Abortion discourses: religion, culture, nation

2018 ◽  
pp. 51-68
Author(s):  
Fiona Bloomer ◽  
Claire Pierson ◽  
Sylvia Estrada Claudio
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Legal Reform ◽  
International Policy ◽  
Transitional Societies ◽  
Faith Based

This chapter explores the interplay of culture, nationalism and religion and their interaction with legality and access to abortion in particular contexts. Starting from the position that institutions do not operate in a vacuum but are influenced by values and norms which makes them part of the cultural fabric of a society, the chapter explores gendered notions of nationalism and culture. The role of faith based organisations in shaping international policy illustrates how religious norms shape conservatism and alternately how liberal organisations challenge such norms. A consideration of transitional societies allows for an analysis of how abortion is positioned in a framework whereby cultural, national and religious norms typically influence conservative discourses. In such settings gender rights becomes subservient to national and cultural identity or alternately may become core to legal reform. Two case studies, Northern Ireland and South Africa, illustrate how abortion discourses are shaped in transitioning societies.

scholarly journals Children coping with COVID-19: Intersectional understandings of film and media access in a crisis

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Justine Atkinson ◽  
Firdoze Bulbulia
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Media Access ◽  
Specific Focus ◽  
Film Education ◽  
The World ◽  
Context Specific ◽  
The Impact

As a result of the global COVID-19 pandemic and resulting lockdowns across the world, digital access has become paramount, as most aspects of education have moved online. Drawing together five case studies located in South Africa, Argentina, the Netherlands, India and Ethiopia, this article assesses the role of film education during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a specific focus on the impacts of digital access. We examine multimodal forms of film education, and how these were used to inform, entertain and educate children during the crisis by the varying work undertaken by the organizations. Applying theories of intersectionality, we address the need for context-specific approaches to film education, focusing upon the impact that the societal and individual contexts had on the dissemination of film education in each country.

scholarly journals Discerning the role of faith communities in responding to urban youth marginalisation

2014 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Reginald W. Nel
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Social Cohesion ◽  
Urban Youth ◽  
Youth Ministry ◽  
Faith Communities ◽  
Doctoral Studies ◽  
Youth Movements ◽  
Faith Based ◽  
Urban Theology

Urban youth marginalisation became a key consideration in scholarly and policy literature in the 1990s. This entailed a shift from an emphasis on youth in relation to activism in the struggle to overcome colonial racism – popularly known as ‘the struggle against apartheid’ – to an emphasis on youth as the object of social inquiry and social welfare programmes. Irrespective of how we valuate this shift, the question in this article is how urban faith communities and youth ministry research are to respond to the agency of youth as dialogue partners – with a focus on social cohesion. This article explores this shift in scholarship on urban youth movements, especially for the period since 1994. It draws from the perspectives of my recent doctoral studies (Nel 2013) in constructing a creative dialogue with youth movements. The ultimate aim of this article is to provide a grounded basis for constructing a methodology for a postcolonial urban theology. In addition, it aims to inform the ongoing Youth at the Margins (YOMA) comparative study on the contribution of faith-based organisations to social cohesion in South Africa and Nordic Europe, with the Riverlea community, in Johannesburg, as one of the case studies.

scholarly journals ‘Objects with Objectives’: Applied puppetry from practice into theory

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Grant
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Body Image ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Body Schema ◽  
Research Network ◽  
Double Vision ◽  
Theoretical Approaches

This article draws on the dialogue between puppetry and applied drama that arose from the AHRC Objects with Objectives Research Network in 2017‐18 to explore a tentative theory of applied puppetry. A range of theoretical approaches to applied drama are examined in the light of practical examples of applied puppetry using case studies from Northern Ireland, South Africa and Australia. Morton (2013) highlights how, in performance ‘tension between the material puppet and the imagined puppet’ gives rise to a kind of ‘double vision’ (Tillis 1992), a concept that the article considers alongside Gallagher’s (2005) distinction between body image and body schema, Brecht’s (1974) V-effekt, Meyerhold’s (1998) distinction between the materiality and agency of the actor and Boal’s (1992) idea of metaxis. The article concludes that the distancing and conductive qualities of applied puppetry often work in parallel and that the puppet can be seen as the site of metaxis when used in an applied context.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Padraic Kenney
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Prisoners ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Imprisonment

In an ordinary prison, the goal is to rehabilitate its inmates; in the political prison, the state demonstrates its power to detain, confine, name, and torture or at the very least discomfort and inhibit a group of people who claim to oppose it. Often state leaders learn that they have to negotiate with prisoners and treat them as potential partners. Rendered illegible by the state’s prison, prisoners create their own illegibility and confuse the prison, refusing its terms. As they create communal structures, engage in protest, and invent prison universities, political prisoners create a new narrative and wrest back their own agency, forcing the regime to respond. Political imprisonment thus has an effect quite different from that intended by the regime. The conclusion looks briefly at the role of prisoners during and after transformations in Poland, Northern Ireland, and South Africa.

