Suchergebnisse

Black bodies have been the site of devastation for centuries. We who inhabit and love these bodies live in a state of perpetual mourning. We mourn the disproportionate dying in our families, communities and the dying in the black diaspora. We are yet to come to terms with the death that accompanied the AIDS pandemic. Tuberculosis breeds in the conditions within which most of us live. We die from hours spent in the belly of the earth where we dig for minerals to feed the unquenchable thirst of capital. Malaria targets our neighbors with deathly accuracy. Ebola stalks west Africa where it has established itself as a rapacious black disease. It kills us. In the black diaspora, African Americans are walking targets for American police who kill and imprison them at rates that have created a prison industrial complex. Africans die in the Mediterranean ocean and join the spirits of ancestors drowned centuries ago. With South Africa as the point of departure, this paper stages a transcontinental examination of black death. It is animated by the following questions. What are the dimensions of black death, what is its scale and how is it mourned? What does the COVID-19 pandemic mean for we who are so intimately familiar with death?

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to explore what narratives of inequality tell us about societal inequality both inside and outside of workplaces. It illuminates the intertwined fates of social agents and the productive potential of seeing organisational actors as social beings in order to advance resistance and substantive equality.


Design/methodology/approach
This research empirically examines narratives of inequality and substantive empowerment among a group of 25 black bankers within a major bank in Johannesburg, South Africa. Data were gathered through one-on-one interviews. The data were analysed using narrative analysis.


Findings
The findings indicate that narratives of organisational agents always contain fragments of personal and societal narratives. An intersectional lens of how people experience inequality allows us to work towards a more substantive kind of equality. Substantive equality of organisational actors is closely tied to the recognition and elimination of broader societal inequality.


Research limitations/implications
The implications for teaching and research are for scholars to methodically centre the continuities between the personal, organisational and societal in ways that highlight the productive tensions and possibilities for a more radical form of equality. Moreover, teaching, research and policy interventions should always foreground how the present comes to be constituted historically.


Practical implications
Policy and inclusivity interventions would be better served by using substantive empowerment as a theoretical base for deeper changes beyond what we currently conceive of as empowerment. At base, this requires policy makers and diversity practitioners to see all oppression and inequality as interconnected. Individuals are simultaneously organisational beings and societal agents.


Social implications
Third world approaches to diversity and inclusion need to be vigilant against globalised western notions of equity that are not contextually and historically informed. The failure of equity initiatives in SA means that alternative ideas and approaches are necessary.


Originality/value
The paper illustrates how individual narratives become social scripts of resistance. It develops a way for attaining substantive empowerment through the use of narrative approaches. It allows us to see that employees are also social agents.

In this paper, I argue that our conception of knowledge cannot be separated from the bodies that are involved in its creation. Resisting the decolonization of the curriculum and how we come to know goes cheek by jowl with which bodies are acceptable and which are unpalatable in higher education. It is not just particular knowledges that are therefore reviled but black bodies that signify those knowledges—that have to fight to belong or are ejected. The paper focuses on critical moments when high-profile black bodies have faced expulsion from the Universities of Cape Town, Witwatersrand, and North-West to illustrate the relationship between what I term "reviled bodies" and "knowledges" in higher education. It suggests that it is no coincidence that "recalcitrant" black bodies are expelled from those universities that assign no value to indigenous ways of knowing. Finally, the paper posits that geo- and body politics of scholarship should be advanced to ensure that Southern and black bodies are at the center of the academy.

AbstractExamining two sets of archived materials that include a corpus of narratives that reflect on the period of apartheid in South Africa and posters used by anti-apartheid activists, the paper teases out the operations of racism and the manifestations of rage on the Black body. Critical discourse analysis and affect as theory and method are applied to trace the work of racism and its affective consequences and resistances. Here affect is deployed to read the terrain of the corporeal and the discursive. Black rage is seen as a response to White supremacy and it has the following outcomes: it can have destructive consequences, can enable psychological release of pent up anger, and can simultaneously be an expression of self-love.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to foreground non-conformity in organisational life as it relates to black female managers. My intervention here is to problematise organisational theory in relation to its limited ability to engage with affect and to point to a more generative framework. Through centering the body, the author also seeks to offer a counter narrative to the field of Positive Organisation Scholarship and its drive to primarily engage with happy feelings and harmony.Design/methodology/approach– The author gives a close reading of four black women's interview-based narratives to engage with the ways in which they refuse to conform to organisational scripts of happiness. The author makes a case for using both critical discourse-based and affective readings of everyday experience which social science readings cannot readily account for.Findings– Non-conformity has a number of local effects including negotiating the present from a position of alternative histories of struggle and cultural values, and holding different and conflicting realities and subject positions. Moreover, a reading of these women's accounts suggests that affect is both personal and social and can manifest in multiple, embodied, transformative, and potentially destructive ways. The author comes to new ways of understanding organisations and resistance when the author uses affect as an investigative lens.Research limitations/implications– By virtue of the close reading necessitated by the nature of the study, the sample of this research is small. While the intention is not generality, the findings of the research have to be understood in context and applied within different settings with caution. The implications of this research are that there remains an urgent need for critical-orientated research which centers affect in order to counter the growing positive psychologies which relegate asymmetries to the margins.Social implications– In South Africa where black women constitute the numerical majority, there is an urgent need to understand and reverse their status as a minority in management and social life. This research goes some way in explicating this process.Originality/value– While there is well-developed body of feminist research which seeks to study black women in South Africa, there is a dearth of research into black women in the workplace. This paper therefore presents an original look at black female managers by applying international theoretical tools to a context that is under theorised. This research presents new methodological and theoretical tools and analysis to the South African workplace.

