Inequality in digital personas - e-portfolio curricula, cultural repertoires and social media

Digital and electronic learning portfolios (e-portfolios) are playing a growing role in supporting admission to tertiary study and employment by visual creatives. Despite the growing importance of digital portfolios, we know very little about how professionals or students use theirs. This thesis contributes to knowledge by describing how South African high school students curated varied e-portfolio styles while developing disciplinary personas as visual artists. The study documents the technological and material inequalities between these students at two schools in Cape Town. By contrast to many celebratory accounts of contemporary new media literacies, it provides cautionary case studies of how young people’s privileged or marginalized circumstances shape their digital portfolios as well. A four-year longitudinal action research project (2009-2013) enabled the recording and analysis of students’ development as visual artists via e-portfolios at an independent (2009-2012) and a government school (2012-2013). Each school represented one of the two types of secondary schooling recognised by the South African government. All student e-portfolios were analysed along with producers’ dissimilar contexts. Teachers often promoted highbrow cultural norms entrenched by white, English medium schooling. The predominance of such norms could disadvantage socially marginalized youths and those developing repertoires in creative industry, crafts or fan art. Furthermore, major technological inequalities caused further exclusion. Differences in connectivity and infrastructure between the two research sites and individuals’ home environments were apparent. While the project supported the development of new literacies, the intervention nonetheless inadvertently reproduced the symbolic advantages of privileged youths. Important distinctions existed between participants’ use of media technologies. Resourceintensive communications proved gatekeepers to under-resourced students and stopped them fully articulating their abilities in their e-portfolios. Non-connected students had the most limited exposure to developing a digital hexis while remediating artworks, presenting personas and benefiting from online affinity spaces. By contrast, well-connected students created comprehensive showcases curating links to their productions in varied affinity groups. Male teens from affluent homes were better positioned to negotiate their classroom identities, as well as their entrepreneurial and other personas. Cultural capital acquired in their homes, such as media production skills, needed to resonate with the broader ethos of the school in its class and cultural dimensions. By contrast, certain creative industry, fan art and craft productions seemed precluded by assimilationist assumptions. At the same time, young women grappled with the risks and benefits of online visibility. An important side effect of validating media produced outside school is that privileged teens may amplify their symbolic advantages by easily adding distinctive personas. Under-resourced students must contend with the dual challenges of media ecologies as gatekeepers and an exclusionary cultural environment. Black teens from working class homes were faced with many hidden infrastructural and cultural challenges that contributed to their individual achievements falling short of similarly motivated peers. Equitable digital portfolio education must address both infrastructural inequality and decolonisation

Cinehacking Cape Town - Embracing Informality in Pursuit of High Quality Media

Although many common tools of media making such as video cameras have become more accessible in recent years, many remain inaccessible. Cinematography, lighting and sound-recording equipment for example can be prohibitively expensive to obtain, complex to configure, and/or require specialist knowledge to operate effectively. These barriers can prevent non-professionals who want to produce highquality media from being able to. Cinehack is an ongoing project to research ways to overcome these barriers. In this paper, we specifically report on Cinehack: Cape Town, a participatory media making project. By co-producing hip hop videos within a community for whom media making is often a ‘means-to-an-end’, we were able gain insights into the kinds of support needed to enable high quality media making by non-professionals. Specifically, we highlight ways to meet users’ needs by embracing informal codes of practice via experimental making and peer-support. AUTHOR KEYWORDS Making; Media; DIY; Africa; Hacking; Hip-Ho

Worlding Cape Town by design:creative cityness, policy mobilities and urban governance in postapartheid Cape Town

Das Leitbild der ‚creative city‘ ist innerhalb der letzten zwei Jahrzehnte zu einer international präsenten Stadtentwicklungsvision geworden. Auch in Kapstadt hat sich seit Mitte der 2000er ein intensiver Diskurs um das Versprechen einer ‚kreativeren' Stadt entwickelt, insbesondere mit Blick auf die nach wie vor nur sehr langsam voranschreitende urbane Integration zwanzig Jahre nach dem formalen Ende der Apartheid. Am Beispiel der Bewerbung um den Titel „World Design Capital 2014“ konzipiert die vorliegende Arbeit Kapstadts aufstrebende 'Kreativstadtlichkeit' (creative cityness) als ein relationales und sich ständig weiterentwickelndes Konstrukt unterschiedlicher politischer, sozialer, räumlicher und ökonomischer Stadtsteuerungslogiken, welche gleichzeitig auf verschiedenen Maßstabsebenen wirken und deren Genealogie die Arbeit empirisch detailliert aufarbeitet und analysiert.Over the past two decades the creative city has become a seemingly ubiquitous international urban development paradigm. Since the mid-2000s, the promise of a more creative city has also permeated Cape Town’s urban transformation agenda, not least in light of the sluggish pace of urban integration twenty years after the formal end of apartheid. Using the case of the city’s bid for the title of “World Design Capital 2014”, the thesis conceptualises Cape Town’s aspirational creative cityness as a relational construct of different political, social, spatial and economic urban governance logics that simultaneously operate at various scales. The thesis empirically reconstructs this genealogy and provides a detailed analysis of the intricate knowledge/power complex emerging around the notion of the ‘first African design(er) city’