scholarly journals Education and Intra-Alliance Conflict: Contrasting and Comparing Popular Struggles in Apartheid South Africa and Palestine

2008 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bilal Fouad Barakat
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
South African ◽  
Review Of The Literature ◽  
Multiple Fault ◽  
Educational Discourse ◽  
South African Education ◽  
Education And Conflict

Much recent research has been directed at illuminating the role of education in major conflicts between ethnic groups. It is increasingly well understood that education does not necessarily have a positive, peace-supporting influence, but that the wrong kind of education can serve to reinforce divisions. However, in many conflicts there are multiple fault lines. Even if one central antagonism between two broad groupings can be identified, numerous tensions and divergent interests may exist within each of these groupings. This study examines the hypothesis that the notion of the ‘two faces of education’ extends to such ‘conflicts within the conflict’. In other words, with regard to tensions within groups on the ‘same side’, education and schooling may also serve either as a unifying force or as a cause of violent disagreement – or both at the same time. This article presents the results of extracting both kind of themes – education as divisive or unifying – from a thorough review of the literature on two case studies: South African education during the anti-apartheid struggle, and the development of Palestinian education in exile and under occupation. While significant differences exist, there are also some common patterns, such as the use of educational privileges to co-opt part of the opposition, the continuation of educational class differentials within broad alliances during and after conflict, and the role of ambiguity in educational discourse in opposition. Both cases support the conclusion that education and schooling can play an ambivalent role at all levels of complex conflicts, and that research on ‘education and conflict’ cannot afford to ignore this complexity.

Erich Wulffen and the case of the criminal

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Birgit Lang
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Central Europe ◽  
Legal Reform ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Professional Career ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
Case Writing

State Prosecutor and legal reformer Erich Wulffen used the case study genre for legal and largely didactic purposes. Chapter 4 illustrates the adoption of the conventions of sexological case writing by the legal fraternity in twentieth-century Central Europe, and ways in which Wulffen brought the case study genre from the hidden world of the court to the wider public. In doing this, Wulffen carved a niche for himself as an expert in legal reform and sexology in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany. He embraced different kinds of case modalities over the course of his professional career, targeting professional, middle-class audiences and the wider reading public during his thirty years in the role of prosecutor. The changing success of Wulffen’s publications highlights the intensifying crisis of the expert case study as a modality able to ‘speak the truth’ about modern sexuality and deviance. While Wulffen’s expert case studies about con men and other criminals were highly successful during the Wilhelmine era, the same approach and model for case writing met a more critical audience after 1918. Wulffen embraced the challenge of a new democratic environment by writing implicitly didactical popular crime novels. However, eventually his criminal subjects literally ‘wrote back’ after their sensationalised trials, using case studies in an attempt to narrate their own versions of events. The accounts of these criminals-turned-writers such as convicted paedophile Edith Cadivec. Thus the popularisation of sensationalist case studies, written, for instance, by perpetrators of crime, was an important factor in the case study genre’s loss of respectability.

scholarly journals Practice of Ritual Sacrifice and the Role of Religion in Development

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cas Wepener
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
South African ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
South African Context ◽  
The South ◽  
Ritual Sacrifice ◽  
African Context ◽  
Role Of Religion

The practice of ritual sacrifice within the South African context is explored in the light of the emerging global discussion regarding religion and development. Firstly, some aspects of the theory of René Girard on sacrifice is discussed, as well as African theories pertaining to sacrifice and modern ways in which sacrifice/offering enters language. The following section presents three case studies pertaining to sacrifice from South Africa: one from fiction, one from fieldwork done in an African Independent church and a description of a recent sacrifice conducted on a beach in Cape Town. In a succeeding section, the data presented in the empirical part is interpreted in the light of the preceding theories. In the concluding section a thesis is advanced regarding the possible meaning and significance of sacrifice for an African understanding of development.

Case Studies

2020 ◽  
pp. 202-238
Author(s):  
James Leigland
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Renewable Energy ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
South African ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Public Private Partnerships ◽  
Power Sector ◽  
Project Costs ◽  
Sub Saharan

This chapter presents case studies of three recent renewable energy independent power producer (IPP) tender programs in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), in Uganda, Zambia, and South Africa. Using competitive tenders to select IPP projects is rare in Africa, but is viewed as an effective way of lowering project costs. And with the rapid reductions in the costs associated with wind and solar projects, renewable energy IPP projects may represent the power sector public–private partnerships (PPPs) of the future. These case studies detail the role of development partners in designing and implementing the first two of these programs and compare their performance with that of the South African program, a program designed and managed almost exclusively by South African officials and their advisers. What are the lessons that can be learned from these two distinct approaches? What impact do these kinds of programs have on the “IPP policy dilemma” described in Chapter 8?

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