ABSTRACT A large body of academic literature germane to service delivery protests has documented area-specific cases of protests and their targets. In the main, the focus of these studies has been the failures of the ruling African National Congress as elected leaders divert public funds aimed at improving the lives of townships and informal settlement dwellers. The emerging overall picture points

(2021). Becoming men: Black masculinity in a South African township. South African Review of Sociology. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT This article critically examines power relationships amongst actors in a local housing development project in the Khutsong township in South Africa. For this purpose, actors’ interpretations and actions of their project praxis are linked critically to Stephen Lukes’ dimensions of power. These are the first-dimensional decision-making and policymaking power, the second-dimensional attempts

ABSTRACT Terms such as “gender-based violence” are connected with a range of evolving discourses that are not merely descriptive, but interpretive and political in nature. Yet, what makes violence “gender-based” is often implicit rather than explicit. In this Debates we argue that there needs to be greater specificity about what is gendered about gender-based violence, while allowing for the continued

(2020). Editorial. South African Review of Sociology: Vol. 51, No. 1, pp. 1-2.

ABSTRACT South African (SA) first-year university students are especially at risk due to poor performance, high dropout and student protest marches. They face challenges of academic performance, retention and decreased throughput rates. While some students overcome their challenges and risks to succeed into their second year of study, some fall prey to their challenges. These students become “at risk”

ABSTRACT The calls for knowledge decolonisation pervade most academic disciplines in South Africa today. In this paper I argue for epistemological decolonisation within men and masculinities studies through “delinking” from western gender paradigms. The paper draws on the Xhosa concept of manhood called indoda to illustrate African-centred ways of decolonising and theorising masculinities research

ABSTRACT The quality assurance of community engagement was flagged as a major problem during the last cycle of audits of South African Higher Education Institutions (SAHEIs) by the Higher Education Quality Committee. Through the implementation of critical literature review methodology and comparing similarities and differences among SAHEIs in their reporting of their attempts at benchmarking, this

(2020). Development, social policy and community action. South African Review of Sociology: Vol. 51, No. 1, pp. 83-85.

ABSTRACT Democratic transitions and consolidation stalled in many parts of Africa in the past three decades. Ethiopia followed a similar pattern of democratic recession, after promising openings at two important junctures, i.e. 1991 and 2005. In fact, the ruling party claimed a “100 percent victory” winning all the national parliament seats in the latest May 24, 2015 election. This article employs

ABSTRACT Violence against women in the home is a serious global social, health and human rights problem which transcends every level of society. Many countries have enacted and implemented specific legal policy interventions, often referred to as the “Domestic Violence Act”, in order protect women from violence at home. Although the Domestic Violence (Prevention and Protection) Act 2010 was an important

ABSTRACT This article makes a contribution to literature on “white-talk”. Existing literature shows how whiteness has been defended by criticizing black people, culture and government in subtle (and not so subtle) ways that allow speakers to deny racism. In contrast to denial, we focus on how white South Africans confess to feeling guilty for their privilege in comparison with their domestic workers

Writing from a participant observation point of view with supplement of in-depth interviews, this article presents UPrising, a student-led movement that emerged at the University of Pretoria's Hatf...

ABSTRACTThe core activities associated with the #Fees Must Fall (FMF) movement in South Africa may be understood as forms of “disruptive power” (Piven [2006]. Challenging Authority: How Ordinary Pe...

Colonialism, global capitalism, environmental destruction and destruction of myriad cultures are intimately intertwined. They have impacted our sense of what it means to be human (and who is fully ...

The global world continues to prepare itself for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) due to the envisaged effects of the 4IR on individuals, nations and the global world. This is being done thro...

The literature on leadership shows that globally, leading a university in a world that is dynamic, ever-changing, multifaceted and technologically advanced has been increasingly challenging. Jansen...