Semiotic machines : software in discourse

Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references (p. 245-259).This study develops new theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of software as a medium of communication. This study analyses voting software, educational software, search engines, and combat and narrative in digital games. In each case it investigates how proprietary software affords discourse, and suggests a way of characterising users’ experience of this discourse. These affordances constitute the rules of communication, or ‘rules of speaking’, ‘rules of seeing’, and ‘writing-rights’ which proprietary software makes available to users, situating them within specific power-relations in the process

Designing development : an exploration of technology innovation by small-scale urban farmers in Johannesburg

Abstract: Both the field of Development and discipline of Design were conceived from agendas of capitalist driven economic growth. Despite having to stand against this current, a minority of practitioners and academics in both these arenas have critically realigned their intentions towards more human-centred ideals. This Doctoral thesis adds new knowledge to this pursuit through the use of an original theoretical framework that combines both Activity Theory and the Capabilities Approach to systemically explore how people innovate technology. Within the complex Johannesburg food system, this study made use of an embedded multiple-case study of seven innovative small-scale urban farmers to explore why and how they innovate technology. The use of activity system modelling enabled the complex contradictions within and between the various aspects of the participant farmers’ technology innovation activity systems to become more evident. Despite significant capability limitations in terms of their own education, skills, land tenure and access to labour, it was found that the farmers’ innovated technology as a means to extend and function capabilities, particularly with regards to gaining more control over their material environments. However, there were trade-offs, and it was found that a few of the capability extensions were at the expense of other capabilities. The participant farmers’ actions were contextualised within the precarious positions that most of them found themselves as marginalised Black urban farmers in post-apartheid South Africa. Due to this, a key finding was that the participant farmers tended to seed their innovation activities from their social systems as opposed to their technical systems...D.Litt. et Phil. (Development Studies

Constructing Ambiguous Identities: Negotiating Race, Respect and Social Change in 'Coloured' Schools in Cape Town, South Africa

South African social relations in the second decade of democracy remain framed by race. Spatial and social lived realities, the continued importance of belonging – to feel part of a community, mean that identifying as ‘coloured’ in South Africa continues to be contested, fluid and often ambiguous. This thesis considers the changing social location of ‘coloured’ teachers through the narratives of former and current teachers and students. Education is used as a site through which to explore the wider social impacts of social and spatial engineering during and subsequent to apartheid. Two key themes are examined in the space of education, those of racial identity and of respect. These are brought together in an interwoven narrative to consider whether or not ‘coloured’ teachers in the post-apartheid period are respected and the historical trajectories leading to the contemporary situation. Two main concerns are addressed. The first considers the question of racial identification to constructions of self-identity. Working with post-colonial theory and notions of mimicry and ambivalence, the relationship between teachers and the identifier ‘coloured’ is shown to be problematic and contested. Second, and connected to teachers’ engagement with racialised identities, is the notion of respect. As with claims to identity and racial categorisation, the concept of respect is considered as mutable and dynamic and rendered with contextually subjective meanings that are often contested and ambivalent. Political and social changes affect the context within which relations to identities are constructed. In South Africa, this has shaped a shift away from the struggle ideology of non-racialism and the respect that could be accrued through this. This process also complicated the status recognition respect historically associated with teaching. As local, national and global contexts have shifted and processes of globalisations have impacted upon cultural and social capital, the prestige and respect of teaching have changed. Appraisal respect has become increasingly important, and is influencing contested concepts of respect and identity. As these teachers exert claims to identities which include assertions of belonging in relation to race and attempts to earn respect, these processes are shown to be elusive and ambiguous. As a trans-disciplinary thesis, this work is located at the intersection of, and between, geography, education, history, anthropology, politics and sociology. Utilising a wide range of materials, from documentary sources, archives, participant observation, interviews and life histories, a multilayered story is woven together. The work’s originality stems from this trans-disciplinary grounding and its engagement with wide ranging theoretical approaches. This thesis argues that the lived experience of educators reflects the ambiguous and contentious experience of ‘coloureds’ in Cape Town. Drawing upon wider literature and debate, the contested location of education – its commodification – in South Africa reflects broader concerns of educationalists in the North and South, and is imbued within concerns over development and sustainability