resilience, which was higher for males, moderated the effects of gender and perpetrator type on distress. Only 15% of students who had experienced mistreatment, either directly or indirectly, reported it, of which more than half (52.8%) were not happy with the outcome. Most students (80.9%) were not aware of the systems in place to report mistreatment. Insights: Student mistreatment is more highly prevalent among medical students at a South African university compared with studies conducted internationally. Despite over 20 years of democracy in South Africa, high rates of racial and gender discrimination were reported and descriptions of racial, language and gender discrimination were particularly concerning. Since the findings of this study, an anti-bullying poster-campaign has been initiated at the university as well as an online reporting system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship on special interest tourism has burgeoned since the 1980s. Although this expanding research interest is relatively new, the phenomenon of special interest tourism is not of recent origin as many of its forms, such as mountaineering, exhibit a long historical record. Most research on special interest tourism concentrates on contemporary issues. The objective is to present a historical perspective on special interest tourism. Using archival sources an analysis is undertaken of the evolution of mountaineering in South Africa as a recreational sport and incipient form of special interest tourism. Cape Town's Table Mountain and the Drakensberg mountains provide the geographical focus of discussion. The results demonstrate that during the 1920s and 1930s tourism promoters in South Africa acknowledged the potential of special interest mountaineers to contribute to tourism growth. The documented experience of early mountaineering in South Africa provides an example of racism in recreation by showing that the country's recreational practices became constructed around politically-imposed racial hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]