ABSTRACT The present study explores the link between the productivity of comprehensive universities (CUs) and the timetables guiding teaching and learning activities. The study was premised on review of relevant literature. The findings indicate that partnership between CUs and relevant tertiary institution stakeholders such as non-governmental organizations, non-profit organizations and charity organizations

ABSTRACT This article conducts an African Feminist exploration into the life herstory narrative of a one-woman beneficiary in South Africa’s Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP) at Leratong Hospital in Kagiso, situated in Gauteng province. In South Africa, the statistics inform us that poverty has a face, she is young, black African and poorly educated, but we are reliably informed that her access

ABSTRACT HIV and AIDS continue to pose a global health and development challenge, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. South Africa has one of the largest numbers of people living with HIV in the world. Despite accelerated efforts to combat the HIV and AIDS epidemic there remains an unabated challenge, i.e. continuing new infections, particularly among young African adults. Studies suggest that risky

ABSTRACT The argument centres around the notion that conventional biomedical healthcare models are behaviour change-orientated but do not cater for patients on an individual level. Healthcare systems need to acknowledge and support alternative medical therapy and also cater for the social aspect of the patient, which includes family support. This article attempts to make a case for the patient's social

ABSTRACT Taking sport seriously in academic sociological writing bridged the gap between the sociology of sport and its mother discipline with a special edition in the South African Review of the Sociology in 2015. This paper addresses a global and national audience in critically reflecting on the discourses of gender, media and politics as they intersect in the construction of the Caster Semenya saga

ABSTRACT Universities are expected to contribute towards the development of society through working collaboratively with communities. One of the many ways that the academy allows for community engagement is through the use of creative placemaking to intentionally inspire a raft of transformational changes to the economy, environment and physical and social infrastructure. However, the pursuit of transformational

Here is the first issue of the South African Review of Sociology for 2019, which introduces a new editorial collective: Dr Darlene Miller, Dr Zanetta Jansen and Professor Zethu Matebeni. We are also happy to offer a revised and interactive layout and design for the journal, which is clearly visible on the online version accessible to subscribers. As we move forward, societies are under constant and

ABSTRACT Scholars studying race in post-apartheid South Africa have largely focused on South African nationals. Little is known about the ways in which non-South African migrants and refugees navigate the South African racial classification system. In the context of continued immigration to South Africa, it is important to examine how refugees negotiate South African racial categories. This paper addresses

ABSTRACT This paper explores the experiences of gay men within the Methodist Church of Southern Africa in Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. Their experiences of the church are explored in relation to gay identity creation and negotiation in a religious environment. Six participants spoke about how they negotiate their intersecting sexual and religious identities. While adopting a qualitative

ABSTRACT Unemployment continues to be a social problem confronting numerous countries worldwide. In Lesotho, poverty and unemployment are rife in rural areas. This study sought to establish the profile of unemployed people, their challenges and how they cope with unemployment. This was a quantitative study with a sample size of 120 unemployed people drawn from Manonyane rural area in the Maseru district

ABSTRACT Ágnes Heller who died on 19 July 2019 was one of the most influential social scientists of the last century, particularly from the publication of Everyday Life Sociology in the 1960s. With analysis of main concepts such as transcendental freedom and hetero interpretation, I wish to pay tribute to my Master of revolutionary ideas in philosophy and sociology in our daily life-world actions.

ABSTRACT This paper engages with the recent discourse on decolonization of knowledge in South Africa from a sociological perspective. It interrogates the position and relevance of both sociology and sociologists to the development aspirations of South Africa. Its basic assumption is that sociology as a discipline is invaluable to the current needs for social reformation and reconstruction in South

ABSTRACT Starting from young ages, children and youth are dealing with adult problems such as poverty and food security. For this reason, children and youth enter the labour market earlier than expected, compromising their scholastic performance and future earnings if they drop out of school. This study profiles the children and youth of South Africa who are engaged in labour market activities using

ABSTRACT In the then Ciskei, the apartheid policy of separate development introduced a decentralised industrialisation system. This strategy promoted the establishment of firms and factories in the Bantustans and Homelands (i.e., reserved black areas outside of the then so-called white South Africa). The strategy was backed up by subsidies from the National Party led- apartheid government, helping

ABSTRACT At the onset of reformation and conciliation in 1994, various interventions were implemented by the South African government to ensure the reparation of learner outcomes and throughput. The Department of Basic Education has, however, failed innumerable times to achieve their set educational outcomes. Thus, educational stakeholders, opinion leaders, and researchers perceive the quality of education

ABSTRACT The emergence of community engagement in higher education and the renewed emphasis on community involvement presents greater opportunities for strengthening university-community partnerships for the common good. These partnerships are nurtured through a range of processes that can be leveraged to address critical issues in local communities. A qualitative inquiry conducted at six universities

