A case study of GADRA’s community-engaged praxis for educational transformation
- Authors: Msomi, Nqobile Nomonde
- Date: 2024-10-11
- Subjects: Uncatalogued
- Language: English
- Type: Academic theses , Doctoral theses , text
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/464864 , vital:76552 , DOI https://doi.org/10.21504/10962/464864
- Description: Although South Africa has achieved considerable steps in development over the last thirty years, post-apartheid South Africa is characterised by widespread poverty, high unemployment and systemic inequality. According to the country’s National Planning Commission, education is central to achieving the overarching democratic goals of eliminating poverty and reducing inequality. This positions education as an important site for the liberation and well-being of our country’s majority. This case study takes a community psychology perspective on education; more specifically the education-development nexus wherein Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) are centrally positioned. NGOs are contentiously positioned in the development discourse. Nonetheless, they have played a key role with regards to siding with the poor, the excluded, persistently marginalised and oppressed majority and to bringing about social justice, following South Africa’s colonial and apartheid histories, as well as in the current democratic dispensation. This study situates a local NGO, GADRA Education, within the country’s socio-political and educational landscape. Founded in the 1950s and located in Makhanda, it has been operating in the rural Eastern Cape province for more than sixty years. In the present-day, GADRA Education positions itself at the centre of a dense network of education institutions in Makhanda, including Rhodes University, and collaborates with a number of education stakeholders in the small city. The case study consisted of two consecutive phases: a Foucauldian discourse analysis of GADRA’s annual reports between 2012 and 2021, followed by individual narrative interviews with 13 organisational members. An Africa(n)-centred community psychology orientation, revealed counter-discourse to the national “crisis in education” discourse surrounding the NGO. The discourse of crisis produced the legitimation for GADRA Education’s continued existence, action and embeddedness in Makhanda. The discourse of transformation informed their modes of support across primary, secondary and higher education. The discourse of access and participation constructed the NGO as a bridge and link between phases of education. The discourse of collaborative partnerships enabled solidarity between state and non-state actors towards educational change. Finally, the discourse of development positioned development at a grassroots level. These constellations formed GADRA Education’s counter-discourse, which produced the Organisation’s apparatus of resistance, formulated as situated praxis. The 5 organisational members’ narratives revealed the apparatus’s impacts on the subjectivities of youth in Makhanda in engendering hope and driving educational change in the city. In contrast to conceptions of education NGOs who work in the public schooling sector making little progress in dismantling educational inequity, this study illustrates the techniques of resistance leveraged, in the context of collaborative partnerships, by the local NGO. These techniques have wider applicability for education-development practitioners concerned with transformative change in their educational locales. It illustrates the principles and modes by which NGOs can operate in solidarity with the persistently marginalised majority, and thus contribute to shaping our imagined educational futures. I argue that psychology is a useful site to think about justice. Critical psychological theory can enable a deeper understanding of practice that contributes to impactful community organisation, intervention and resistance in the country’s education sector. The operationalisation of the values and principles of community psychology can make important contributions at the nexus of theory and practice in working towards educational, and ultimately social, change. , Thesis (PhD) -- Faculty of Humanities, Psychology, 2024
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- Date Issued: 2024-10-11
Discursive constructions of alcohol use and pregnancy among participants in intervention aimed at reducing Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders
- Authors: Msomi, Nqobile Nomonde
- Date: 2020
- Subjects: Fetal alcohol spectrum disorders -- South Africa , Pregnancy -- Psychological aspects , Reproductive rights -- South Africa , Reproductive health -- South Africa
- Language: English
- Type: text , Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/140374 , vital:37883
- Description: South Africa’s socio-cultural and political history has had significant effects on maternal and reproductive health. The hazardous alcohol use patterns in the country have affected alcohol consumption during pregnancy. Antenatal exposure to alcohol may result in Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD). The levels of FASD in particular areas of the country are the highest recorded in the world. Epidemiological studies have dominated pregnancy and FASD research in South Africa; however, recently critical scholarship seeking to contextualise the issue of drinking alcohol during pregnancy is emerging. This study forms part of a developmental/formative assessment of an alcohol and pregnancy intervention. Assessment is an important part of pilot interventions, and discourse is a key area of focus due to its constitutive role for the subjectivity of human beings and legitimation of institutional practices. Using a reproductive justice perspective and a Foucauldian approach to analysis, I identified five prominent discursive constructions of alcohol use during pregnancy produced during interviews with community educators. These interviews were conducted following training workshops with the community educators. Participants constructed their living environments as ‘wholly bad’ and ‘issue-ridden’ and positioned alcohol consumption as ‘a destroyer!’, ‘king’ and a social lubricant. They interpellated the foetus, the ‘FASD child’ and pregnant women into this context. They positioned themselves as transformed subjects able to effect change. The foetus was constructed as ‘vulnerable and important’, as opposed to the ‘defiled FASD child’. Pregnant women were constructed as ‘ignorant, preoccupied and unreceptive to knowledge’. These constructions hinged on so-called ‘scientific knowledge’ of biological processes in utero, demonstrating Foucault’s conception of the power/knowledge nexus and how its dynamics transforms knowledge of human beings. Whereas this ‘knowledge’ transformed alcohol consumption and the foetus into powerful and vulnerable subjects respectively, the circulating discourses had objectivising effects on pregnant women. The discourses of responsibilisation, the personification of the foetus, ‘the problem’ category of FASD, the discourse of difference, and the discourse of alcohol consumption as an entrenched practice were circulating around pregnant women. I suggest alterations to the identified constructions using principles of community psychology, the harm reduction model, a social model of disability and the reproductive justice perspective
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- Date Issued: 2020