Ethno-National Colonialism in South Africa

The purpose of this dissertation is to answer the question: why do ostensibly similar ethno-national conflicts within a system of settler-colonial domination see such wide variation in their outcomes? How they emerge from conflict through power sharing and social integration versus the endurance of separation and systems of domination and control? The study identifies causal paths that resulted in the decline of domination systems of this type. Ethno-national conflicts that feature certain similarities develop in different trajectories due to certain conditions that culminate in transforming the structures of these conflicts towards integration (the establishment of a single political entity) or separation (independence in separate entities). The goal of the dissertation is to examine the Palestinian-Israeli conflict through a comparative lens in order to specify the conditions that led to the persistence of the two-state solution and to examine the prevalence or lack of necessary and sufficient conditions for the emergence of a one civic-democratic state. Building on the comparative approach I argue that ethno-national territorial underpinnings of the conflict and the “regimes of territorial legitimation” of the dominant group are the most crucial explanatory factor in determining the trajectory and outcome of the conflict. “Regimes of territorial legitimation” are the practices, procedures, systems of meaning, and institutional designs that found the relationship between a nation, people or ethno-national group and geography/territory. The dissertation features a qualitative structured and focused comparison of the conflicts in South Africa, and Palestine. Method of difference is applied for a case-oriented interpretive inquiry that focuses on the complexity of each of the two cases and aims at capturing the historical diversity of these similar cases.

Understanding Individual Perception and Experience of Fear during Mandatory Quarantine: Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic in Ghana

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has manifested differently across the globe in terms of its sociocultural and economic impacts. The World Health Organization (WHO) developed guidelines for the effective implementation of local or national quarantine protocols to quickly detect people who have been exposed to COVID-19 and separate them from others during the disease’s incubation period. This paper examines how Ghanaians perceive and experience fear under quarantine in the various designated quarantine centres (Pentecost Community Centre and Pram-pram Convention Centre). Drawing on the interpretive inquiry lens, data were collected through phone/Skype interviews with six individuals who had been quarantined with experience to share. Interpretative Phenomenology Approach (IPA) for data analysis was used to interpret the views and experience of participants under quarantine and how that affected their well-being. Using the WHO quarantine guidelines, our analyses focused on an individual’s experience of fear under quarantine, offering an insight into what characterises their fear as well as exploring events, coping strategies and the implementation of standard quarantine protocols in the country. The results showed that the quarantine protocols aligned with the WHO guidelines, albeit with some exceptions; these omissions partly compounded the fear experienced by those who were quarantined in the various centres. The results help to reveal the specific events that led to fear. For example, the fear of being infected by others at the quarantine centres, the unknown duration of the quarantine, the potential loss of lives and the uncertainty of recovery. The participants managed their fearful experiences and tension at the quarantine centres by coming together to pray every morning, share the word of God and engage in jokes. This paper contributes to issues of distinct emotions and individual viewpoints under mandatory quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic in a specific country context.

Librarians as Wikimedia Movement Organizers in Spain: An interpretive inquiry exploring activities and motivations

How do librarians in Spain engage with Wikipedia (and Wikidata, Wikisource, and other Wikipedia sister projects) as Wikimedia Movement Organizers? And, what motivates them to do so? This article reports on findings from 14 interviews with 18 librarians. The librarians interviewed were multilingual and contributed to Wikimedia projects in Castilian (commonly referred to as Spanish), Catalan, Basque, English, and other European languages. They reported planning and running Wikipedia events, developing partnerships with local Wikimedia chapters, motivating citizens to upload photos to Wikimedia Commons, identifying gaps in Wikipedia content and filling those gaps, transcribing historic documents and adding them to Wikisource, and contributing data to Wikidata. Most were motivated by their desire to preserve and promote regional languages and culture, and a commitment to open access and open education.

ICT Integrated Teaching: An Interpretive Inquiry of Teachers and Students' Perceptions on ICT based Teaching

ICT based teaching is the most popular fashion of today's higher education in the world. Most of the teachers and students tried to habituate in ICT tools for their teaching and learning. Due to this fact scenario, I focused on to explore the perception of teachers and students towards ICT as teaching- learning tools. It has used the qualitative approach where phenomenology as the research method to explore the realities. The teachers and students were selected through the purposive sampling. The focus group discussion and in-depth interview were conducted with the selected informants to reach the rich and depth information. The major finding is that the teachers and students were highly positive to use the ICT tools in higher education teaching. It helped to create the motivating and entertaining classroom. It also facilitated in self-learning for teachers and students. It supported to the teachers and students to develop the collaborative learning culture, where they easily promoted the supported culture.