In this paper, we explore the afterlife of naked body protests through an examination of interview and archival data from women who participated in various naked protests in South Africa. We engage the emotional outcomes that follow African women's naked protests. We read black women's naked body protests through the theoretical lenses of refusal and the affective economies of shame and psychic distress. By examining a data corpus of 16 interviews, archival video, podcasts and written content emanating from South Africa, we explore what occurs after naked protests. The experiences endured by the women protestors range from negative affects such as shaming to humiliation by protestors' communities and psychological distress. The findings suggest that refusal is not counter to women's experiences of psychological distress and shame – they co-exist. We demonstrate how affects travel in affective economies and stick to bodies in ways that disperse bad feelings and create productive openings for freedom. Finally, we contend that the affective afterlife of naked protests might be understood as an ongoing theorisation of the body long after the event of the actual protest.

This study explored workplace social networks in order to understand practices of inclusion and exclusion in the context of an increasingly diverse workplace in post-apartheid South Africa. We found that the ways in which space is occupied shows marked continuities with the era of formalised segregation during the preceding periods of colonialism and apartheid. We contend that intergroup relations theory and homophily assist in providing a partial understanding of the pervasive microsegregation observed within a South African organisation. We offer that a historied account of the continuing race-based accounts of microsegregation is more productive for understanding this phenomenon in a country with a past that formalised segregation across all areas of social life. We explore the meanings that people assign to segregation patterns within the workplace based on data emerging out of 54 interviews, nine naturalistic observations and a group discussion conducted within the headquarters of a major bank in Johannesburg. Discourses of linguistic and cultural differences were used to rationalise segregation and naturalise racialised differences. The material effects of segregation were noted to be particularly onerous for Black bankers. As a capitalist class, we however found that Black bankers resist, adapt, subvert and reinscribe power relations in ways that simultaneously serve their interests while also potentially limiting their opportunities. We point to the agentic aspects of social networks for marginalised groups and contend that representation is not sufficient to ensure inclusion.

In this article, we present "retrospective autoethnographies" as a methodology for decolonial inquiry/intervention in the context of neoliberal settings, specifically the university. Autoethnography represents that epistemic and methodological space where the personal intersects with the political, historical, and cultural to critique everyday power structures. Instead of inserting the autobiographical past into the present, we write of our present and our desire for a utopian future to begin to create an image of the New University. Together, as people raised in the postcolony and within coloniality, we begin at the negative affect as neoliberal universities invisibilize, surveil, audit, and discipline—but then, we strive to imagine a New University characterized by radical hope, doing so alongside student movements pushing for decolonizing the university. This article is envisioned as an exhortation for a decolonial intervention of radically dreaming the New University into place.

AbstractIn this paper, we provide empirically informed reflections on the difficulty of undertaking critically inflected, decolonial praxis in community psychology within the overdetermined global order of neo‐liberalism. Using interviews with 10 alumni of the Masters in Community‐Based Counselling (MACC) psychology program at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in South Africa, we extend what have hitherto been largely theoretical debates about the fundamental constraints on teaching decolonial theory as an important touchstone of criticality in the context of the constraining forces of the free‐market economy. We focus on our participants' attempts to navigate the inevitable tensions between the tenets of decolonial critical community psychology and neo‐liberal market pressures on employability. We analyze accounts of job‐seeking and employment experiences of the program alumni to ask whether we may have to contemplate the imminent evacuation of critical community epistemologies within the context of a market‐structured and professionally regulated psychology. We suggest that while the death knell of critical pedagogies and epistemologies has not yet quite arrived, more nuanced approaches to criticality may have to be adopted by the training programs that embrace them. We reveal that decoloniality's emergent traction within the academy is not mirrored by the world of professional psychology. We contend that our apparently ideologically bifurcated curriculum together with fundamental constraints on practice opportunities in the world of work, do not support an easy leap into the decolonial breach.