ABSTRACT Poverty is a persistent problem that characterises San communities in Botswana and beyond. As an indigenous and minority ethnic group in Botswana, the San find themselves trapped in unequal social relations with the Tswana-speaking groups. Since the societal structure is made of unequally perceived social statuses where the San are regarded as “inferior/subordinate” and Tswana speaking groups

ABSTRACT This article reports on a study that explored a subculture called izikhothane that has taken root among black male youths in South African townships. Focus group discussions were conducted with young black males who are involved in this subculture and a thematic content analysis was used to analyse themes in the study. The findings showed that izikhothane are primarily concerned with music

ABSTRACT While South African educational policy gives all persons the right to attend educational institutions irrespective of pregnancy or maternal status, it can be demanding to be both a student and a mother and to reconcile competing conceptions of what it means to be a “good student” and a “good mother”—particularly within African culture. The research adopted a feminist ethics of care perspective

ABSTRACT Since the adoption of the Child Care Act of 1991, many families in South Africa have been formed through transracial adoption, particularly through the placement of black children in white-parented homes. Though this family form has increased over the past two decades, very little research has been dedicated to understanding the experiences of these families in South African society. The current

ABSTRACT Climate change is considered by many to be one of the greatest challenges to humanity, with Africa seen as one of the most affected continents. There is a growing recognition that purely scientific and modern approaches alone are not enough to mitigate the “multiple stresses” of climate change in Africa. Nonetheless, the dominant thinking in climate change science appears to treat indigenous

ABSTRACT Leadership has traditionally been associated with men; however, some women have elevated themselves above the socially enforced constrictions caused by gender expectations. These gender expectations specifically pertain to women's roles as mothers and wives and, as such, present particular implications for women to establish a constructive work-life balance in their careers. A general increase

ABSTRACT Writing decades ago about Africa’s experience of “international” trade during the 16th to 20th centuries, the great African historian, Kenneth Onwuka Dike (1917–1983), made a sociologically poignant remark about what he termed the “ingrained instincts of piracy” – instincts he believed were the constant amidst the mutating contents, contours and stratagems of capitalist enterprise. Dike made

ABSTRACT Recurrent xenophobic violence in South Africa highlights the strong undercurrent of popular opinion opposition to international immigrants. This article examines public attitudes towards the international immigrant community in South Africa and the factors influencing those attitudes. The author uses public opinion data from the 2014 South African Social Attitudes Survey (SASAS). The article

ABSTRACT This article reports on a study that examined the Bakweri women and the land question in Cameroon in terms of access and ownership. This is in view of the observed deprivation of women from land ownership due to socio-cultural practice resulting from the patriarchy that dominates most of Cameroon. This is so in spite of increased involvement of women in food crop production. The question of

ABSTRACT Globally, migrants face numerous socio-economic and institutional impediments that hinder their participation in the labour market of host cities and/or countries. This motivates them to join the informal economic sector to make a living. Applying the concept of tactical cosmopolitanism to understand the social and economic agency of African migrants, this article reports on an explorative

ABSTRACT The South African biofuel sector has developed slowly compared to other African contexts, despite the existence of biofuel production policy frameworks. In this article, the authors review the literature on agricultural reform and rural livelihoods in South Africa and analyse case studies from elsewhere in Africa in an attempt to draw lessons for South Africa. They argue that biofuel production

ABSTRACT In 2008, more than 60 foreigners were killed during xenophobic attacks in South Africa. As if that was not enough, the same act was repeated in 2015 when seven people were killed (four foreigners from Africa and three South African nationals). These seemingly politically, socially and economically inspired attacks continue to generate arguments among students of development studies, Third

ABSTRACT This article reports on the first step in a larger project aimed at obtaining accurate and reliable data on migration in the South African context. It examines the comparability of questions relating to migration asked in the 1996, 2001 and 2011 censuses. It goes on to present migration data with respect to the Western Cape province and South Africa (as a whole) using those sources. The major

ABSTRACT Bisexual erasure refers to the cultural de-legitimation of bisexuality as an intelligible sexual identity. There is little South African research that considers how this occurs. Generally bisexuality is “a silenced sexuality” both in popular and academic discourse. Research has not attended to (women’s) “self-aware bisexual identities”, tending to focus on men’s bisexual practices or other