‘Tutoring Is Not Proofreading’. Exploring the Perceptions of Writing Tutors at University Writing Centres, Saudi Arabia: An Exploratory Study

Academic discourse is highly complex and requires writers to follow specific writing conventions. Many Saudi university students have underdeveloped writing skills (Al-Khairy, 2013). One way to assist second language (L2) learners and develop their academic writing skills is through academic language support offered by writing centres. The challenge for writing centre tutors lies in the predominant belief among many L2 students that tutors’ only role is to fix students’ mistakes. Although there has been significant growth in writing centres in Saudi universities, the perceptions of writing tutors concerning tutoring non-native students are still under-researched. This study uses thematic analysis to explore the role of writing tutorials as perceived by writing centre tutors in Saudi settings. Data were obtained using an interpretive inquiry through individual interviews of two tutors. The main findings of the interviews were that tutors perceived proofreading requests, low writing proficiency of tutees and tutees’ understanding of tutors’ role as influencing their tutorial practices. The implementation of this study may help regulate the role of tutors in writing centres in Saudi universities by highlighting new avenues that can improve writing tutorials, especially in Saudi Arabia.

Multidimensional Approaches to Examining Digital Literacies in the Contemporary Global Society

Literacy scholars have offered compelling theories about and methods for understanding the digital literacy practices of youth. However, little work has explored the possibility of an approach that would demonstrate how different perspectives on literacies might intersect and interconnect in order to better describe the multifaceted nature of youth digital literacies. In this conceptual article, we adopt the idea of theoretical triangulation in interpretive inquiry and explore how multiple perspectives can jointly contribute to constructing a nuanced description of young people’s literacies in today’s digitally mediated global world. For this purpose, we first suggest a triangulation framework that integrates sociocultural, affective, and cognitive perspectives on digital literacies, focusing on recent developments in these perspectives. We then use an example of discourse data from a globally connected online affinity space and demonstrate how our multidimensional framework can lead to a complex analysis and interpretation of the data. In particular, we describe the substance of one specific case of youth digital literacies from each of the three perspectives on literacy, which in turn converge to provide a complex account of such literacy practices. In conclusion, we discuss the promise and limitations of our integrative approach to studying the digital literacy practices of youth.

Polic(y)ing time and curriculum: how teachers critically negotiate restrictive policies

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to theorize teacher agency as enacted through a P/policymaking lens in three elementary classrooms. Big-P Policies are formal, top-down school reform policies legislated, created, implemented and regulated by national, state and local governments. Yet, Big-P policies are not the only policies enacted in literacies classrooms. Rather, little-p policies or teachers’ local, personal and creative enactments of their values and expertise are also in play in daily classroom decisions. Little p-policies are teachers doing their best in response to their students and school contexts. Design/methodology/approach Adapting elements of discursive analysis, this interpretive inquiry is designed to examine textual artifacts, situated alongside classroom events and particular local practices, to explicate what teachers’ policymaking enactments regarding time and curriculum look like across three distinct contexts. Using three elementary classrooms as examples, this paper provides analytic snapshots illustrating teachers’ policymaking to solve problems of practice posed by state and school policies for curriculum, and for use of time at school. Findings The findings suggest that teachers ration (aliz)ed use of time in ways that enacted personal politics, to prioritize children’s personal growth and well-being alongside teachers’ values, even when use of time became “inefficient.” An artifact from three focal classrooms illustrates particular practices – scheduling, connecting and modeling – teachers leveraged to enact little p-policy. Teachers’ little p-policy enactment is teacher agency, used to disrupt temporal and curricular policies. Originality/value This framing is valuable because little-p policymaking works to disrupt and negotiate temporal and curricular mandates imposed on classrooms from the outside.

Against Discourse

Since its emergence as a systematic discipline, the scholarship on prophetic traditions depicted itself as the heir of a scripturalist apophaticism, which cancels itself in favor of the unknowability of the divine nature and the incomprehensibility of the sacred Qurʾanic discourse on it. The main features of this tradition were as follows: (1) the conviction that the Qurʾan is the uncreated, eternal word of God. (2) This premise was fundamental in canceling out human discursive constructs, since they cannot grasp the meaning of the transcendent discourse on God’s nature, specifically in the case of Her anthropomorphic depictions. (3) Any interpretive inquiry is doomed to fail before the unknowable divine nature and the transcendent discourse on it. Theological discourses nullify themselves in favor of a non-cognitive position, where neither the divine ipseity, nor the meaning of the transcendent discourse on it can be known. This non-cognitive, anti-interpretive position played an important and rather exceptional role in the canonization of Sufism in the tenth and eleventh centuries and in the formation of the nascent Sufi orders in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.