Pushing the bounds of possibility: South African academics narrate their experiences of having agency to effect transformation
- Authors: Idahosa, Grace Ese-Osa
- Date: 2017
- Subjects: Education, Higher -- South Africa , Education, Higher -- Social aspects -- South Africa , Educational change -- South Africa , Higher education and state -- South Africa , Rhodes University
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Doctoral , PhD
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/5845 , vital:20981
- Description: Over 20 years after the first democratic elections, the institutional cultures and structures of many South African universities remain un-transformed; they are embedded with racist and sexist discourses and attitudes that allow for the marginalisation and exclusion of students and staff (Department of Education 2008; Soudien 2010; van Wyk and Alexander 2010; Akoojee and Nkomo 2007; Hemson and Singh 2010). In order to effect change, research has noted the importance of leadership and staff involvement in the transformation process (Van-Der Westhuizen 2006; Portnoi 2009; Niemann 2010; Viljoen and Rothmann 2002). These studies argue that both leaders and staff members must be interested, and actively involved in, the transformation process. This suggests that the extent to which leaders and individual staff members have agency to effect transformatory practices determines the success of transformation policies. But what motivates this interest in transformation? While a number of studies have focused on the imperative to transform, few studies have focused on the role of individual agency in the transformation process. After all the world and in some ways structural properties are given to us and at the same time ‘actively constituted by us’ (van Manen 1997, XI). Drawing on interviews with academic staff members at one university in South Africa, this study uses a hermeneutic phenomenological approach to understand the nature of having agency to enable transformation drawing on the experiences of academic staff members. In the context of studies on the agency- structure divide and the need for a structural and cultural change in universities in South Africa, the project aimed to find out how transformation happens, when it does happen. I was interested in how individual agents are able to use their agency to ensure transformation amid limiting and rigid structures and cultures in the university. Given the fact that structures are only revealed in human action, the individual experience of transformation at once gives insight into the dominant structures, the social context and how their capacity to act was deployed to enable a change in such structures - at least in their own experience and understanding. This may help our understanding of transformation and what is needed to effect the transformation of deeply embedded apartheid legacies in university structures and cultures. This study aimed to reveal moments at which individuals embedded in what have been identified as rigid structures and cultures perceive themselves as having had the agency to interrupt and transform them despite their rigid nature. The study was interested in what characterises these moments and what individual and institutional contexts make them more or less possible/likely.
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- Date Issued: 2017
Losing, using, refusing, cruising : first-generation South African women academics narrate the complexity of marginality
- Authors: Idahosa, Grace Ese-Osa
- Date: 2014
- Subjects: Women in higher education -- Research -- South Africa , Women college teachers -- Research -- South Africa , Sex discrimination in higher education -- Research -- South Africa , Feminism and higher education -- South Africa , Marginality, Social -- South Africa
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2880 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1013148
- Description: While existing literature shows a considerable increase in the numbers of women in academia research on the experiences of women in universities has noted their continued occupation of lower status academic positions in relation to their male counterparts. As the ladder gets higher, the number of women seems to drop. These studies indicate the marginalization of women in academic settings, highlighting the various forms of subtle and overt discrimination and exclusion women face in academic work environments. In this study I ask how academic women in South Africa narrate their experience of being ‘outside in’ the teaching machine. It has been argued that intertwined sexist, patriarchal and phallocentric knowledges and practices in academic institutions produce various forms of discrimination, inequality, oppression and marginalization. Academic women report feeling invisible and retreating to the margins so as to avoid victimization and discrimination. Others have pointed to the tension between the ‘tenure clock’ and the ‘biological clock’ as a source of anxiety among academic women. Where a masculinised presentation of the self is adopted as a solution to this dilemma, the devaluation of the feminine in the academic space is confirmed. However, experiences of academic women are not identical. In the context of studies showing the importance of existing personal and social resources, prior experience and having mentors and role models in the negotiation of inequality and discrimination, I document the narratives of women academics who are the first in their families to graduate with a university degree. These first-generation academic women are therefore least likely to have access to social and cultural resources and prior experiences that can render the academic space more hospitable for the marginalised. Employing Spivak’s deconstruction of the concept of marginalisation as my primary interpretive lens, I explore the way in which, in their narratives, first-generation academic women negotiate marginality. These narratives depict a marginality that might be described, following Spivak, as ‘outside/in’, that is, as complex and involving moments of accommodation and resistance, losses and gains, pain and pride.
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- Date Issued: 2014