ABSTRACT The study of social entrepreneurship is gaining momentum in academia, in research institutions as well as in practice; however, there is a lack of sociological analysis of social entrepreneurship. This article argues that social entrepreneurship needs to be understood from a social sciences perspective. As the research has pointed out, sociological literature does not have much to say about

ABSTRACT Young people in contemporary South Africa inhabit a multiplicity of diverse, often contradictory, economic and socio-cultural contexts. These contexts offer a range of possibilities and opportunities for the affirmation of certain identities and positionalities alongside the disavowal of others. Dress – clothes, accessories and body styling – is one of the key components through which, within

ABSTRACT This article reports on a study that explored how Eritrean refugees in South Africa – part of a generational wave of emigrants labelled the “generation asylum” by Hepner (2015) – make sense of their refugee experience and identities, herewith referred to as interpretative repertoires. Interpretative repertoires is a concept coined by sociologists, Gilbert and Mulkay (1984) and later adopted

ABSTRACT By experience, formal control structures working alone have not solved all criminal acts. This article reports on a study that examined the efforts of agba (elder), ajobi (consanguinity) and ajogbe (co-residency) as informal structures of vigilantism to control crime in Egba, Nigeria. The study used a purposive sampling technique to select the study area, and the participants in focus group

ABSTRACT This article reports on a study that used a sample of undergraduate students at the North-West University, Mafikeng Campus, South Africa, to examine the effect of selected sociodemographic factors on the participation of voluntary activities amongst youth who have been exposed to the country’s higher education system. Specifically, the binary logit regression model was employed to analyse

ABSTRACT Social cohesion is the cornerstone of social relationships, which depend critically on the social systems that determine people’s behaviour. Members of society are defined by their cultural values and beliefs, in terms of which interactions may meet with social approbation or disapprobation. In any society, interactions that draw endorsement from other people are more likely to be welcomed

ABSTRACT Commercial farms in South Africa have relied on cross-border migrant workers for decades. In this article the author explores how social relations on farms in Musina, Limpopo, South Africa, shape the employment conditions of Zimbabwean farmworkers. Drawing on empirical fieldwork with 134 workers, the author argues that within a context of unequal social power on farms and conditioned by a

ABSTRACT The ideas of ‘ownership’, ‘control’ and ‘love’ among people in intimate relationships, are often woven into the discourse of power relations. In this culture, a man owns his family and this sense of ownership results in control – erroneously seen as love for his family. For those who subscribe to this notion of relationship, the concept of partner-abuse hardly exists – in fact, it is constructed

ABSTRACT The National Development Plan 2030 (NDP) is arguably South Africa’s widest and most inclusive plan for economic and social development since 1994. It is evidence of the urgent need for development in South Africa, although its political will is yet to be determined. A test of the NDP’s strength is whether it can implement development beyond the document using existing state institutions and

ABSTRACT An existing hiatus in empirical research related to the use of ‘juju’ rituals as a spiritual or psychological control mechanism by perpetrators to subjugate victims of human trafficking for sexual exploitation has underscored the need for this exploratory study. The phenomenon is shrouded in secrecy and little is known about what juju entails and how it is used to subdue victims. The aim of

ABSTRACT The historical review of South African families reveals that the family has undergone significant transformations, resulting in a mosaic of family formations that have had an impact on family functions. Notwithstanding the importance of the family being one of the fundamental social units, however, there is limited data on how these families function in South Africa. This article analyses

ABSTRACT This article reports on a study which examined the experiences of women in South Africa after imprisonment. Using in-depth interviews, the experiences of 13 women ex-prisoners who were imprisoned in South African prisons were examined. It emerged that some of the participants of the study experienced unemployment, stigma and discrimination, as well as the psychological effect of imprisonment

ABSTRACT One winter morning in 2006, conflict ensued between firewood vendors (selling wood to passing motorists and also supplying bulk quantities to cities), on the one hand, and a group of predominantly women (and others sympathetic to their grievances), from villages on the southern fringes of the former Shangani Reserves in western Zimbabwe, on the other hand. The latter group confiscated firewood